Just Cause

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Just Cause

We go on a kick-ass tour around the action-packed island of San Esperito

Words: Matt Cundy, GamesRadar UK

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One game that has grabbed our attention firmly by the cojones is Just Cause from Swedish developer, Avalanche Studios. Not only does it look absolutely gorgeous but, by dropping the player into a huge, tropical hotbed of anarchic action, it promises an overload of riotous fun when it's released this fall.

After being mighty impressed during our latest hands-on with the game, we tracked down Avalanche's content director, Odd Ahlgren, and liberated some answers from him about Just Cause, big game worlds, being compared to GTA and future plans.

Secret agencies, corrupt governments, rebel forces and drug cartels. Is Just Cause as serious as the storyline suggests?

Not at all. The storyline is merely a backdrop for a furious, action-packed, eye-melting adrenaline-fest of a game that we feel proud to unleash upon an unsuspecting market.

Of course, if you don't play the game with enough skill and boldness, El Presidente will probably blow up the entire eastern seaboard. But seriously folks: it's really a paraphrase on what is going on today with... naaaah. It's not that serious. It's just fun.

At a little under 20 miles squared, Just Cause's game world is absolutely enormous. Did you want to make something on such a huge scale right from the off? It seems like a massive undertaking...

Originally it was supposed to be twice as big! But that became just a little too realistic (read: boring and not full of cool stuff).

We feel that this size we can handle, and handle it quite well. And on another note: if you are to fly jet planes, as you are in Just Cause, you need some airspace to do it in. And airspace without land beneath it is just plain lazy. Of course it was a massive undertaking. But why do something semi-cool when you can make it super cool?

Do you think big is definitely best, then, in terms of game worlds?

Yes. It's just a matter of packing the huge game worlds with huge amounts of cool and fun stuff to do. A task at which our level designers have excelled.