Just Cause 2

Just Cause 2 sent the player to the fictional Southeast Asian island of Panau and offered one of the largest and most open playgrounds of its generation, in scale far exceeding competing open-world titles of the time. Main character Rico Rodriguez wields a grappling hook and a parachute that can be combined into utterly absurd chains of stunts — pulling himself toward enemies, tethering vehicles to each other, launching himself onto rooftops, or towing himself behind a flying plane. The story about overthrowing Panau's dictator is little more than a pretext for the player to enjoy total physics-based anarchy and complete dozens of side missions for local resistance factions, collect scattered equipment crates, and unlock new weapons and vehicles.

On the PS3, the game ran on its own Avalanche Engine 2.0 and offered a huge, visually varied environment ranging from tropical jungles through deserts to snow-capped mountains, at the cost of occasional frame-rate drops and longer loading times during fast travel across the island. The music and ambient sounds nicely complemented the sense of adventure on an exotic island, while the physics model of explosions and destruction gave the action a comedic, almost cartoonish energy typical of the whole series. Collecting upgrades and unlocking new abilities motivated the player to keep exploring even outside the main storyline.

Critics and players alike praised above all the freedom of movement and the endless ways to take down enemy bases and military convoys, even though the linear story campaign was seen more as a side product to freely roaming the world. Just Cause 2 became a cult favorite and defined the subgenre of open-world action sandboxes built around movement acrobatics, inspiring the creators of other games and gaining an active modding community on PC. Today, players return to it mainly for the sheer joy of moving around with the grappling hook and parachute, something many later games struggled to replicate even with much bigger budgets and more elaborate stories.

Why play it: For the sheer joy of moving around with the grappling hook and parachute, which later games with far bigger budgets struggled to replicate, Just Cause 2 remains a cult choice for lovers of free-form destruction.