Just Cause 2

I loved the first Just Cause, but it had a few flaws.

For one, the grapple / parachute thing never worked quite as well as it was supposed to. But far more importantly, the side quests became really repetitive and boring. Capturing the islands meant raiding towns and villas in order to claim land and get upgrades. However, it meant doing pretty much the same run & gun raid over and over and over again and it got more than a little boring. For this reason I never actually finfished the game, getting fed up about half way through.

The sequel looks like they've taken everything that was cool about the first game and improved on it. Who knows until it actually comes out, but at the moment it's looking like a kick-ass open world action game. Color me excited.

Yeah, it looks pretty damn swell.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for turtles though. It's long been a fantasy of mine to grapple-hook turtles to helicopters.

The grappling hook alone is worth the $60; I've never experienced such a 'visceral' game mechanic and you really can grapple to anything! I also think the many, many ways of destroying stuff makes this game a blast BUT...

very poor cover system - you can duck but can't hug a wall, pop out and shoot from behind it.

seems like it can be repetitive (reminds me somewhat of red faction guerilla); goto place, blow stuff up,
kill people, collect stuff, rinse and repeat

wish graphics were as nice as UC2; there kinda flat BUT

it is a very, very fun game!

This game is going to be a blast!
I've pre-ordered it and downloaded the demo and it's so awesome.

I agree on the grapple hook, it pretty much makes the game what it is.

I got Just Cause 2 a few days ago and have been playing it. It's pretty good. Maybe an 8.5 out of 10. The storyline is short or seems short [ I got the gamer book ] but its a huge sandbox map. The game seems less about a plot and more about causing destruction for the sake of destruction.

I have a copy. What I don't have is a working XBOX. Once I have it fixed, the madness shall begin.

So Splinter Cell Conviction is really pullin me to the dark side and I'm itchin' for an Xbox, BUT...

My research tells me that because of it's basically flawed designed (poor heat dissapation), the box is still crappin' out on folks which makes me hesitant about getting one. A guy I spoke w/ at GameStop said his has crapped out a couple of times but he just sends it in for repair and they get it back to him in a week or two (and he seemed perfectly fine w/ that).

Although I'm not a hardcore gamer, I can sometimes rack up 6-8 hrs at a time on my PS3 w/o any problems (although I know it's certainly not a perfect system) mine sure has been workin' great over the past 2 yrs.

I'm interested to hear from other Xbox owners about this

Awlright, I'm back in the game. I have played a bit of this and enjoyed it so far. It certainly does what it says on the tin, it promotes lateral thinking and lots of boom. It made me want to write some more, so I put up a longer post on the RWEP blog ;

http://www.reviewwithextremeprejudice.com

AAAAAAAAAAAaand ... done.

Just finished the story mode of Just Cause 2 yesterday.

What can I say ? It was a blast, definitely worth owning. I finished the story missions after about 18 hours of total play, which surprised me because it felt like less. Time flies when you're having fun. I was left with only 28% completion. Plenty of faction missions left to go and TONS of exploring. Plus I only did about three of the race challenges. So if I didn't have a bunch of other game sto play, there would still be a bunch of content to explore.

In fact, the story missions were probably the weak point of the game. I preferred just noodling around doing my own thing, to be honest. The second to last mission (no spoiler, but - the dome mission) was actually the hardest, in my opinion. The last mission was really easy for me. Perhaps that's just because I'm awesome at everything and have a huge cock.

Not a perfect game, others have said it better than I. Spawing enemies are a pain etc etc etc. But yeah, if you have any interest in sandbox or 3rd person action games you can do a hell of a lot worse.

I've been playing it for dozens of hours, and it's totally worth the purchase. It's my number 2 favourite game of all time. It only loses points for the bad story and characters, and some presentational nitpicks.