Why oh why has it taken so long for me to put together a review for Just Cause 2 when we got a promo copy far ahead of release?  Why haven't I been writing much recently?  What have I been up to all this time?  What's been occupying my time for so long?  Well, boys and girls, I'm quite happy to tell the answer to all of these questions.  It is largely because I've been playing Just Cause 2 so much!  The game we saw a while ago while still in development has taken turns for greatness and if you want to know just how great the game is, read on.

Now, I didn't play the first game, but I've heard all kinds of things about it.  It was, I've heard, good, but needed polishing, a little bit rubbish and empty in places, that there wasn't really enough fun to be had and not a lot of variety in the gameplay.  Can the same be said of its sequel?  Well, it seems that what Avalanche have done is bring what was good about the first Just Cause game into the second and bring it up-to-date while leaving behind a lot of the bad aspects.  But not all but we'll see about that a bit later on.

To give you an idea of the game, you begin being choppered into a war-torn area where the government is in a constant struggle with three different gang factions in an island archipelago somewhere in fictional southeast Asia.  The nation of Panau is suffering under the unilateral dictatorial rule of Kim Jong Il-esque 'Baby' Panay who is strangling the population by restricting everything from water to oil and keeping an atmosphere of fear in place with police and military brutality.

You play as Rico, known also as Scorpio or the Scorpion, a one-man army endearing yourself to the gang faction leaders and spreading as much chaos for the government as possible.  This chaos ranges from the petulant vandalism of the ubiquitous statues of Baby Panay to the saboutage and destruction of pipelines, oil rigs and military bases.  If it goes 'boom' and has a white Panauan government star on it, you will be rewarded for destroying it.  Water towers, generators, transformers (no, not that kind), radio masts, cranes, silos and fuel depots are among the destructible objects commonplace throughout Panau.

Versatility and variety are key in Just Cause 2, which offers you three landscapes to play around in.  One is a low-lying golden dune desert with a very Middle Eastern look to it; another is a dense jungle with lost temples and great cities while the third is a high-up, inhospitable-looking snow-capped mountain area complete with frozen lakes and ski resorts.  Once you have had your fill of the variety in landscape, turn your attention to the variety in vehicles.  If it moves on two, three, four or sixteen wheels, flies or floats, you can hijack and control it yourself.  From tuk-tuks to tanks, Hamaya scooters to helicopter gunships, the world of vehicles is yours to command but, should you feel too dependent on engines and fuel (which is never exhausted) then take the slightly slower but more scenic route by engaging Rico's trademark parachute.

In conjunction with the grapple, the parachute is simultaneously a great combat device and a means of escape, allowing you to slingshot yourself out of harm's way when those pesky guards start to get the better of you.  In DLC, you can even attach jets to the 'chute meaning you never have to set foot on planet Earth ever again though, strictly speaking, that's impractical; where would you poo?

The grapple itself makes Rico a highly manoeuvrable killing machine that can dart to and fro, from ground to air, to building, to car and wherever else the desire takes him - or rather, takes you.  Aside from the obvious travel usage, the grapple makes a very effective offensive weapon, be you beating people with it, or attaching it to a person on a bridge and pulling them down to the ground with a bone-shattering crunch.  The grapple can be attached at each end as well, meaning you can use it to, say, tether a guard to a jet as it takes off or attaching a large piece of debris to a car, using it as a wrecking ball or even just hanging a guard from a wall and hitting them like a piñata.  The uses are limited by the pallet of objects and your imagination, so experimentation is always encouraged.

Weaponry is also varied.  Shotguns, uzis, assault rifles and snipers join more potent firepower such as triggered explosives, grenades and rocket launchers, though I must say there is little out of the ordinary, save for the one hidden gun that fires harmless bubbles that's somewhere on the extraordinarily huge map.  Other curiosities include a hot air baloon, a nightclub suspended by zeppelins, the island from LOST and a shark in the water that is actually just a fin with a motor.  There really is a wealth of variety and though the game itself is mission-based, like GTA IV, there is a great deal of fun to be had taking advantage of the sandbox elements, just getting out there and following your very own whim.  Whether this means you try to drive each unique type of vehicle (of which there are 104, DLC notwithstanding), collect all the gang faction items scattered across the archipelago or liberating small towns a huge cities from the Panauan government by ending their influence, is entirely up to you.

