The majority of open-world games generally consist of driving and shooting. And sometimes, by happy chance, what really, really hits the spot is just driving things and shooting things. Which is exactly the playground Just Cause 2 offers – with over-the-top action-movie flair. It's set on an absolutely huge island, full of planes to fly (and parachute from), cars to hijack (or stage preposterous gunfights on top of), buildings to climb (grappling-hooks!) and enemy soldiers and bases to explode as creatively as possible...

The story is little more than a sequence of explosions told by characters with accents that veer wildly from sentence to sentence: the Asians sometimes sound British, sometimes Chinese, and even the Americans can't decide whether they're from Texas or New York. It's dreadful but irrelevant, because the game's best moments are the ones you create yourself – attaching a bus to a helicopter and launching it at an enemy base, or baling from a motorbike in time to watch it career into some explosive barrels.

The fundamentals – controls and combat – can be awkward, and the missions and chaotic atmosphere become repetitive quickly, but Just Cause 2 never pretends to be anything other than a silly, explosive, action blockbuster: expect nothing more and it won't disappoint.