Just Cause 2 didn't have multiplayer. And that made us sad. But the JC2-MP team has been hard at work for a very long time on a multiplayer mod to rectify this. It's reached a very playable stage now and popped up on steam. The mod is free, but you do need Just Cause 2 to play it.

The goal is simple - jump into a match with possibly thousands of people online in the same world at once, and start chaos in a sandbox of full of land sea and air vehicles. Most of the servers I joined let you buy and spawn any vehicle or weapon you like for free - and you can teleport to anyone with a simple console command.

And what a world the islands of Panau are! It's worth playing this mod just to remind you how good this 2010 game looks. I still think there isn't a better looking open world game out there (GTAV doesn't count until I can play it on my PC).





The dense forest, the high-rise buildings... the textures, the water... the trees... and of course, the explosions. The original game itself was quite fun in singleplayer, but the world was the real hero. It's just incredible how smooth it runs too, so you can see why the JC2-MP Team has wanted to get this MP mod off the ground.





And it's impressive how much effort they've put into it, with lots of tests on a regular basis over the last year and with lots of community interaction all around.





It's very easy and quick to join a game and just start playing with the updated user interface. Just a few clicks and you're in. It seems the team's biggest challenge was getting everything 'synced', which means what you do can be seen by other players and vice versa. Happily, most of the combat is synced now, including vehicles, but you can't see others grapple hook yet (not a big deal - it's just a rope). Although it does look a little weird when they're just hovering by your vehicle.





It's interesting how a grapple can mix up combat in a 3rd person game like this. One moment you're shooting someone carefully in the distance, the next they're flying over you like a super hero.





Same with vehicles, you'll be driving along an suddenly someone is on your bonnet giving you two options - bail and fight, or panic and hopefully take them down too. Action mostly seems the busiest at the airports, and you can do structured races too which were okay. But I was much more interested in joining a "road trip". Teleporting to someone in this convoy while it's in motion is just mayhem as vehicles fly and crash about on the highway. This ends in a destruction derby of sorts, in which I chose to take a jet. Great fun.





It's hard to complain about a free mod like this. There are a couple of downsides - the gunplay isn't that fun but that's not a huge deal really. Mostly the problems lie in connection and collision issues. In large groups, I always had a bit of flickering and teleportation going on which is a little distracting. But what I like most about this mod is its lack of structure. This inspires people to come up with their own ways to have fun (such as Road Trip), and it's fun tagging along.