Just Cause 2 Demo Impressions

Jump off a cliff, parachute to a busy street, zipline to a motorcycle, kill 5 enemies in the car next to you and commandeer it, then drive to your next objective. The ridiculous stunts you can do in the new Just Cause 2 demo makes the game sound fun right off the back.

This aspect of the game is really fun. It feels like a cheesy action movie and you’re the hero who can take out a whole army who for some reason just cant seem to hit you with all the bullets in the world! But that doesn’t necessarily make a game great. When you start the demo you play the role of super agent Scorpio and you’re helping the rebel squad known as the “Reapers” stop the oppression of their people. The leader of the group’s name is “Bolo” and she sounds completely like a rip off of Miss Cleo and every time she talks it’s completely comical and you just can’t take her seriously.

When the gameplay starts you’re just dropped in to a Reaper hideout. What are your missions or objectives? Well, the game doesn’t tell you. You just in some hideout on top of a mountain and you’re just supposed to do run around. So out of you’re boredom you just start to shoot stuff. There’s a large amount of explosive barrels around you for some reason and when they blow up, you’re given “Chaos” points which you’re unsure what they mean or are used for. Its the lack of direction that makes the game seem somewhat mindless. As you run around and shoot stuff, all of a sudden the game demo time starts and you have 30 minutes to run around.

Now, you have 30 minutes(timer in the top right corner) to run around without any objectives or idea of what you’re supposed to. That’s boring and I stopped playing.

After about an hour of wondering why a demo like that would come out, I went back to play it again because I was not convinced that the game(which I’m looking forward to) would be like that. So when I started it up, I searched vigorously for some sort of reason for me being there and to my surprise I found some box on a roof. When I collected this, then here comes Bola telling me I did some good work. I didn’t know what the significance of the box was or why it didn’t show up on my mini-map, but I was just happy to know that I did something that had a meaning. The game demo time started again and I parachuted much further up the street  then I had before. And all of a sudden music starts playing and  then I’m being shot at. I don’t know what I did but I was being shot at and there was a percentage counter in the upper left corner of my screen.

I was at this base I found accidentally, just shooting at people and watching that counter not go up. Once again, I was lost. So after I killed about 25 people, I started to just shoot at random stuff. I noticed a power generator had a health bar so I just started to shoot at it, and once it blew up, the percentage counter went up. So I just started to shoot any object I saw and watched the counter go up and up and up.Now, if they had told me I had to blow some stuff up or take this object the game would be a lot more fun. After shooting at everything the counter stopped going up and I just didn’t know what to do. Again. I started playing with the zipline and just going on top of rooftops and jumping off of them and just wanted to see how I liked the controls. One thing that I noticed was that you can’t simply just hop onto stuff. You always have to use a zipline then jump up. Small boxes ledges or curbs should not hold you back in a game like this.

As I was mindlessly running around waiting for the time to end until I stumbled upon a helicopter and just began to fly it. As soon I took off, missiles were being locked on top me and there were 2 other helicopters just chasing me. Don’t know where they came from but it was something to do. As I was flying I stumbled upon another base so I jumped out of the airplane and just started shooting at the group of guys. And sure enough Bola came in and told me that there was something there I needed to get and hack. And the objective was actually pointed out to me. Which was a nice change of pace. At this point I actually started to have fun with the game.

So I tried to, unlock the door and I found out I had to kill an officer with the keycard(which was also pointed out to me). I killed him, unlocked the door, did a brief hacking mini game to find a location of a witness and that was the end of that objective. I felt accomplished and complete after that. I was then told to wait for a helicopter to fly by and zipline onto it.  And that was going to lead me to another objective. Bola informed me that I had to capture this witness that just happened to be driving by along the road. So as I’m hanging from the helicopter and approaching the objective a big countdown happens in the center of the screen and I only have 10 seconds left before the demo is going to end.

I am now very uneasy about this game. Running around, not knowing what to do or why you’re really doing it and I’m hoping that it was just a bad demo and will all make more sense when the game ships this year.  At this point, I say skip the demo because it will only disappoint you.