On My Radar: Just Cause 2

I have previously given little thought to Just Cause 2, probably because the Just Cause demo stood out in my mind as being pretty terrible. The trailer for its sequel looks pretty promising, in truth, so I thought it only fair to revisit the demo and give it another shot.

I wish I hadn't.

I would be significantly more excited about Just Cause 2 if I had not replayed the demo for the original, and now I'm frankly disappointed. The original Just Cause misses the mark entirely. The concept is actually really cool, and the freedom to interact with the environment is enjoyable. Good qualities end there. The mechanics are simply off: the camera's hard to control, the character rarely responds as you'd wish, and trying to control yourself in "parachute mode" is futile. Mission mechanics fall short as well; the demo took me far too long to complete, because any time I failed a mission (which admittedly happens), it would invariably restart me at a point that made it nigh on impossible to complete the mission. Almost everything involved doing something or getting somewhere within a given time limit; however, there's no timer or action cam to let you know whether or not your time's about to be up, and guess what? It is. The retry point puts you back in a situation where you're STILL not going to make it in time, and there's no option to restart the mission completely or enter back into free-roam mode. At one infuriating point in time, I had pressed retry and it brought me back just far enough to immediately see "Mission Failed" post again on the screen, less than second (I swear to it) after the game reloaded. Unbelievable.

Now, I'm willing to admit that this game originally came out in 2006, and that there's a chance the demo doesn't do it justice, although I hardly doubt that they completely revamped the gameplay between demo and release. There's a chance that all of this has been fixed in Just Cause 2, but I have no way to know that. They're certainly not going to launch an ad campaign that says, "Remember how hard our first game sucked? Yeah we fixed most of that," though it'd be refreshing to see.

What I'm getting at is this: without a Just Cause 2 demo posting to XBox LIVE soon, or some really stellar reviews from some really trusted sources, I'm not going to waste my time on the game. I'm actually hoping I eat my words on this, I want it to be a good game, but...I don't see it happening.