Just Cause 2

When issue 200 of Game Informer hits your mailbox, you’ll find our latest impressions of Eidos’s Just Cause 2, but we wanted to give you something special for our online coverage. Earlier this week, I got to spend a little over an hour-and-a-half playing the new game and causing chaos all across the island setting of Panau alongside fellow GI editors Tim Turi, Dan Ryckert, and Jeff Marchiafava. Read on for a full document of that first hour and some fun new video footage. Just please keep in mind that we’re not this insane and messed up in real life. I swear.

…Okay, maybe Dan is.

0:00 -- We spawn on top of a dirty mountainous area as suave protagonist Rico Rodriguez. After gaining our bearings, we leap off the mountain and parachute onto a paved road below where we immediately grab a vehicle. We drive down a dirt road for a while until we noticed a small paved path off to the right. Turning onto this road, we discover a mansion and decide to explore.

0:05 -- Walking around to the mansion’s backyard, we stumble onto a bunch of armed enemies guarding one of the game’s 60+ colonels. We survive the barrage of bullets to take out the colonel and his guards.

0:10 -- After all the enemies are dead, we grapple to the top of the mansion and steal the dead colonel’s helicopter. As we’re flying, we realize we’re under attack by a military chopper, so we drop out of the helicopter and parachute down to a small settlement below.

0:15 -- Once we drop down, we manage to destroy one military chopper. A second shows up, and we grapple onto it in hopes of hijacking it. Before Rico can pull himself up to the helicopter’s door, it flies low and drags him across a hill. Luckily, we survive with only slight emotional scars and rip the helicopter’s driver out of his seat so we can take over.

0:20 -- Free of the heat, we fly to another settlement and jump out to explore. Suddenly obsessed with the idea of using the grappling hook to tether things together, we attach a civilian to a street lamp, where he hangs helplessly and yells. We run in the opposite direction.

0:25 -- We end up blowing up a gas station. Then we blow up a propaganda van. Then we blow up another gas station. We stand a little too close to that last explosion and accidentally die.

0:30 -- On our second spawn, we quickly grab a truck and begin driving around. We find a huge biofuel station and crash the truck into it. Opposition surrounds us quickly, and we die again shortly after leaving the truck.

0:35 -- Spawning on the mountain once again, we parachute down to the buildings below and spend five minutes attempting to tether random people in the area to a vehicle and drive it off a cliff. We are unsuccessful. 

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0:40 -- We grapple up to the top of the water tower. Our attempts to connect civilians to vehicles have caused authorities to take notice, and they begin to shoot at us from below, eventually destroying the water tower. Luckily, we survive the fall to the ground.

0:45 -- Back on the ground, we grab a motorcycle. Some scrolling text in the top center of the screen informs us that this is the fifth unique vehicle that we’ve driven. The game keeps track of an insane number of stats that are updated at certain milestones through similar scrolling text, including kilometers driven, free falling height, drag kills, fall kills, juggle kills, stunt points, and total progress in each of the game’s hundreds of bases and settlements. The stat tracking impresses us so much that we can’t help but immediately jump the motorcycle off a cliff, push off it in mid-air, and parachute to the ground below.

0:50 -- Landing on a highway, we begin grappling vehicles to each other as they pass just to annoy the civilians who are driving. We hop on top of some vehicles and get cursed at in Malaysian. One driver gets scared while we’re standing on the hood of her car and begins driving very fast. She eventually crashes, after which a small army of enemies corner us and kill us again.

0:55 -- After respawning, we decide to head back to the biofuel plant. This time, instead of just crashing our vehicle into it, we enter the plant and begin fighting enemies. As more soldiers stream in through the stairs, we pull them toward us with the grapple and shotgun them in the air.

1:00 -- We make it to the bottom of the plant and overload it – a surprisingly simple process of pressing a button. As gas begins leaking, we grapple up and out of the plant, getting far away just in time to turn around and see a gigantic explosion. It’s hard not to be satisfied with that. The biofuel plant explosion along with the rest of our adventures thus far earns us enough “chaos” (the game’s currency, essentially) to unlock our first set of missions.

1:05 -- We try to hijack a military helicopter in order to fly to our first mission, but it gets blown up by another chopper that’s on our tail. We jump out just in time, grapple over to the chopper that was attacking us, and hijack that one instead. 

1:10 -- The first mission we seek out is an airplane race mission that begins on a small beach area. A small hut here houses an arcade machine that begins the mission. Unfortunately, we ignore the mission marker and instead try to tether the handful of civilians in the room to some fruit scattered on tables nearby.

1:15 -- Before we can start the race, a military chopper shows up. Luckily, we’re able to tether a civilian to the chopper before it kills us.

1:20 -- We get back to the beach area and actually start the race. There’s an old biplane on the beach that we use to fly through hoops in the air. Despite several close calls, we make it to the final hoop…but crash into a crane before flying through it, blowing up the plane and poor Rico in the process.

1:25 -- We respawn back at the mission start point. This time we have a much sleeker jet airdropped into the area before we begin. This vehicle is much more maneuverable but also clearly far too fast for this specific race; we zoom past the first checkpoint and decide to give up, leaping out of the jet and parachuting into a village.

1:30 -- In the village, we begin jumping onto civilian’s cars again, leaping from car to car, then onto a motorcycle, then onto an SUV. We hijack the SUV and then drive it into a river.

1:35 -- We hijack several helicopters until we find one that has the ability to launch rockets. We proceed to rain down said rockets onto a small settlement, destroying their water tower and pretty much everything else we can see.

1:40 -- Done with this pocket of destruction, we jump from the helicopter. We pull our parachute string a bit too late and end up face-planting on the pavement in front of a ton of enemies. Somehow we’re back on our feet before the health bar is drained, and we grab a nearby motorcycle and succeed in a dramatic getaway – a fitting end to our fast-paced exploits in the game so far.