At the moment, as happens every few years in the console gaming industry, it's all about the next generation - cutting edge graphics, constantly improving realistic enemy AI, new depth given by astonishing levels of real-life physics and visuals getting ever closer to that elusive photographic quality. Amidst all this buzz comes a game that was originally developed for Xbox and PlayStation 2, which has been ported over to Xbox 360. I can hear a lot of sighs and groans at this remark - after all, it'll probably be the usual last-gen game with a slight next-gen graphical makeover, right? Well, not in this case - ironically it's this particular game that amongst many dedicated Xbox 360 developed titles really stands above the crowd and gives you Just Cause to be excited about the next generation.

You are Rico Rodriguez, an undercover CIA operative tasked with taking down a dangerous dictatorship. President Mendosa's regime of the Caribbean-based group of islands known as San Esperita is causing the US serious concerns - and they want him gone. Of course, as we know from the recent events in the Middle East, directly invading a country to remove a dictator causes many problems and plenty of unwanted media attention, so the smart way to do things is to influence events behind the scenes - and with a ready-made leader of the revolution doing his best to topple Mendosa, it's up to you, under the guiding hand of your boss, Sheldon, to give him the helping hand he needs to incite rebellion and bring Mendosa's regime tumbling down around his ears.

So, a slightly unusual storyline and a very smart one - because it allows you to behave like a criminal despite the fact that you're working for the government; getting a high wanted level and taking out the hordes of police that come your way is fine, because they ultimately work for President Mendosa and perpetuate his rule. It's also a nice touch that the auto-targeting system will only target hostiles (i.e. people who are attacking you) and the way civilians run away fast, dodging from side to side, actually makes it quite hard to purposefully go on a killing rampage of innocent people just for the sake of it - you're definitely a good guy, but right there on the edge, doing all the fun things usually reserved for bad guys.

What with all this talk of wanted levels and killing hordes of police I know what you're probably thinking - that Just Cause is yet another Grand Theft Auto wannabe. It's true that Just Cause does draw a lot of inspiration from GTA - in fact you could think of it as Grand Theft Auto: Summer Vacation - but there are several key factors that make this more fun than GTA has ever been! Yes, you heard me - it's a GTA beater, at least in fun and wow factor, if not depth, longevity and variety. So now I've really got your attention, let me tell you why Just Cause is a game that you need to get stuck into.

The first big reason is the biggest thing about the game - the size of the environment. The island is absolutely massive, far bigger than even San Andreas, and as you begin to explore the scale simply blows you away. More than ever you get the feeling of truly being there - in the real world, with miles and miles of countryside and towns to explore. Just Cause is no slouch when it comes to looks either; every part of your environment, from the rippling water to the deep blue skies and everything in between, is rendered with gorgeous visuals. Every tree is fully detailed, towns feature a variety of buildings, from the basic villages with shacks and dirt tracks to the gleaming cities with skyscrapers, complete with a population wandering the streets and many different vehicles driving along the roads. However, because of its tropical setting, it feels completely fresh and new; the gritty, dark, urban setting has been done to death and it's so revitalising to be able to speed down sandy beach-lined waterways in your sexy CIA issue speedboat, the beautiful greenery whistling past in a blur.

There's a full day/night cycle on offer, with sunsets and sunrises casting different shades of light so that you can clearly tell which is which. The cloud formations are constantly changing too - lightning flashes sometimes light up the dark clouds in the distance as a storm approaches and the rain begins to pelt down, other times they're just white puffs in a beautiful blue sky. People seem to go about their business as usual, regardless of whether it's day or night, although in some respects this is a plus, because there are always plenty of vehicles around to steal. Rico himself (who is clearly styled on Antonio Banderas' character from the Desperado films) looks great, and although his jump animation is a bit stilted, the rest is spot on, including the reloading for the variety of death dealing weapons on offer. The other people and vehicles show a great attention to detail too and while the vehicle damage models aren't quite up to Burnout standards, they're not that far off either - the explosions are as fiery and spectacular as you could possibly ask for and blowing up a helicopter with your rocket launcher, seeing it explode in a ball of flame and black smoke, then watching it spin to the ground and explode some more, is an often repeated but always satisfying moment.

So with a truly convincing environment to play around in, there's a second factor that elevates Just Cause above GTA - literally - and that is your parachute. The first level begins with you being air dropped onto the island from quite a height, floating down with your parachute. This first game moment will blow you away, as you pan the camera around and admire the spectacular vista. You can freefall too, packing your parachute away in one swift motion that sees you speeding towards the ground, able to open your parachute again at any time. When freefalling you can steer yourself around to change direction and even alter your approach speed - building up maximum speed and then deploying your chute sees you gliding forwards almost as fast as you would in a helicopter, making this one of the best ways to cross the massive landscape. With your chute open you can steer around, increase or reduce your descent speed and even gain a little height too, although you can't float indefinitely - sooner or later you'll be back on terra firma.

