Problems with Just Cause 2

The Game Room
1

I exchanged Assassin’s Creed, which I hated, for Just Cause 2. I have been playing it on and off for about three weeks. Although I certainly like it MUCH more than AC2, and can find myself immersed in the game well, there is just a problem with it that’s become a niggling nuisance.

You have to hold down R2 to accelerate. Unlike the GTA series, in which acceleration was actuated by holding down X, with your thumb, in Just Cause you have to use the shoulder button on the gamepad and therefore have to use your finger.

Sound trivial? It isn’t. Think about it for a minute. Your thumb is a big, strong, hefty digit, ideal for prolonged holding down of something. Your finger, by comparison, is far less effective at this, being longer, thinner, lighter and having two joints instead of only one. The game area of Just Cause 2 is enormous. You will be driving on roads for miles, and you must hold down the R2 shoulder button with your finger the entire time. The thumb would be far better in this situation.

I tried going to the Controls menu in the options to change this…and, of course, you can’t. You’re stuck with the control scheme that the pigheaded game designers have dogmatically decided is the “best” one.

The other major beef I have with the game is that the weapons are atrociously inaccurate and weak. Enemy soldiers (with no body armor or protective gear of any kind) will take 20 or 30 shots from an automatic rifle or submachine gun before they go down. This is really absurd. In this day and age when so many games have gotten the bullet mechanics down, there’s no excuse for a sprawling and ambitious game like Just Cause to have monkeyfucked it so badly. Why did they do this exactly? Did they think it would be more fun to completely eliminate any element of skill, aiming or concentration from the game?

The helicopter control mechanics are trash…GTA: San Andreas, a game made six years ago, did a better job with this. What’s their excuse for making the helicopter piloting so clunky and unresponsive?

If I encounter more problems, I will report.

2

The first thing I did when I got Gran Turismo 5 is to change the accelerator to R2 from X. R2 has much more throw on it and you can be much more precise on the throttle. YMMV.

BTW, if you like the GT series GT5 is friggin awesome!

3

I’ve sunk maybe 100 hours into Just Cause 2, so allow me to provide a few counterpoints.

  1. If your finger gets sick of accelerating, then hop out of the car and parachute for a spell. Or hitch a ride on someone else’s car. Or hijack a plane and coast to your destination. Or even get extracted by the black market guy, assuming you’ve been there before. Just Cause 2 benefits from the range of options, but it does fall down a bit when you’re just doing one thing; the race where you have to follow the coast for about 15 miles really hammers that home, but at least when you crash you can just hop in the next car that turns up and continue.

  2. Guns are terrible at the start before you’ve upgraded them; stick with the grapple and enjoy the physicsy fun it brings. If you spend a few hours going from town to town picking up upgrades, you’ll have plenty of points to sink into your favourite weapons. I went for the pistol, SMG and grenades first, as they seemed fairly common weapons, but there’s no wrong answer.

  3. Yeah, helicopters are a bit finnicky, but if you blow enough stuff up with them Scorpio starts humming Ride of the Valkyries, so I’m willing to give that a pass :smiley:

In short, if you play Just Cause 2 like a standard cover-based shooter or driving game, it will seem lacking. Start playing like an 80s action hero - lots of bullets, walking slowly away from explosions, and assume any car that you get into will last rouchly thirty seconds before being jettisoned.

4

That was my only real criticism of Just Cause 2- it waits until entirely too late in the game to let the player in on the joke. You’re not supposed to take any of it seriously, and once you realise this the game gets even more awesome. Awesome to the max, in fact. :smiley:

5

The first faction mission had me hijacking a jet to blow up a spaceship; I think that was a pretty big clue :smiley:

6

If we’re thinking about the same mission, it’s not a spaceship, it’s an ICBM… and I don’t recall it being one of the first missions.

The thing is, for probably 40% of the game it’s clearly supposed to be over the top and full of explosions and silly mayhem with a storyline that’s one step above and an Excuse Plot, but the point at which I (and many other people, judging from the conversations I’ve had with other gaming friends of mine) realised we were playing a computer game version of a Outlandish '80s Action-Adventure movie was when the Uzi-wielding Ninjas showed up. :smiley:

It’s still an awesome game, though, and on a second playthough (when you’re treating it like something that should star Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Dr. McNinja right from the start) you’ll find yourself laughing hysterically at some of the improbable situations your character finds themselves in.

7

Was it an ICBM? I thought that was later? Either way, it was one of the first missions I did when the island opened up. It might depend on which one you choose first, I guess.

I had the advantage of reading a JC2 thread before I bought the game, replete with anecdotes of riding army vehicles into silos, surfing on passenger planes, and attaching plastic explosives to everything before calmly walking away while pressing the detonator. I think I still said, “Oh come on,” out loud when thesubmarine turned up :smiley:

8

It sounds like you’re playing on a ps3 controller, but using an xbox 360 controller, holding down the right trigger is as natural as not holding it down - it just becomes the part of the controller you’re gripping.

Anyway, in any driving game having the gas on an analog control is so obviously superior that I don’t know how someone could stand it otherwise. Granted, JC2 is not exactly a driving simulator with a lot of subtlety…

Console games not allowing the rebinding of their controls are weird though. The idea that you’re set to a specific set of controls is annoying. The weird thing is that even on some of the console ports on PC where you use an xbox 360 controller to play them allow you to remap the controls while the console version doesn’t.

Anyway, JC2 is awesome. Of course the plot is silly - it knows it is. I’ll take that over the wildly implausible, retarded plots that think they’re being cool and serious like modern warfare 2 or homefront.

9

Thread necromancy, because it’s still relevant.

  1. The aircraft controls are shit. Complete and utter shit. Did you know there is no yaw key? And planes pitch down much more slowly than they pitch up, so the only way to turn a plane is to turn on one wing and pitch up, then roll 180 degrees and pitch up in the other direction. To make things worse there are no guided missiles, the missiles have tiny explosions, and even the plane that looks like a Harrier has too high a minimum speed to hit anything reliably.

  2. The controls for releasing a grapnel are inconsistent. Sometimes it’s F, sometimes it’s left Alt, sometimes it’s left Ctrl.

  3. The game needs a Cruise Control key. Saints Row lets you make the car you’re driving keep driving to make drive-bys easier, or just to send it careening off into some unsuspecting victim. Just Cause 2 literally forces you to get out of the car before you can shoot someone, but won’t let you set the car to keep going. Even if it wasn’t available in all cars, the ability to leap onto the hood of your car, leap onto the pursuing jeep, kill the driver, leap back onto your own car and get back in is the kind of ridiculousness that the game should be encouraging. I’ve only found one opportunity to do this so far, in the second mission.

There are a lot of ideas I’d like to see stolen by another, better game, but Just Cause 2 is only half a great game.