Just Cause

My honest reaction when booting up the original Just Cause in 2024 was curiosity quickly followed by a reality check. This is a product of 2006, built on Avalanche Studios' then-brand-new proprietary engine, and it wears that vintage openly. What it offers is a massive open-world sandbox set on the fictional Caribbean island nation of San Esperito, where you play CIA operative Rico Rodriguez tasked with toppling a corrupt dictator who may be sitting on weapons of mass destruction. The pitch sounds exciting. The execution is uneven in ways the sequels would spend years correcting. The map is genuinely enormous for its era, stretching over 1,000 square kilometres of mountains, jungles, beaches and villages, all traversable by land, sea and air without a loading screen interrupting you. That seamless streaming world was a technical achievement worth noting. Rico can skydive, parasail by latching onto moving vehicles with the Protec Grappler G3 harpoon tool, hijack cars, boats, planes and helicopters, and work through 21 story missions alongside a sprawling pile of side content. The grappler in this first entry is a more limited gadget than fans of the series will remember from later games: it functions as a vehicle-attaching harpoon rather than the free-surface mobility tool Just Cause 2 popularised. You can use it to hijack vehicles by hooking onto them mid-chase, which is genuinely fun, but it does not pull you freely across the world the way its successor's version does. Here is where the honesty has to come in. The gunplay is imprecise and rarely satisfying on PC, relying on a forgiving auto-aim system that makes firefights feel low-stakes and hollow. Driving is functional but the vehicle physics have obvious rough patches, and the enemy AI has a frustrating tendency to spin out your car during chases. The side mission pool is large on paper but thin in variety, with repetitive objectives that wear out their welcome well before you reach the bottom of the list. Critics at the time and players revisiting it today both flag the same thing: after the initial wonder of the open world fades, the structural depth is just not there to sustain long sessions. The original Just Cause does have one thing going for it that no patch can add to a sequel: it is the foundation. Watching Avalanche figure out what the series wants to be is genuinely interesting if you have any affection for the franchise. The parasailing traversal, the stunt-based hijacking, the sprawling faction system that has you currying favour with guerrillas and drug cartels to unlock new missions and gear, all of it is here in rough prototype form. The soundtrack also deserves a mention - a mix of Spanish guitar, electronic beats and blaring brass that gives the tropical chaos a real personality even when the moment-to-moment action is dragging. For new players, the honest recommendation is to start with Just Cause 2, which took every idea here and rebuilt it into something that actually holds together. But for series completionists, fans who want historical context, or open-world players who are curious about the rough origins of a franchise they love, this original entry is an interesting few hours. Go in with your expectations calibrated to 2006, accept that the PC port has some quirks, and you will find a sandbox that occasionally sparks to life even when it cannot quite sustain the flame. Alex, Scout Team