Just Cause is one of the biggest games ever made. Although it stands behind procedurally generated games like MineCraft and space games like Elite: Dangerous, it is about the largest game world ever made for a game with a fixed, non-randomized map and which takes place at least partly on human scale rather than in a spaceship that goes four lightyears a minute past totally empty void. Elite: Dangerous does technically model the entire Milky Way galaxy but it does so by only fully rendering the space parts, which means all the computer needs to do is keep track of very big xyz coordinates and not actually fill them in with anything. In Just Cause, there are actual towns, military bases, and geographic features.
What there’s not is a whole lot of gameplay, and what there is hasn’t been used well. Now, when I say there’s not a whole lot of gameplay, I’m speaking relative to the map’s size. There’s plenty enough gameplay in here for a perfectly good game and while I think Just Cause is an also-ran to Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction in the realm of regime-change sandboxes of the PS2 era (which you’d expect would be a very small genre, but Far Cry and Just Cause compete over it to this day) and stands far behind Just Cause 3 and maybe also 4 but I haven’t played that one yet, it’s still fun to play and I don’t mind getting through it just to see how the series has evolved. But one of its flaws is unmistakably that the map is much bigger than what they had content for.
Just Cause has three mission types: Story missions, settlements, and side missions. Story missions are introduced with a brief cut scene, give you a unique goal like assassinating a specific dude on a yacht or blowing up oil tanks on a train, and when you complete them, a region of the map is destabilized.
Destabilizing a region unlocks settlement liberation missions, in which you have to do some combination of killing enemy troops, blowing up blockades, killing a specific enemy officer, and running up to a flag to press the E key. This unlocks new safehouses, which are the primary means of restoring health and fast travel (they also let you replace ammo and vehicles, but they’re not the most effective way of doing so). Liberating settlements also converts the local patrols to friendlies and turns the map a lovely shade of…well, actually a kind of bland shade of green, because the authorities are blue since their early-game troops are cops, and the guerillas all wear camo and hide out in the jungle so they’re green, I guess. Could’ve just made red team the good guys, Star Wars did it and it was fine. But map painting is still fun and liberating settlements is how you do that.
Side missions can be taken from a friendly settlement or from a settlement in a stable enemy region. These have random goals like stealing a specific vehicle, picking up an object guarded by enemies, killing a specific enemy, and so forth. They reward favor points with friendly factions which helps you upgrade your safehouses to have better weapons and vehicles, although settlement liberation does, too.
The issue is that side missions are more fun but less effective, while settlement liberation is less fun but more effective. And this plays into the size of the map because what makes settlement liberation less fun is not that there’s anything wrong with it, but that it gets repetitive. The map has something like 40 or 50 settlement liberation missions (although some of them are keyed to multiple settlements – liberate one and two others nearby flip to your side, and I wonder if that was thrown in near the end when they realized how tedious liberating all the settlements was and threw in a quick fix that made it go three times faster) and they’re all nearly the same. On the other hand, the side missions are reasonably varied, but there’s very little reward for doing them and they regenerate infinitely so it doesn’t feel like I’m getting anything done. They’d be fine as a quick distraction, but due to the staggering size of the map, reaching an NPC who gives out side quests can be a three or four minute trip. Settlement liberation is even worse, because those are the missions that unlock your fast travel points, which necessarily means you don’t have any fast travel nearby when you’re on your way to liberate a settlement.
A smaller map in which side missions were mixed in with settlement liberation, so there were fewer “kill guys, blow up blockade, kill officer” missions and the empty space was filled in with more variety, would’ve served Just Cause much better.
Also, this is only slightly related, but the ceiling on the settlement liberation missions before the mission fails because you’re out of bounds is really low compared to the effective range of helicopter weapons, and also you die instantly if you’re in a helicopter when it explodes rather than just losing some amount of health and being flung out of the vehicle to parachute to the ground. The Just Cause series has a huge emphasis on crazy stunts in a sort of Pierce Brosnan-era James Bond kind of style (and sort of Mission Impossible style, but Mission Impossible stunts are often done by basically just pointing a camera at Tom Cruise while he actually does the stunt in real life – in a controlled environment, but still, they are fundamentally within human abilities in a way that Just Cause stunts often are not), so you can jump out of a helicopter and parachute to the ground and it’s generally safer to do so than landing it because you attract significantly less enemy fire on the descent, but then if your helicopter explodes, that’s it. I guess the idea is to encourage you to ditch the helicopter before an enemy rocket connects in a stunt that is both more spectacular in general and also more rewarding because it requires some skill to pull off, but if that’s the case then there really should be some health indicator for the vehicle you’re piloting like in Mercenaries so that I know when I’m just one more missile away from instant death and need to ditch when I see one incoming.
Between the low ceiling of settlement missions and the fact that the only effective way to use a helicopter is to either complete an entire mission without losing it or memorize its HP and keep track in your head, they end up mostly useless, despite being treated by the game as a high-end reward for racking up a ton of reputation points.
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