The “Break it Down” Blog

Ok so the new demo of Just Cause is on XBox Live, I downloaded it and gave it a spin and here is what I think: Fun.

Not GTA-murder-a-hooker-and-ride-over-pedestrians fun, but MDK-fun. For those of you that didn’t play MDK or don’t remember it, it was this kookie game from Shiny (before they reuined the Matrix games) that was in this silly land with a main character who wore a skin tight body suite and a huge biomechanical helmet and had a side kick bad-ass dog. The coolest part of MDK was that the main character had a redeployable immediate-use parachute in the back of his suit that he could rip out and pull back in whenever he wanted to slow his decent:

Doesn’t sound that cool? Well it was. Imagine running as far as you could, gunning, then LEAPING off the edge of a huge chasm and freefalling like a bullet only to rip out your parachute at the last-possible-second bringing you to this badass landing. Well that’s how MDK was, and that is exactly how Just Cause is:

Just cause doesn’t follow any existing gaming rules, it’s all about fun. I think you can get shot, by bullets, like 500 times before you die… hell I think your health regenerates, but dying is not what the game is all about. The game is all about having fun and doing awesome stunts.

Hell, you can drive every vehicle you see from a bike, to jeep, to van, to helicopter to boat. Not only that, but every vehicle has two commands, the “Exit the vehicle” command which sends you leaping from whatever you are in or on, and the “Stunt position” button. This button has your character exit the vehicle in some incredible way then latch onto it to prepare for some cool stunt. For example, on the car, you leap out the window and onto the hood. In the helicopter, you fling yourself from the cockpit only to grab onto the back fin of the helicopter. Naturally, you can re-enter the vehicle if you aren’t feeling like a stunt. I would also point out that while you are in the stunt position, one of your options is always “Deploy parachute”, meaning you can rip yourself off the top of a car and flying into the sky by pulling your parachute while trucking down a hill at 60mph on the hood of a jeep. Naturally, once air born, you can hit “A” again, and pull your parachute back in and drop into an immediate free fall, only to rip your parachute back open again a split second before hitting the ground. I love it.

I also noticed that stunts seem to be highly encouraged in this game. I was barreling down a mountain trail in a car when I rear-ended someone going like 100mph. What happened was my car flew up over the back of this car, flew into the air and time sort of slowed down. So my car is flying up into the air at about half normal gravity and time is slowing down, so I figure the game is egging me on to be awesome before my car lands and blows up into a ball of fire. So I naturally throw down the “Exit vehicle” button, throwing myself out of the flying car and break into a free fall for 2 seconds before pulling my chute back in and landing in a tuck-roll on the ground. The car landed seconds next to me, but I didn’t care, I had to shoot some more people in the face:

The graphics of Just Cause are easy on the eyes but nothing like Crysis (reminds me of that because of all the forest). There are some nice and subtle filtering effects applied to make the scenes look better, but overall it’s not about the graphics, it’s about the fun ass gameplay. I love the fact that the designers took away the fear of dying. How’s about leaping off a building, pulling your chute cord and firing at enemies as you drop into a free fall… I can dig it, I can dig it big time.

Another thing that deserves a big standing applause from me to the designers is that the game is mission based somewhat like Dead Rising in that you are giving timed events to complete like “Return the boat to the hanger!” or “Kill that guy!”, not all of them are timed but some. The upshot is that if you fail an event, unlike Dead Rising where you restart the game or kill yourself in real life out of frustration, Just Cause lets you continue (or restart) right at the moment when you accepted the new mission. Each mission is a few minutes to 20 minutes long (Atleast in the demo), so you really don’t step back that far in the game and so far everything seemed pretty straight forward. They are not relying on artifical means at making their game seem longer, they just focused the entire game on having fun.

Hell I restarted the first mission 3 times because I kept running to the edge of the forest hill and leaping off the edge into a free fall towards the ocean before pulling my chute out. Sometimes I let my character just slam into the earth for good measure, but the point is that there was no punishment for me having fun.

I’m looking forward to this title, it is going to be a blast to play. (Digg this)