ave you played the Just Cause 2 demo? You know, that game with the grappling hook, where you can hijack an airplane, jump on top of it while in mid-flight, fire your gun at the ground below, then parachute to safety as the plane crashes into a tropical village? You know, that game where you can shoot a propane tank, grapple onto it, and then ride it into the air as it’s propelled by leaking gas? You know, that really, really stupid game?
Nobody can deny just how ludicrously stupid the game is, and the game – in its defense – wholeheartedly embraces that stupidity, and as a result it’s pretty fun. I laughed out loud more times in the first ten minutes of that demo than I did in an hour of Sam & Max. Remember how in Grand Theft Auto you can jump out of speeding cars? You can do that in Just Cause 2, except instead of rolling onto the ground, you somehow manage to open your parachute and fly into the air. And sometimes you need to play a game that lets you do that. Did I mention this game was really, really stupid?
So the game is stupid, but it’s fun, and it taps into that anarchic “fuck you I’m going to grapple onto your motorcycle and drive it off a cliff” gameplay that Grand Theft Auto III made us realize we love so dearly. But the game also highlights a major problem with these games: the more freedom they give, the less heed they pay to things like physics and reality, the dumber they get and the less we care about them.
Games like Just Cause and Crackdown are fun, but we say they’re merely fun. The games that we pay attention to, like Grand Theft Auto and Assassin’s Creed, rein in player freedom and try to direct that sandbox gameplay into a narrative funnel, even though these games are in many ways less “fun” than their lunatic siblings. I put more hours into San Andreas than any other GTA title because, well, it’s a crazy fucking game with jetpacks and hijackable 747s and miles and miles of world to explore. But of all the GTA games, I care the least about San Andreas.
So why is it that games that epitomize sandbox gameplay also cheapen it? Open world gameplay has been the design-du-jour for a decade now, and the ultimate sandbox game is something of a holy grail for game developers. Games like Spore and Fable caught our attention for their ambitious scope, and even if they were good games – fun games – they weren’t what we were promised, if such a game is ever even possible. Critics of Spore panned its aimlessness and shallowness. In trying to give us everything, they say, Will Wright didn’t give us anything.
No game, of course, provides that mythical all-powerful sandbox experience. Every game that purports to do so inevitably lets us down. But that ambition always evokes some small sense of wonder. We start the game and wonder whether this is the game that finally lets us do this, or do that, or maybe something we’ve never before considered. Some things we can do, some things we can’t, and the former is rarely as enchanting as the latter is disillusioning.
Just Cause 2 is dumb as hell – it really is – but through its sheer vapidity managed to disarm me. I didn’t expect anything going in. I didn’t ask what the game couldn’t do, but what it could. I didn’t expect the ridiculous interaction of questionable physics and unbelievable action stunts, and every single unbelievably absurd glitchy action I performed was a delightful surprise.
I still don’t care about the game’s protagonist, whatever his name is, and who knows if I’ll ever play the full game. I’m sure, like so many other action games, Just Cause 2 will come and go. But it’s the first game to let me parachute from a rocketing propane tank hundreds of feet in the air, and it deserves some credit for that. While sandbox games may not have the structured form that lends more linear games their meaning, the sandbox has proven to be an invaluable petri dish of design, and even the most forgettable action games can still manage to squeeze out something unprecedented.
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