This game took a lot of strength to get through as I nearly gave up on it twice throughout my playthrough. To put it in one sentence, this game has aged like milk.

The story is so bland and boring but that's not the main focus as each games story is really similar where Rico is tossed into a politically unstable country and has to kill a dictator. The characters are also really dull, with Rico never speaking outside of a cheesy one liner and the two other side characters are there only to tell Rico his mission. Pair this with eerie almost uncanny valley cutscenes with character models I can only describe as something you would see in a low budget 2000's animated movie.

The map is enormous, which I will commend the game on for its time being of that big a scale. There is also lots of side content which I never touched as it all looked exactly the same. This was clearly a game created to spend more time on than just completing the main story, which I did just over 5 hours, across like 2 days as I couldn't take much more of it after two hours.

Now onto the rest. Gameplay wise, there is nothing special to note. Instead of enemies being bullet sponges, Rico is a bullet sponge. Due to there being no form of a cover mechanic, Rico can take stupid amounts of damage, so much so that I spent around 3/4 of the game with around half health and never had any problems outside of 1 mission. Enemies will never hit you, the only way you can die is by blowing yourself up or getting hit with a rocket. The driving acts like the entire game is on ice and is really hard to control. Enemy vehicles rubberband onto your car so ridiculously quick that they are impossible to escape, meaning that every piece of downtime between missions I was being chased by helicopters and armed cars. Also at one point my entire loadout disappeared, dunno what happened there.

Two missions in particular nearly made me quit. The 1st time was the far cry 3 esq burn a field of drugs mission as it was so painstakingly long and had no efficient way to burn anything (also featured no dubstep). Plus my game crashed after I burned everything and I had to do it again which nearly made me quit. The worst of them all, the 19th mission, where there are infinitly spawning helicopters and jets, a ridiculously bad checkpoint and an almost impossible objective if you dont manage to get a helicopter. This mission took me like 15 attempts and I nearly just called it quits but pushed through just to say that I did.

A game that was no doubt groundbreaking at its time but has aged as well as warm milk. I'm gonna play the rest of the Just Cause series as I have only played the third game and wanted to try them all out. A bad start unfortunately

Reviewed on Apr 12, 2024


2 Comments


22 days ago

Maybe this explains why I've literally never heard anyone talk about this game ever hahaha, talk of the sequels is much more common

22 days ago

@Wollom I was convinced that the series just started at 2 for the longest time because no one talks about it lol