Once upon a time, at the height of the Cold War, that shining bastion of democracy and freedom known as these United States of America was a very busy country indeed. When they weren't teaching old mate Bin Laden and his homeboys how to make bombs and providing them with weapons to fight the Russians, they were covertly fighting the Red Menace closer to home in Cuba. We've all heard of the crazy ways the CIA planned to take out Fidel Castro, including but not limited to exploding cigars and poisoned wetsuits, but the most famous of course is the farce that was the Bay of Pigs invasion. In an attempt to keep their hands clean of direct involvement in the overthrow of another nation's government, the US armed and equipped Cuban exiles, and prepared them for an invasion of their homeland. The Kennedy administration modified the plans however, and the rest, as they say is history.

This time however, there'll be no wishy-washy peacenik interference; the CIA has carte blanche to deploy their deadliest weapon to the island nation of San Esperito, home of troublesome Presidente, megalomaniac Mendoza and his nasty Black Hand soldiers. So with a limited budget, the cause just and his existence plausibly deniable, super-agent Rico Rodriguez is dropped into the tropical hot-spot with one simple mandate: overthrow Mendoza's regime and end the rogue leader's threat to the USA...and when we say Rico is dropped in, we mean it!

The opening sequence of Just Cause is an apt indication of what to expect from the rest of the game: you are dropped from a plane at 1000m in freefall to parachute down onto a beach slap bang in the middle of a firefight. After gunning down a battalion of San Esperitian soldiers, you'll man the turret of a jeep, and shoot down half a dozen helicopters and destroy a score of enemy vehicles. And this is just part of the tutorial! It certainly sets the tone for the style of game Just Cause wants to be, which sadly, isn't always the game it ends up being.

The problems start at the most fundamental level: your protagonist, Rico Rodriguez is a walking homage to the El Mariachi trilogy; one-part Banderas's desperado, one-part Depp's psychotic Agent Sands. Unfortunately, he possesses neither the suave charms of the mariachi, or the slightly loco fun of the crazy CIA agent portrayed by Depp in Once Upon a Time in Mexico. He has about as much personality as a dead fish, and the few jokes he has in the game are neither funny or well-delivered. It's such a shame that, given the game's premise, more couldn't be done to make the player-controlled character a little more memorable.

This isn't really surprising however, given how confused the game's story is. It's not that it's implausible and silly, rather that it isn't sure whether it wants to implausible and silly, or if it wants to be a serious tale of nuclear-capable rogue nations and the free-world's fight against them. The tropical island setting, fast cars and fast women, speedboat drug-runners and freedom fighting guerrillas really lends the game a sort of 80's influenced Miami Vice feel that would be better served with Bond villains and giant lasers than sinister dictators and WMDs. The weapons, technology and the clear'n'present danger are all very modern, but the location, the larger-than-life CIA operatives and super-agent are very much the realm of spy spoofs and comedies.

Sadly, this indecisive feeling extends from the set-up into the actual gameplay as well. on the one hand Just Cause wants to be the new poster-boy for freedom and open-ended gameplay, but in practice, the story missions are entirely linear, there's no branching side-stories, and ultimately, not a whole lot to do in San Esperito. All up there's about 25 story missions, which can be knocked over pretty easily in about 5-6 hours if you're in a rush. Some of them seem to have very little to do with the primary narrative, and overall things feel a little forced, particularly Rico's interactions with the other members of his CIA team.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about the story missions is that while they don't offer you any narrative choices, they do allow you quite a bit of freedom in how you tackle the challenges. With the exception of timed or vehicle-specific missions, Rico can achieve his goals pretty much however he wants; take out the VIP with a sniper rifle before he gets to his car, or grab a chopper and blow that car to pieces...or parachute down onto the roof and drag him out of the speeding vehicle. It's this kind of approach that Total Overdose flirted with on Xbox but never quite pulled it off, and admittedly Just Cause gets a whole lot closer.

The biggest hurdle for Just Cause is really the sheer size of the archipelago that is your playground. Walking really isn't an option, which you wouldn't want to do anyway because Rico's animations are pretty basic, and he's fairly slow too. You won't want to drive either though, because the vehicle handling, responsiveness, feedback and physics are really some of the worst around. It's quite bemusing that so many of these Grand Theft Auto inspired games can't ape the franchise's exemplary driving sections. At any rate, that pretty much leaves you helicopters, boats or planes as modes of transport. The boats are good fun to hoon around in, but given that the majority of the action is inland, they lose points because they almost always require you to walk or drive. The planes are hard to come by, so the end result is that you'll spend most of your time piloting choppers around the various islands.

