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This is one of the biggest open world game available today. It takes hours just to explore a small part of the map. Causing destruction destabilizes the region unlocks new missions, equipment and vehicles. Raise hell and finding all the pick-ups tucked away in an area will bring a village or base completely under your control, which earns a good number of chaos points, but it also means there won't be any guards there in the future and you're free to use anything that's around. This being the case, it's usually far more beneficial to take over military installations than ordinary towns, even though towns are easier to capture. In any case, reaching 100% control of an area involves the same process of blowing up all the key targets as endless waves of soldiers come pouring in. Things become pretty tedious once all the destruction is done and players are forced to track down a final box or two to take over an area. Some of these military installations are so big that it can take an very long time.

Another fast way to get ahead is through aligning with one (or all) of Panau's local rebellion groups. Morality and ideology don't play a role in the decision, since you're pretty much a mercenary for hire and they're all after the same thing: Kicking out the current government and taking control for themselves. So, it's really a matter of aligning with the criminal organization that you find the least annoying. The rebellious factions provide missions that help establish a presence around the islands. Taking strongholds on their behalf provides safe havens from where players can depart and street battles between rebels and authorities often provide valuable distractions. We wished a little more could be done with rebels. Although they appear during certain missions, including the finale, they can't be relied on to reinforce an area. Nor can they be instructed to enter a vehicle, which is a waste, because many of the military cars include a gunner position. As things are, using rebels is limited to hijacking vehicles that already have them in the gunner's seat.

The enemy can be a little finicky at times. There are times when Panau soldiers will attack for no reason. Bullets start flying when players are simply walking down the street without doing anything suspicious. At other times, players can fly attack choppers straight into military bases and alarms won't trigger until they start shooting the place up. Once the heat is on, it soldiers will often chase the player halfway across the island without letting up. Before you know it, air support gets called in, which can be seen as a great way of getting a new attack chopper. The only downside is that players need to pay close attention to their ammunition, since the game doesn't offer a means of hijacking a vehicle using just the grapple to pull soldiers out.

The grapple is a great tool for getting around in a Spider-Man sort of fashion but without the benefits of swinging or wall crawling. It also works well with putting together stunts, since two objects can be wired together. This works especially well when connecting enemy soldiers to vehicles and dragging them around, or attaching them to canisters and shooting them so they launch into the sky. Players are limited by their imaginations, as heavy objects can be tethered to choppers and used as wrecking balls. Unfortunately, there are some odd surfaces that don't work well with the grapple, especially on small outcroppings. There are times when we were trying to get atop a roof and ended up dangling from it. At other times, we grappled onto a surface but the character failed to grab hold. This is especially problematic when being chased by jeeps and attack choppers. The grapple system also inconsistent with how it treats obstacles. Sometimes Rico will pass through objects in the way of his destination, and sometimes he'll get stuck on them. Similarly, Rico can sometimes get stuck on small objects like steps while or rocks while running around.

Fortunately, there's a wide variety of vehicles to help get around the huge nation. Military vehicles often prove to be the most useful, but civilian sports cars are great for getting around quickly.. or dropped on enemies. There's a great diversity in vehicles that allows players to travel by land, sea or air. Helicopters prove to be the most versatile choice, but we question how the damage done by shotguns and pistols from far below. Jets are a touch too sensitive for our taste and we never got the hang of maneuvering them for attacks. Players also able to unlock and purchase equipment from the black market, which can be delivered to players wherever they are. Although having guns and explosives on demand proves useful, there comes a point where purchasing vehicles is kind of pointless. Even when we had more money than we knew what to do with, we could never bring ourselves to justify buying what we could easily steal from our controlled military bases. Especially since most vehicles are soon ditched or destroyed.

Just Cause 2 moves at a generally swift pace. There are only a handful of missions that relate directly to the plot and the rest is filled in with either causing chaos or doing favors for rebel factions. There are a bunch of racing quests and collection side missions, but they seem obligatory and have extremely low impact on the game. But if you enjoy causing destruction and running around doing pretty much whatever you want across an open world, this game fits the bill perfectly. Better yet, the PC version supports advanced graphics features, so players with high-end video cards have an opportunity to put them to full use. We played on high settings, without maxing everything out, and it still looked great. The game might have a few quirks, but it makes up for it with loads of destruction and the opportunity for tons of crazy and creative stunts. There's so much over-the-top fun that we couldn't help getting sucked into it, for nothing else than to cause more mayhem.