The gameplay of Just Cause 2 is a fun, hand-on affair with controls that are pretty standard and so easy to familiarise yourself with.  The mechanics of grappling can take some getting used to, however and at times the parachute/grapple combo can be a little cumbersome.  Aiming and shooting are nothing extraordinary, and you can quickly adopt an over-the-shoulder Resident Evil 4+ style at the press of an analogue stick, affording you more accuracy and the greater chance of juicy headshots.  Driving varies from vehicle to vehicle, some are staunch and solid while others glide and spin out of control with the more heavy handling styles; you can pick up quite quickly which vehicles are your favourites and seek them out should you need to make a quick getaway.  And you might well need to.  The AI on the enemies is quite sneaky.  They hide and appear all at once, ambushing you to great effect; too many times have I found myself having to parachute out of a situation where the heat got too much and I was just taking too much damage.  The health system is such that you will heal to a certain extent while out of your enemies' sights, but you do not recover fully unless you use a health pack which you cannot carry with you and are not what you might call common.  This, to me, treads dangerously close to the line that separates challenge from frustration, when you've got two helicopters sending rockets to you with love, bombarding you with minigun pellets, you're surrounded by guards with shotguts and AK47s and your tank is on fire, you start to feel that the odds are somewhat stacked against you.  And indeed the future can hold one of three outcomes.  You eject and 'chute off, you die or you stand and fight, grappling onto one of the choppers, hurling the gunman to the ground below and attacking the pilot in a brief quicktime event (QTE) sequence.  Now you've got the chopper, you can bring down the other and move out of the way, sending the aerial inferno crashing down onto the guards below, the explosion sending bodies in all directions.  As your health recovers to just under 50%, you can continue with your deed of liberating this settlement.

Along with destroying anything that will explode impressively, completing settlements also involves a sometimes-infuriating game of hide-and-seek with inanimate object.  Glinting in your vision, boxes that contain weapon parts, vehicle parts and armour parts are dotted about the place and count in the percentage of completeness of any particular town, village, military base or whatever.  Finding them can have you pulling your hair out because you don't know precisely where they are; your only indication is a signal strength bar on your heads-up display (HUD).  The closer you get to it, the stronger the signal and this can really get you tearing your hair out which, presumably is why I'm running out of the stuff.  We all know how annoying it is when someone has hidden something and taunts you with 'getting warmer... warmer, oooh, ice cold', well, this is precisely that.  But thousands of times over because of how many times you have to find these things.  When you do find them, you can use them to upgrade weapons, vehicles and your maximum health.  The first two are done through the black market dealer known as Sloth Demon or something along those lines, where you can have any unlocked weapon or vehicle dropped to your location in exchange for cold, hard cash.  Fortunately, you earn money quickly by destroying stuff, completing missions or, to add more spice to the mix, completing races, so there shouldn't really ever be a time when you can't afford that zippy little helicopter with the machine guns (upon upgrading).

Graphically, the game is awesome.  I've played it on PS3 and PC and while the PS3 handles the impressive draw distance well (you really can see everything), it only renders at 720p.  If, like me, you own a high-end PC (which we all know will only be high-end for another two weeks) then you can set it to 1080p and enjoy the finer details.  While the missions themselves can get a bit repetitive and tiresome,  the very fact that you're not bound to them is a godsend; there's plenty else you can be doing to break up the GTA-style missions.  The sound is great too, with the exception of the voice acting.  Now, I'm no professional voice actor, but this game seems to have the most jarringly bad voice acting you could possibly think of.  Rico is by far the worst offender, with dodgy one-liners delivered with Action Man authenticity.  Some say it's so bad it's good.  I will reserve judgement I'm afraid, leaning as I do towards it being so bad it's bad.  That said, the head of the gang called the Reapers, Bolo Santosi has a cult following and even our own Xander has been chatting her up, so obviously they're doing something right and indeed I have found myself using "BOLO!" as a substitute expletive and this is indicative of a greater truth about Just Cause 2: it gets under your skin and is infectious, it's a seriously fun game with a great deal of scope for causing mayhem and having some good old-fashioned fun.  The immersive world is very pleasing to the eye and you just want to spend as much time as possible inside it, exploring its finely-crafted locales and making your own mark on the land.  And this is why I haven't so much as been able to review it until now; I've just been playing it all the time and once you get your hands on it, you'll find precisely the same.