This isn't as bad as it sounds – some of the choppers are quite fast, they're heavily armoured, and as Rico himself says, the best way to see San Esperito is from the sky. Once you're up and flying, the sheer sense of scale the Avalanche engine is capable of producing is often breathtaking. The draw distance is massive, the amount of trees on screen at any one time is staggering, and while there is some pop-in and frame-rate issues, it's really hard not to be blown away by how Just Cause looks. The procedurally generated islands feel very organic, but what makes it so impressive is the way the game handles the scale; you can be 1500m up in the air, and freefall down to ground level without any loading or hitches whatsoever, and the detail once you get back to terra firma is wonderful. The jungles are easily as lush as Oblivion, complete with sunlight dappling through the jungle canopy, casting real-time shadows. By comparison the vehicle and character models seem still and half-hearted.

In a lot of ways, Just Cause is almost more of an Avalanche engine tech-demo than it is a fully-fledged game. It's a technically impressive, visually stunning game with fairly pedestrian gameplay tacked-on. This is no more evident than in the non-storyline missions you can participate in. There are essentially 3 activities available to you: takeover/liberation missions, side-missions, and collect missions. Unlike your GTA's or Saint's Row, collect missions are embarrassingly straightforward: blue dots on your map mark something you can collect. Get them all in an area to complete a collect mission. There's no hunting involved, the game just tells you where stuff is. Many of the locations have you landing helicopters on the side of mountains (lucky those pesky trees pass right through your propellers!) or jumping off a bridge to find things in the water, the only common link is that they provide a handy demonstration of the locations the game is capable of.

The side-missions are barely even worth mentioning: talk to a guerrilla or cartel operative to be given a mission, which involves going from A to B, then back again. The actual missions vary in name only, the end result is that you either collect/drop off a package/vehicle, or kill someone. Apparently there's over 200 "variations”, but honestly, if you've done one you've done them all. The takeover and liberation missions are a little more engaging thankfully, but no less repetitive. San Esperito is divided into territories, and within these territories, the "good” drug cartel you work for and the guerrilla forces are vying for control. By activating a takeover or liberation, you and a handful of A.I. controlled drug foot-soldiers/freedom fighters will engage in identical missions to control bases. Settlements, haciendas and military bases all play out exactly the same: kill some baddies until you reach a threshold, then blow up a blockade. Rinse and repeat three times, and then capture the flag. Liberations in cities are the only missions that differ; here, you just keep killing baddies until you capture the flag.

The takeover/liberations are the real meat of the Just Cause experience and there's literally dozens to do if you want to unlock the good stuff. Doing these missions nets more loyalty points than side-missions or collections, which means you'll advance up the ranks faster. Doing so will unlock an arsenal of weapons and host of vehicles at the various safe-houses, and knocking over cartel bases has the added bonus of equipping each of them with a civilian chopper on the roof – a real godsend if you're in a hurry.

This is all well and good, but the chances are you'll never use half the available stuff – the vehicle handling really is abysmal so you'll want to avoid anything with wheels, and the array of guns is great, but Rico's ‘pitbull' pistols have unlimited ammo and are quite competent. Not only that, but Rico also has a nifty magnetic grapple gun, much like Scarecrow in Matthew Reilly's novels if you've read them. This handy device, in unison with his parachute, allows you to hitch a ride on, well, pretty much anything that moves in the game! You can either parasail along and take in the sights, or use reel yourself in and hijack the vehicle. This is great if you have to bail in the middle of nowhere, but sadly you can fire it off when you're in the water which is a nuisance.

Just Cause is not a particularly challenging game – as mentioned above, the core storyline missions can easily be completed in around five hours playtime, and the various ancillary missions range from insultingly simple to nigh-impossible. The issue here is the way the A.I. reacts to Rico...a simple fender-bender is enough to bring in military gunships or have your car rammed off a cliff by aggressive police, and there's no perceptible difference between wanted level one or wanted level four really. Likewise, stay on foot near a military base and enemies will never unleash explosive weapons against you unless that's all they have...but hop on a motorbike or into a car and expect RPGs, missiles and shells to vaporise you in seconds. In all honesty, you'll probably have more fun just flying around on a whim than doing side-missions or collecting things, it's just a shame that Just Cause couldn't have put some hidden goodies in to reward your exploration.

The audio is a bit of a mixed bag too. The music is great fun and quite fitting, the sound effects are pretty decent and the voice acting is capable and gets the job done. Yet the music is insanely repetitive, and unlike other free-roamers that cleverly utilise different radio stations to provide a bit of variety, whenever you jump in a car, boat or plane, the music is identical. To give you a rough idea of how little music there is, during the end-game credits, the same track loops four times before the lights go down. The rest of the audio suffers from the same repetition unfortunately, and within the first few hours you'll be thankful that your Xbox 360 allows you to load custom soundtracks...