Just Cause 2 has everything it needs to be a great game, they just didn’t really bother mixing them together at all. It’s got faction missions, which are perfectly fun to do and could’ve formed the main plot of a good sandbox game if they’d had a good sandbox game to put around it. It’s got a big old sandbox map full of places that are fun to travel through or across and have gun fights in. It’s got lots of fun guns and cars and helicopters to do the traveling and gun fighting with. It’s got tons of enemy landmarks full of goodies you can pick up and things you can destroy in order to 100% clear them and then they stop spawning bad guys.
The problem is, they don’t seem to have realized that 100% clearing these towns and military bases would be, like, a goal that people would want to do on a whim. Every single one is a maddening scavenger hunt for that last power transformer you need to blow up to finish things. There’s two ways they could’ve done this better, either 1) instead of requiring you to blow up every enemy target and find every collectible, just require a certain amount of “chaos points” be gotten in the same location all in one go (i.e. the score resets if you get too far away), and you get chaos points from blowing the stuff up or from defeating enemy soldiers and blowing up their vehicles or from finding collectibles or whatever. Or 2) instead of having the player fish around to find every last collectible and destructible themselves, put big glowing dots on the mini-map for it. Just Cause 3 figured this out, and its base clearing missions are gobs of sandbox mayhem fun, and it’s weird to see Just Cause 2 to make all the assets but then fail to put in the weekend’s worth of effort required to make them fun to use.
The guns, similarly, have had all the work put in to give them a good variety without being too finnicky for the Just Cause style gameplay (you don’t want to go the STALKER route of differentiating between AK-74s loading 5.45x39mm bullets as opposed to L-85s which load 5.56x45mm – it’s Just Cause, just give me a fucking assault rifle that’s easy to keep track of and find ammo for regardless of which mooks I’m fighting), but generic ammo drops are so rare, your weapon inventory so limited, and enemies have such a variety of different weapons that running out of ammo is a constant problem, made worse by the fact that you’re expected to hookshot all over the damn place which means you don’t generally advance to the spot where enemies dropped their weapon but rather zipline fifty feet above it, which means I’m constantly running out of bullets (I specifically requested the opposite of this!). They put in all the work to have a variety of guns and then used that to make the game worse than if every enemy always used either an SMG or an assault rifle – that would’ve been very same-y, but at least I could’ve kept my ammo topped off. Similarly, my remote-detonated explosives almost never get refilled unless I order replacements from the black market, which means I have to be super judicious about blowing up enemy radar dishes and cranes and other infrastructure that the game encourages you to attack.
There’s a bunch of cool military vehicles like IFVs and helicopter gunships (haven’t found a plain old tank yet, but they’re probably around here somewhere) but there doesn’t seem to be any way to buy them from a shop or otherwise get reliable access to them, so I only ever have them when I happen to come across them in the world. At least hijacking helicopters with the hookshot has been made way easier. That seems like the intended way to deal with them in Just Cause 1 and 2, but only actually works in Just Cause 2.
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