The plot, if you care, involves black-clad CIA agent Rico Rodriguez, sporting a somewhat impressive "Harry Hamlin in Clash of the Titans" mullet, and his struggle to overthrow the tyrannical tinpot dictatorship of San Esperito *cough Cuba*. Along the way, Rico can undertake a number of shady missions that will endear him to the local rioja drug cartels as well as the somewhat less than pure socialista guerrillas. Just like real life, then.

Just Cause's Big Thing is its engine. A magnificently efficient streaming monster (a bit like Godzilla on speed), the Avalanche engine copes with an amazing amount of stuff with a minimum of optimised visual shortcuts: there is a bit of pop, to be sure, and quirks like viewing the trees from above as they jostle to display their single-angle bitmap is like looking at a particularly mental magic eye picture. There is no convenient fogging (outside of realistic banks of mist) in the distance nor most other graphical shortcuts - Just Cause draws to the horizon, and you can see exactly where you want to go and exactly how to get there. You can spy an isthmus of sand from miles away and walk there, taking hours if necessary, without a single loading pause or streaming shunt.

Everything seems reassuringly solid and collision detection is normally fairly good, which is impressive in a free-roaming game of this scope. The island is imposingly massive, and exploring can take a great deal of time, something Avalanche have tried to address with the inclusion of heavy drops - being the delivery of equipment ranging from motorcycles to gyrocopters, as well as extractions so that you can be deposited at a safehouse of your choosing (once you've unlocked them, which is the only place you can save, outside of being prompted after certain major missions, although checkpoints are also set in place during said major activities).

Disappointingly, combat is repetitive and uninspired, comprising flick-on autotargeting, as well as an over-the-shoulder manual aim. It grows dull as dishwater rather quickly. The main joy is to be found in aerobatics deriving from your parachute and grapple gun: base-jumping, skydiving, parascending... much fun is to be had simply playing around, although it's slightly disappointing that Rico can't perform more aerial-related stunts (somersaults and the like) and that some sort of points/reward/achievement system wasn't based on this, because, as it stands, this is a toybox with an awful lot of box and not many, erm, toys.

The Pursuit Force-style car-to-car jumps are a largely unnecessary and barely used mechanic - the "stunt position" (which Rico can also perform with jets, helicopters and boats) of mounting the bonnet is annoying because it's essentially pointless, other than being a prelude to parachuting away from a vehicle. There are so many things that could've been added to lengthen the lifespan of this game... features like perhaps being able to skywrite naughty anti-governmental slogans (and hence have your kudos with the local guerrilla factions boosted) or do propaganda leaflet drops (if we want to be really true to life) or reconnaissance missions... how about shark-fishing in the fabulous ocean the game provides? Or at least something to do on the numerous oil-rigs and offshore installations that Avalanche have bothered to include in the game and then done absolutely nothing with. There just seem to be so many lost opportunities to open up the variety of play.

Thus, Just Cause presents the player with the veneer of a terrific amount of freedom - how to accomplish missions; the priority of carrying them out, if at all; the way in which you get there - but the actuality of that freedom is a whole lot of nothing. The body of side-mission types is also emaciated, normally consisting of "go there, kill him/pick this up, come back" and it gets tedious quickly. It's possible to even be given the exact same side-mission twice within the space of just a few minutes, which is just plain lazy. Also, although there are conurbations within the game, for all the gameplay variety they add (you can't enter buildings, for example, or interact with them in any way other than landing on their roofs), they might as well have been yet more wetted woodland.

Providing more in the way of play outside of various collectathons and race events - the latter of which are often frustrating due to AI automobiles consistently crashing into you and thereby causing every policeman/soldier/gangster to start shooting - would've been appreciated. The main meat of the game: the liberating of towns/cities, is again extremely repetitive, consisting of the same "kill everyone, destroy barricade, kill everyone" dynamic and is not particularly challenging. Liberating larger conurbations like cities requires a bit more effort, as the government will roll out APCs and tanks, but once you figure out all you need is air superiority (that is, grapple-gun an attack chopper and take it over), such tasks become a walk in the park, whereas on-foot they can seem Herculean as you get ping-ponged from explosion to explosion and die. Repeatedly.

Exploring becomes frustrating later in the game, too, as simply moving around in unstable or government-ruled provinces will ensure that an omnipresent military helicopter is constantly spewing bullets at you (and missiles, too, if you so much as venture near a car). Sure, you can destroy it, but it instantly respawns, so it's pointless. In this, the game is obviously mimicking GTA's "wanted" status, but it's possible to start a conflagration merely by clipping a passing motorist and then having to endure legions of police flinging themselves kamikaze-like at you without respite until you get to an unlocked safehouse or are extracted. It's quite frustrating.

As with nearly all sandbox-type games, bugs stick their antennae up, although few are game-breaking (outside of faulty trigger-points in some side-missions). Walking on water and collecting oblivious pedestrians atop your car are a few of the more pleasant ones. After one particularly long session we have to report that things got very strange indeed and the entire worldmap start to pop apart at its polygonal seams, but we're not sure if that was our 360 giving up the ghost or the game.

The main rub, then, is that the potential of Just Cause is great - the engine copes with nearly everything without a wisp of chug (the only real instances witnessed being aircraft-related, and a hint of slowdown when churning up spray in a speedboat) and it streams like a dream - certainly featuring none of the c-r-a-w-ling loading of Oblivion (although it's unfair to compare the two as they're doing fairly different things: Just Cause is procedural and doesn't really have the persistent and intricate objects/details of Oblivion).

Just Cause is more prophet of potential rather than a great game in and of itself, a proof-of-tech with a game bolted on. Which isn't to say it isn't sometimes fun to play, more that it seems narrow-of-purpose and uninspired, and features some alarming incongruities. The animation of Rico, for example, is quite jarringly poor and makes it seem as if he's filled his pants most of the time. When compared with the sublime vistas on display at certain points in the game (the sun-kissed-pink mountains dreamily appearing through soft-focus mist, for example, as you skit across the landscape in a helo) it's emblematic of the game as a whole: by turns fabulous and ragged. This also applies to the cheap-looking cutscenes, which will become nothing more than skippable annoyances after enduring the first few.

Fun, then, in moderate doses and more a tantalising promise of things to come rather than an essential early entry in the 360 canon.