First Look: Just Cause

The credit crunching continues! Despite holding out for the whole of March without buying a game I decided that for April I'd try not to buy anything new. As I have most of the Easter weekend off I picked this up for £7.50 in Game.

First impressions aren't great. You can't move about the menu without using the d-pad. Every time you load or save you have to select the hard drive. The graphics aren't great either. The huge island looks great but the characters and vehicles are poor and there's far more pop up and texture pop in than you'd expect.

It's also just too big and the scale of the mini map too small making it hard to judge where things are and pretty much a trudge to travel anywhere.. Even in a helicopter. When you get your grapple gun it makes things a little easier but not by much. End falling down a valley into a lake and you can wait ages for a boat to appear. It's very sparse out side of the towns.

Basically you end up calling for 'extraction' most of the time which takes you straight to you safe house and straight to get a story mission. Meaning that despite the fact that the world is properly huge you'll hardly see any of it unless you're interested in doing the side missions and collecting packages.

The driving is rubbish too because most of the roads are too narrow meaning you keep having constant collisions. It's like some one described GTA to the developer and they've tried to make an over the top clone without actually playing it too see where the magic really is.

Despite that it's not devoid of fun and check points mid mission keep it from getting to frustrating. Unless you get a checkpoint mid explosion when you'll constantly respawn with very little health.