I looked down and saw a statue of the dictator that had his thumb on the people of the island, and decided to parachute down and use one end of my hook on the statue, the other end on a truck. One particular five-minute flight to the other side of the map took me through the mountains at sunset, and the view on my LCD was lovely. I escaped by taking the plane off the mini-runway and flying to my next objective. I landed and fought my way through it, taking all the power-ups I saw.

I flew there, only to find it was a floating pleasure palace called the Mile High Club. I grabbed a helicopter, and saw what looked like another plane being held by balloons off in the distance.

The beauty comes from the scope of the land you're on, and the fun moments of exploration. You can be airlifted by your friend the Demon, but even that doesn't work unless you've already cleared the area. In fact, getting places can be a pain in the ass in anything except the fastest jets moving miles across the island can be quite painful. It's worth doing the story missions just to give yourself an excuse to explore the huge world of the game. You'll be helping gangs expand their territory by taking missions for them and causing explosions and chaos wherever you go. The story involves looking for some guy for some reason, being aided by a black-market arms dealer called 'Sloth Demon.' It is, of course, utterly irrelevant. The island you're fighting across is quite the environment, with mountains, desert, snow, city, and jungle all in one place. You have a grappling hook that you use to fly from place to place in a good approximation of a surly Mexican Spider-Man. You have an endless supply of parachutes, so you can deploy your 'chute, fall for a second, disengage, and then open another one. You can ride on the top of cars, hijack motorcycles, fly every helicopter and plane you find.

The game plays like every bad impulse Michael Bay ever had. The good news is that Just Cause 2 gets good. It's one of the worst openings for a good game in recent memory. The voice acting is cringe inducing, the story doesn't exactly seem inspired, and the action is stilted as you try to get a feel for the controls.

The first twenty minutes or so of Just Cause 2 are laughably bad.

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