Just Cause 2

This game seems to the the wild card so far this year. I'd never heard about it or the original before. When the banner advert appeared on Steam I saw a generic guy standing on a plane I thought "generic action shooter" and didn't give it any further consideration. It was about a week later that the video of the Lost Easter egg hit the web. As a Lost fan I was intrigued but in that video the game play still didn't look very interesting, seemed to be lots of floating though the air with a parachute or just running through an empty jungle. It wasn't until this week that I saw some other videos and realized that it actually looked quite fun. It's basically Grand Theft Auto on a tropical island with a grappling hook or as the game website puts it: "Base jump onto helicopters, surf planes, tether soldiers to each other, to vehicles, to bridges, barrels, trees, cars, buildings or commercial airliners". It's a huge open world in which you're extremely free to do what you please. Jumping from building to building and blowing stuff up and yanking people of high ledges to their death can't help but be fun. Obviously there's some American guy with a bounty on his head who you're supposed to be looking for, but there never seems to be any rush to seek him out. There's too much fun to be had tethering people to cars and then driving off! However it's not perfect, there are times when it could be considered a bit too open. More than once I found myself unsure what to do next. Of course wanton destruction is always an option but that lacks purpose. The other biggest problem I've faced so far are the plane controls, either they suck or I do. I can't fly the planes well at all and keep crashing! I've only played for about five hours so far and my save game file tells me that's only 4% complete, so still a lot to do. I can see me playing this one more in little bits at a time rather than mammoth sessions, otherwise I think it could get frustrating.