Just Cause 2 Demo Hack Pack Update
Jahed Stetter
Rico's first target is a Subteniente (middle level boss) Miguel Esteban, a murderer and "enemy of the cause". Rico will jump out of the helicopter above Esteban's convoy, which has just departed. The player will be instructed to open the parachute and land on Esteban's vehicle. Hijack his vehicle and exit it, then pull out your pistols to quickly take care of him.
Rico's next target is to investigate civil unrest and kill Mayor Pepe Nuoz. Rico is instructed to meet with the Guerrillas to start a liberation mission in order to kill him. The liberation will require you to take out three government blockades using newly acquired grenades. After the blockades are down, the Mayor will appear to fight you. Once the Mayor is dead this part of the mission is over.
Rico is then instructed to head for his next target: Capitan Juanito, two kilometers away. Once Rico arrives, Juantio will be seen escaping in a helicopter. Rico must quickly acquire a second helicopter to chase him down. This can be tricky to do at first due to the many Automatic surface to air missile launchers. Alternatively, there is a Mako Ocra which, with the right timing, can be used to shoot down the helictoper.
Once Juanito's helicopter is down, Rico will be instructed to head for Cortez Harbor. There, Rico will find three patrollers of Coronel Aguinaldos on their way to destroy a prototype MV. Rico must intercept the patrollers before they can reach the MV. To do this, Rico will be provided with a Bald Eagle Persuader jet-boat, armed with machine guns and guided missiles. Once destroyed, Rico will learn the Agency needs this prototype MV. Rico must head for the garage where the MV is parked and drive to a mountain base on the island. The San Esperito Police Department will be notified of this and will set up barricades with several troops and Red Barrels. After a 2 km trip, Rico must cross a bridge in order to reach the mountain base. However, the bridge will explode while Rico is on it. Rico jumps the gap, but the words "To Be Continued..." appear on screen, ending the demo.
Afterwards, an announcement for Just Cause releasing Fall 2006 appears, as well as the available consoles and a link to (the site doesn't work in Internet Explorer 8). That site is now used to advertise later games in the Just Cause game series.
I would even go so far as to say that Just Cause 3 was one of my favorite games in recent years, despite its flaws. In addition to playing the fun and goofy story, I spent dozens of hours working on getting better scores in its many races and stunts and even more hours concocting absurd ways to bring pain to my enemies with the grappling hook, remote detonators, jets, and much more.
That measure returns from prior games. It's a measure of how much destruction you're causing to the evil, oppressive force you're battling. The higher you drive the chaos level, the more Rico and his allies can control where things are going.
Just Cause 3's primary tools were a grappling hook, remote detonation mines, a parachute, and a wingsuit. There were some fun variations; the grappling hook could be used not just to propel Rico around, but to tie objects or enemies to each other. You could connect an enemy vehicle to an explosive gas tank, then draw the line shorter until they collided and exploded. You could connect multiple objects in a chain of destruction. There was also a variant on the remote mines that turned the mines into jets, propelling whatever you attached them into until that object (or person) exploded.
Just Cause 4 has all of those things. It adds some fun new variations, too. Now you can set those attachable jets to never explode, so you can make a crane turn into an eternally spinning wrecking ball. You can attach jets that make objects hover, then program them to follow you around or behave in other ways. In one example, the developer found two large, explosive objects, attached the hover jets to them so they flew in the air, then programmed them to follow him. He proceeded to fly with his wing suit and lead them over an enemy base, then let them fall and blow up, destroying numerous enemies.
The grappling hook now has a new upgrade tree, and you can customize it to do new things, though we didn't see all of these in the demo. Just Cause 4 takes all the physics-based tools that made Just Cause 3 an enjoyable sandbox and adds more tools that are very much in the spirit of its predecessor. Series fans won't be disappointed on that front.
You probably saw that giant tornado in the trailers. The developers say that the tornado is a full-fledged physics simulation, along with all the other wind and weather in the game. It looks great, and it really does drift around the map sucking enemies, civilians, and objects up.
It wasn't clear during the demo whether the tornado is always there or whether it just shows up sometimes. I got the impression it was the former, though. That's because enemy bases are equipped with devices that essentially act as tornado repellers.
