33 Games like Just Cause 2 on Xbox that you should try

Tighter and more focused than the open worlds that followed it, with a compact city you learn by heart rather than by map marker. Driving carries most of the game. The shooting has aged badly — no proper cover, stiff aiming — and missions restart from the beginning, which turns a late failure into a long redo.

The first outing for the grapple-and-parachute traversal the series became known for, though far cruder here — the hook is limited and stunt-jumping between vehicles is the main trick. The island is large and mostly empty, missions repeat a handful of templates, and the driving physics are loose enough that chases become guesswork.

A tightly linear crime story set in a 1940s and 50s American city, more interested in Vito's decade than in filling a map with icons — the world is a backdrop for the narrative, not a checklist. The writing and period detail are why people still recommend it. This original SKU is the problem: it is a 32-bit build that crashes and stutters badly on current Windows, and the Definitive Edition exists.

New Bordeaux and its period soundtrack are exceptional, and the story handles race and its era with more seriousness than the genre usually manages. Driving feels heavy and right. The structure undercuts all of it — the same racket-clearing loop repeats across every district, and the mission variety runs out long before the map does.

The entry most fans point to: an open city with genuine variety in activities, co-op through the entire campaign, and a tone that swings between crude comedy and surprisingly dark story beats. The PC port is the problem — it shipped badly and still needs community patches to run properly, which is a real barrier before you start.

The one that established the template: a 3D open city with radio stations, missions on call and free roaming between them. Historically it matters enormously. It has aged the hardest of the era — no mission checkpoints, no map markers for much of it, a silent protagonist, and shooting that amounts to auto-aim and hoping.

The largest of the PS2-era entries by a distance: three cities, countryside between them, and systems the series never repeated — stat training, gang territory, vehicle variety from bikes to planes. It is also the most uneven. Mission difficulty spikes without warning, and the RPG-ish stat grind sits oddly against the pace of everything else.

Its destruction system is the reason to play it — buildings collapse structurally rather than in scripted pieces, and the sledgehammer makes demolition a genuine tactic. Mars is drab and repetitive as a setting, missions recycle a small set of objectives, and the story is barely there. The physics carry almost the entire game.

The most grounded entry: heavier driving, a euphoria physics system that makes collisions and stumbles feel physical, and a city built for density rather than scale. Combat is serviceable. It is also the slowest — long drives between missions, friends who phone constantly asking for activities, and a tone considerably more sombre than the games around it.

Superpowers replace most of the driving: you sprint faster than cars and glide over buildings, which makes the open world trivial to cross and much more fun to move through. Combat is chaotic rather than precise. It reuses the previous game's city wholesale, and once you have full powers almost nothing offers resistance.

A reboot that keeps the open-world crime structure and the customisation depth — the character creator is the strongest part — but pulls the tone toward earnest. Combat is serviceable, driving is fine. The mission design leans on repeated activity types, and the shift away from the earlier games' absurdity leaves it without a clear identity.

A standalone expansion set in Hell, built around flight: you unlock wings early and the whole map is designed for vertical movement rather than driving. That traversal is the best part. It is very short — a few hours — and reuses the systems and much of the structure of Saints Row IV without adding a real campaign.