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Not needlepoint
By Fuseball
In the real world I’m a miserable fucker. More often than not getting out of bed is a major feat. After a long tiresome day at work my back aches, my feet are sore and my knees click worryingly at the thought of stairs. I’m not the man I used to be. If I chucked myself out of a speeding car I wouldn’t be rolling to a gun-toting action poise, I’d be out cold, nose bloodied and sprawled in a ditch. I still secretly want to chuck myself out of cars though. And this is where videogames are my friends.
Fuseball. Yesterday.
Just Cause tries to be a lot of things. Perhaps not all things to all men - there are, after all, some sensitive types who might prefer a good book or perhaps the joys of knitting - but certainly chucks in a lot of stuff to entertain the rest of us. What could so easily feel like an arid checklist of twenty-first century gaming ticks somehow gels into something more than just homage. In short, it borrows the good stuff and fixes the bad. At the risk of appearing lazy I’d say that it outshines Far Cry for lush island locales and outguns GTA for drive-by thrills, to mention its two closest inspirations. There are also stylistic nods to Mercenaries and the guerrilla idealism of Freedom Fighters, which is good for any beret and bandana wearing readers amongst us.
All these straight-laced influences are thankfully filtered through a healthy disregard for physics or killjoy super-smart AI. You’re actively encouraged to take the foolhardy courageous path, safe in the knowledge that the game really wants you to go on a destructive rampage or make that death-defying leap. Combat is gloriously loose Commando-style run and gun heroics. The liberation missions particularly are over-the-top kid-in-a-candystore gunplay riots. You can only hope Rockstar watch and learn.
A pair of bollocks. Er..stretched.
The game also knows that tutorials are bollocks. Instead it kicks you out of a plane above the island, and within minutes you’re blowing chunks out of helicopters and calling in airstrikes. It’s a Bond movie intro and you can’t help but love it. Indeed, there’s more than a hint of Goldeneye at times, with your instant parachute the dream gaming gadget. It makes the free-roaming island feel like a vast playground.
Add to this the wonderfully absurd stunts and the way that vehicles become toys, to be used and abused in increasingly lavish and inventive ways. It’s as if the developers watched dumb action movies solidly for a week, on a diet of popcorn and beer and then stumbled back out into the daylight blindly believing all those insane pyrotechnic action set pieces were perfectly possible, normal even. They know, just as we do, that realism is all well and good, but it’s nowhere near as much fun as it sounds.
Oooooh. I'm scared.
A churl might argue that the missions are repetitive and the plot hackneyed. True, of course, but then this plays with a rare arcade-like action bravado. You won’t find yourself idly cruising the island’s roads fiddling with the hipster radio stations or stopping to admire the scenery when the far more entertaining and rewarding option is to blow stuff up and piss off the authorities... and after a day of creaking joints and a nagging headache, kicking off a minor revolution is paracetamol for this gamer’s soul.
October 2006
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