Just Cause 2

Combat is introduced in stages - a few enemies standing near explosive barrels, a few more lingering on the edges of precipices - and while you could just take them out with the game's chunky range of SMGs and grenades, you'd be much better off getting creative.

Why not tether two soldiers together before blowing them both into the air, or grapple-zipline into one and send him sailing over a cliff, attaching an unfortunate friend to his ankle just before he drops out of view forever? (That's how my uncle died. True story.)

Before you know it there are turrets to destroy, optional silos to blow to pieces, and you can even ride a tank over a ravine and into a mass of troops waiting below to see where that gets you. (It gets you dead, incidentally, but amusingly so.) None of this is new, particularly, but the grapple, your never-ending parachutes, and Avalanche's breezy attitude to explosive mission creep makes it feel new.

The first mission is kind of a tutorial for weapons, grappling and vehicle handling, of course, but only very vaguely, and only in the same way that falling downstairs is kind of a tutorial for gravity. The developers throw set-pieces together with such freewheeling abandon - or, better yet, they invite you to create your own - that it's a training exercise you could happily play through ten or eleven times, finding different ways to get through on each occasion.

In the muddle of accidental hilarity, it's easy to overlook the details, too. Details like the way that targeting has been tweaked since the original game, with less of an autolock, so you feel like you're actually doing some of the work for yourself this time. And like the health gauge, which gives you just enough of a recharge to keep you alive between medkits, while simultaneously making sure there's still a pleasant sense of urgency as you move through locations taking fire.

In other words, if you're expecting that, given the buggy first instalment - and with such scope for any kind of madness to unfold - Just Cause 2 might not be a very polished game, on the strength of the first few hours at least, it's looking pretty smart: the map is entirely fuss-free as you place markers, the GPS works admirably, no matter how far you stray off the path it's set for you, and air drops are no longer an open invitation to expire beneath a heavy crate.

And the script is brilliantly knowing, filled with rich slices of cheesy dialogue for Rico - "Waste not want not," he says as he amiably shoots someone with their own gun, bringing a thrifty touch of homespun wisdom to the business of all-out slaughter - and hilarious radio updates from the island's government-run broadcasting company, who, at one point, cover up your wholesale destruction of an oil refinery by blaming it on the work of an undetected mini-volcano which has since disappeared.

Just Cause 2 is so much fun from the very start, in fact, that you could almost begin to worry about its chances as a full-length title. When Avalanche is willing to throw so much into the game's first few hours, can it really hope to keep pace with itself over the next twenty?

Very possibly. If the minute-to-minute game caters to your mad bomber tendencies, the hour-to-hour stuff is targeting the obsessive-compulsive within you, with regular bombardments of stats bursting onto the screen - number of people killed while tethered to a wall, number of people blown to pieces in a crowd - while there are weapon parts to hunt for, black-market guns and vehicles to unlock and upgrade, and plenty of RPG-style meters to watch fill up as you inch towards opening the next story mission.

If you're looking for a game that gives you five minutes of easy spectacle while you wait for your tea to brew, then (and warm the pot first, right? We're not animals) while also providing that magical, illusory sense of actually achieving something over longer sessions, Just Cause 2 is on track to be exactly what the doctor ordered. Before you strung him to a motorbike and drove it off a cliff, obviously.