With regards to ammo and vehicles that brevity did come at the expense of being entirely accurate. Other than the shop there is no way to get access to your upgraded vehicles. You can access useful vehicles by extracting, though that is if anything more hassle than buying them other than avoiding the cost. With ammo I actually found the shop the least painful option of gearing up and eventually just went with whatever I could find as I needed it.

To expand on the other points you mention, the large world helps to give a sense of immersion but is a liability more often than not. It’s fun to drive across Panau but it is only really fun once. In practice the size of the world does not add much content but makes even the decent amount of content in Just Cause 2 feel like it has been spread thin. The content which does leverage the size of the world, such as races, feels a lot like filler. Getting from a to b becomes such a time sink that I ended up extracting as much as possible, which it seems defeats the purpose of having such a large world.

The bad voice acting isn’t something that actually bothered me too much and is way down on my list of gripes.

The grappling hook and the vehicle free was a strong point in the game but still not outstanding. Along with parachute the grappling hook gives you a decent amount of options for getting around. The problem is there a lot of games which do a similar thing but better. For a straight up better implementation of a grappling hook there is Arkham Asylum. On the sandbox games front inFamous, Crackdown, Assassin’s Creed and various Spider-Man games, while they don’t exactly use a grappling hook all are more fun for getting about without a vehicle. Out side of bases and urban environments the only use I could find for the grappling hook to get around other than as a tool for stealing vehicles was dragging the parachute. That is kind of indicative of the problem with Just Cause 2, while it has a much broader feature set than any of those games mentioned for any particular aspect of it it’s possible to quickly rattle off a list of games which do a similar thing better and Just Cause 2 never quite adds up to being more than a sum of its parts.

For me the high points of Just Cause 2 involve messing around. Things like trying to ride two motorcycles at once, attempting to complete the time trials spending as much time as possible standing on the vehicles or my first journey across Panau. But there is only so much life span in finding your own fun.

The thing is I don’t think those extra details really change the review much. I want to put together a quick reference of at least some recent games and leave the fine details up to some one else. Perhaps that approach is not going to entirely do justice to games as feature rich as Just Cause 2. However, while the two line review may be in very broad strokes it does sum up my opinion of the game pretty accurately.

I’ve been reading for a while, and I have to say, I felt you skimmed over Just Cause 2.

Among other things, the fact that you dedicated two lines to it doesn’t look right, and although I agree that the shop mechanic was awful, there were plenty of ways to get ammo and vehicles other than through the shop, there are crates hidden at certain locations, and the chopper can extract you to any bases with nice vehicles, including planes and jets.

Not to mention you sort of completely avoided such things as the sandbox being 400 square kilometers wide, the grappling hook, the sandbox freedom and the hilariously bad voice acting. I don’t know whether you didn’t have time to go further into depth with JC2 (which considering the number of games you review, it wouldn’t suprise me), or it was not just your type of game, or something else, but I feel you were way too shallow with that review.

Hoping for a reply,
Conot