But Rico can destroy those. In fact, he can selectively destroy them in clever ways to essentially direct the tornado where he wants it to go. I saw the developer who was playing the game do just that to drive the tornado into an enemy base. He also shot a bunch of rockets into the tornado, making it even more deadly; we could see the rockets spinning around precariously and hitting hostile buildings and vehicles.
The tornado did worry me in terms of performance. At certain times, it had sucked up what looked like hundreds of cars, ragdoll people, and building fragments, with explosions and particle effects to boot. It looked good on the PC the team was demoing it on, but that's a lot to calculate, and I'm not confident the OG PS4 and Xbox One are up to the task. (The PS4 Pro, the Xbox One X, or a solid Windows gaming PC should be able to handle it, though.) If console players don't have the latest hardware, I'm pretty sure they'll be dipping under 30fps again.
Right at the beginning of the demonstration, the developers admitted that fans had criticized the sameness and lifelessness of their previous open worlds. They said fixing that was a priority in this sequel.
I didn't see anything in this demonstration to suggest that it's any different in Just Cause 4. But maybe that doesn't matter. After all, you'll spend most of the game flying high above it all and raining death from above. And it's not a game about experiencing a living, breathing world; it's a game about having fun blowing stuff up in endlessly creative and goofy ways.
Just Cause 2 is a game that pushes all the right buttons for us here at Digital Foundry. Proprietary engine? Check. Scandinavian developer? Check. Colossal open world? Ingenius physics-based gameplay? Epoch-making pyrotechnics? Check, check, check!
The arrival last Thursday of demo code for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 gives us our first chance to properly evaluate the technology and performance of the respective console versions within the DF lair, away from the compromises of compressed internet video.
It's exciting stuff - not just gamers, but for other game-makers too. On a recent DF visit to a developer currently working on a triple-A title, Avalanche's videos were being showcased at a team meeting on a 50" plasma. Interestingly this presentation wasn't about polygon counts, LOD biases or framebuffers. They were checking out the footage because Just Cause 2 looked like fun to play.
Central to the game's appeal is the inclusion of an extremely long grappling hook. You use it to winch yourself onto just about anywhere within the huge environments, or else to effortlessly hijack speeding vehicles.
Its offensive capabilities are impressive too. Sure, you can use it to pull opponents towards you, but the ingenuity of the grapple-gun comes down to its ability to link enemies and objects together. Attaching your opponent to a barrel that's about to explode has its appeal, as does connecting them to a passing vehicle.
Beyond the grappling, the key appeal of this game is its environments, and this is where the technology Avalanche has been working on comes to the fore. The rendering distance of the gameworld is absolutely colossal, with an impressive level of detail retention even in the most faraway areas. Jump into a chopper to reach stratospheric heights and check out the view: this sort of stunt was impressive in the first Just Cause, but it's been taken to a new level in the sequel.
The overall feel of the game is bolstered by an impressive lighting model, with smooth atmospheric effects. Transparency elements such as particles, clouds and explosions look very smooth indeed. Despite the 34 square kilometres of gameplay world available in the demo, water sources within the playable area are hard to locate (the available play area is so vast, we're still looking). How Avalanche has handled this effect in both of the console builds will be interesting to see.
Early impressions are that PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 owners have been well-served by Avalanche's code-smiths. However, it is curious to note that while overall the similarities between the console games outweigh the differences by quite a margin, Avalanche has chosen two different approaches to the performance aspect of Just Cause 2. The headline news here is that the Xbox 360 version can drop v-sync while the PS3 game does not.
Few surprises here. Avalanche has capped frame-rate at 30FPS. In order to maintain fluidity and consistency in response, when the game engine struggles, v-sync is lost and torn frames enter the equation. In the course of this video a mere eight per cent of the 60Hz output of the Xbox 360 consists of torn frames. Cut-scenes apart (which both consoles struggle with in their own way), the game only really seems to suffer when big explosions kick-off.
Here we see a very different FPS graph owing to a change in the rendering attributes of the Avalanche engine running on PlayStation 3. The game maintains v-sync throughout, making for a higher consistency in image quality as you play. Also note that the PS3 game runs without a frame-rate cap while overall maintaining an average just a notch below 30FPS - just like Xbox 360.
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