America, F Yeah.

Oh man, yet another sandbox game? It's true: *Just Cause* is another in a long line of wannabes. Taking liberal amounts of "inspiration" from Grand Theft Auto and Mercenaries, Avalanche Studios brings not much new to the table outside of one thing.

The fact it's utterly ludicrous.

*Just Cause* doesn't take much time to get into the craziness, eschewing any sort of formal introduction by tossing you out of a high flying aircraft for a long free fall onto a massive island. At this point, it becomes necessary to throw open your mysteriously massless parachute and float down to terra forma harmlessly. That is, until you realize that you're in the middle of a firefight. Thanks to relatively poor enemy AI and infinitely supplied dual pistols, the initial fight is a breeze.

At this point, the game is almost expected to shift gears into something a little more serious. Thankfully, it doesn't. After jumping onto any vehicle, the option is given to hop on top of it and somehow accelerate and steer while having no real contact with any of the controls. From there, the aforementioned massless parachute can be thrown open to fly you hundreds of feet into the air. You can perform this at any point in the game, making the atmosphere that much more bizarre. In Just Cause, it's entirely possible to run away from a load of police on a dirtbike, transition into a hundred feet vertical hop via parachute, then cut the chute to land perfectly on the hood of one of the police vehicles and jack it in transit.

Of course, I'm not entirely certain whether or not this can be chalked up to absurdist game design or a severely bugged contextual script cue. Both sides have an even case, really. Tonally, the game is as batty as they come. In an interview with Pro-G back in March, Odd Ahlgren denoted that the protagonist was "the child of one thousand comic books and action movies". I can see that much, as the game feels like a coked up Latin American version of the Arnold Schwartzenegger classic *Commando.* On the other hand, some otherwise easy missions become terribly frustrating due to the buggy nature of the game. Simple tasks as manning mounted guns becomes a hassle, as the script cue for it sometimes has the tendency to lag or even clip through solid objects. When this sort of thing happens, it's when a mounted gun is absolutely essential. When you have eight guys firing high powered rifles at you at a time, it's just not prudent to mess around with trying to get in when you should be able to do so in the first place.

Bugginess aside, Just Cause proves to look anywhere from good to great depending on what version you decide to play. The Playstation 2 version looks a bit dated, with circa 2002 visuals that seem to haunt every game that uses the Havok Engine. The Xbox version looks a bit better, while the 360 version looks spectacular. Although, given the scale of the game, it's a bit understandable. The huge island first seen in the game is rather but a fraction of the game's territory. This only first becomes apparent when viewing the map via the PDA, and cements itself when you finally grab a plane and decide to joyride across San Esperito. With a size approximately one and a half times larger than the entirety of Texas, it's hard to believe that *Just Cause* has as much land as it does. Even given that the game engine creates landmass on-the-fly and the fact most of the tropical islands are...well, tropical and uninhabited, the bar has still been set for future endeavors in gaming.

For the most part, though, Just Cause pulls players along with a promise of bigger and badder weaponry. The threadbare plot and mediocre dialogue can't really be accounted for, especially when lines such as "Regime changes sure work up an appetite" are uttered whilst the character who spoke it leafs through a book titled "Regime Change" emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes.

If you think about it, the world has sort of reverted to the 80's. MTV is showing music videos (albeit only on the internet!), the economy is spinning out of control, Latin America has again become "the enemy," and pop culture is diving into a pit of self-parody yet again. So maybe the Reagan era sensibilities of *Just Cause* are right on time. Either way, it's a fun ride.