Oh my fucking God.
This game is really great, graphics are amazing .. but it plays like shit.
It's like the developers forgot that a game has to be FUN to play.
I should probably mention that I played borderlands before this. The thing I really liked about Borderlands is that it 'helps' you play the game, making it more fun and 'fast'0. Basically all the game mechanics are designed to keep you playing.
Just Cause 2 is the exact opposite. The controls are sluggish, aiming is really hard for some reason, driving a car properly is nearly impossible. Whenever a character gets hit it looks like he's about to die but no he gets back up, and again, and again, and again until he's finally dead. Even if you spray him with bullets from a tank and send him flying 30ft in the air, he'll just get right back up. There is no real indication of the 'health' of your vehicle. You can die while jumping off of a parked lorry. You wont die if you drive into a fuel pump at full speed, explosions everywhere, you just exit the vehicle as if nothing happened. You can't really 'hide' if you have heat, you either have to kill all pursuers wasting precious ammo or find a vehicle that can sort of out run theirs and gun it. Hiding on a roof or in the forest doesn't work. Oh .. and did I mention the load screens? I have a pretty fast PC so it never loads for more thant 5 seconds, but just the cut scenes every damn time you want to have one type of ammo dropped is just killing the game play. In Just Cause (1) you could unlock hideouts that had guns, vehicles and ammo available, much better solution.
And the worst thing of all: saving. For some reason, they forgot to properly test the most important game mechanic of almost any game: saving. In Windows 7 you need to run the game as administrator or it will not save, not even if it claims to be trying to save in game or even checkpoint saves. And it wont tell you it failed saving until you try to manually save (like after a few hours of playing). Then there is the problem of how the game saves. It doesn't actually save the actual game state, it's just using crude checkpoints. I was in a base, destroyed 90% of the equipment (for the THIRD TIME) knowing that there was this bug where you could die jumping off a parked lorry I decided to save just before, so save, then hook to the lorry, jump, lo and behold, I die again. So I load the save game .. and wtf .. I'm back to 33% of equipment destroyed and my tank is gone. So I walk out of the base to get a new tank .. MISSION FAILED and the load screen pops up. So basically I'm stuck, in the middle of an enemy base, with barely any ammo and no tank. Best Game Ever (not).
Now you're wondering, why are you posting this here? Go complain at Eidos' forums .. well I tried, and the story just gets worse. You know how these game markers don't really spend any time or effort on community building? Like how they get crappy free BBS' and give them even crappier skins? Well, the one at Eidos wont even let me register (probably a Chrome bug, but I can't be arsed to try another browser). For some reason it wont properly detect my captcha answers.
So, that was my rant .. I just had to get this off my shoulders.
Hate to see a good game ruined by bad support mechanics. Thank God I didn't buy this game yet.
--Jarudin--
