...snip...
"The grapple hook attaches to anything with collision now - buildings, trees and even people," says Johansson. "There are no grapple points whatsoever, so you're really free to work on your own tactical style."
Rico's new favourite toy can also be used to tether things together. To demonstrate this, Johansson uses it to attach an enemy to a telephone pole and hoist him off the ground. Then he starts machinegunning away. The man shrieks as his body jiggles about in the air, like a puppet on a string. An electrically charged string. Made of pain.
The island of Panau, where talk is cheap and machineguns are very reasonably priced actually.
Other inventive ways to commit murder with the grapple include tethering a man to an oil barrel, then dragging the two towards each other before blowing up the barrel and by association the man. "My personal favourite use of the grapple? You can lift a jeep under a helicopter and use it as a wrecking ball," says Johansson. We don't get to see this in action, unfortunately.
The grapple isn't just there for the nasty things in life, like hooking a man up to a blocked drain and shooting him in the legs till they look like ketchup-covered dog food. It's also handy for getting around the South-East Asian island of Panau, where Just Cause 2 is set.
At around 400 square miles the island is massive, but that's not necessarily a good thing. One of the biggest complaints about the first Just Cause was the amount of traipsing around you had to do, covering large tracts of dull terrain between missions. The gameworld in Just Cause 2 is still huge, but now there's a lot more work to be getting on with.
Even more convenient for getting around than an Oyster card.
"To give you an idea of just how big the world is and how much there is to do, this is the entire map of Panau," says Johansson. A top-down view of the island appears on the screen. "This area here," he continues, pointing to a tiny dot in the bottom left hand corner, "Is the harbour area where you just saw me play through that entire mission." There are gasps from the demo audience. Listening back to the dictaphone recording later you can hear one person go, "Wow.
But that's the whole point about Just Cause - no one's ever pretended this is the series to go for if you want a gritty, authentic simulation of real-world military combat. Just Cause is about big guns and silly stunts and cartoon kills and huge explosions. It's about cruising in a super-fast speedboat across a beautiful tropical sea, then zooming up a beach and off a ramp and parachuting into the azure sky, as the speedboat heads straight into a giant oil tank and explodes in a cloud of fire and thunder.
Avalanche hasn't lost sight of this, thankfully, and it's clear they're working hard to fix the problems with the first game. Just Cause 2 certainly looks prettier than its predecessor, and judging by the map it's bigger. But perhaps the key to making it better is really to focus on what this series is all about - and make it stupider. So far, so good.