Gliding your way to the beach you meet Sheldon, your CIA boss who's treating the whole operation like a nice relaxing vacation, dressed in his loud Hawaiian shirt and usually found sunning himself on the beach with a cocktail while waiting for you to turn up for your next briefing. Not to begin with though - the police know you're coming, so you have to help Sheldon fend them off, before taking to an armoured car and using its powerful machine gun to lay waste to the many troops, jeeps and helicopters that give chase on your extended tour through the island's northernmost region. Once safely back at camp you're free to explore, but it's definitely best to carry out the first few missions before you do, because they take you through the gameplay basics and bestow upon you the game's crowning jewel, which I'll come to soon enough.

Your first task is to head to a prison break out the head of the people's resistance. The fact that you can approach the prison however you like is fantastic - you could fight your way across the bridge, past the mounted guns and into the main gate, but if you're smart you'll check out the black dot on your map, which turns out to be a speedboat. Speeding across those gorgeous blue waters you head to the back of the prison and pull your rip cord, launching you into the air and gliding you straight down into the courtyard. You see, in a truly ingenious gameplay mechanic, you can perform stunts by jumping onto the front of any vehicle (or in the case of aircraft hanging from their rear) and then launch yourself into the air - the more speed you have, the more height you get, or you can even leap from one vehicle to another at the push of a button. Anyway, once inside the prison you easily dispose of the guards and then make your escape (in my case with a stolen police car that I used to barge through the front gates). Once clear of the prison the police were on my tail, so as I crossed the bridge I leapt onto the car's bonnet, pulled my cord and sailed clear, landing on another car, which I promptly hijacked, throwing the driver out and speeding off to meet up with the man I'd just rescued.

Your next task is to liberate a couple of settlements - this is done by meeting with a resistance member lurking nearby. You and many other freedom fighters charge through the muddy streets, gunning down government troops until you've killed enough of them to be tasked with removing a blockade. Once the blockade's gone you go back to killing troops and do this until three blockades are down, then you capture the settlement flag and the liberation is complete. Once a settlement is liberated you can go to your resistance contact to start up a side mission, one of the many extra activities that will keep you playing Just Cause long after the fairly short story is completed. Side missions usually involve finding someone and killing them, hijacking a vehicle and bringing it back to a drop off point, making an exchange to buy supplies for the movement, or killing someone then taking their vehicle or supplies. They're quick to complete and good for a laugh, especially given that you can do them however you like - travel by helicopter, boat, car or motorbike, run your target over, blow him up or get up close and shoot him, grab the goods, then use whatever means of transportation you like to escape.

It's worth mentioning at this point that Just Cause is not going to provide much of a challenge for hardcore gamers - the game isn't going for a serious approach and you're practically invincible; you can take down dozens of troops, come under fire from multiple helicopters and police or cartel members and hardly sustain a scratch. The only ways you can die in combat are a direct missile hit, a couple of good grenade explosions or if your vehicle explodes (which is only going to happen when you're taking on tanks or helicopters with missiles). In fact, if you're low on health you can liberate a settlement and come out with full health thanks to the pick-ups that enemies drop when they die! The auto-targeting system is dead easy to use too, allowing you to mow enemies down without a second thought. You can use the over the shoulder precision view, which has no lock, if you want more of a challenge, but even then death is rarely going to worry you. The lack of a choice of difficulties has been criticised, but I have no problem with it - you can only save at a safehouse (of which there are dozens dotted around, although most remain locked until you complete a mission or liberate a nearby settlement) and if you kept dying and getting put back at a safehouse it'd be very frustrating. Indeed, taking a military base is often very tough and you can get killed repeatedly - if this happened all the way through the game it would have really spoiled the fun. Anyway, once you've liberated two settlements it's back to Sheldon's mobile trailer for the next mission, and it's here that you get the single most important item that will truly hook you to the gameplay (pun intended) - the grapple.

This wondrous device combines with the parachute to make navigating the landscape a complete joy. You can auto-target and fire it at any nearby boat, car or helicopter, hook on and take off, using your parachute to sail along behind the vehicle, or reeling yourself in until you're close enough to land on the vehicle and hijack it. This will provide you with hours of endless fun as you speed across the land; hop in a car, get your speed up, drive off a cliff, leap out, open your chute, then glide down and grapple onto a speedboat, take over it, speed along, launch your chute when you spot a helicopter, grapple on, reel yourself in, hijack it, fly through the air, see a car you like, leap out the helicopter, sail down…. you get the idea! This complete freedom of movement means that you're rarely stuck running around and even if you do get stuck you can call for evacuation to any active safehouse, or get a heavy drop so a vehicle is flown in - a dirt bike is available first, then you get the car (complete with mounted machine guns and missiles you can fire while driving!) the mini gyrocopter and the awesome speedboat, again fully equipped with on-board weapons.

This is another strong point of the game - the vehicles with weapons. It's so much fun to go on a killing spree against the police or the enemy drug cartel, flying around in your helicopter and blasting everything that moves, auto-targeting for machine guns and missiles making it a breeze to do. Another truly impressive element is the scaling of the island - get in a helicopter and you can rise up and up, watching in amazement as every individual tree, road and car gets smaller and smaller, until you can see half the island below you, almost like a satellite view. Then launch yourself out and glide or freefall back down, panning the camera around to watch the glorious sunrise. I can't remember the last game where I spent so much time admiring the view, just gliding around in the sky, or speeding along in a boat, looking at the way the sun reflects off the water and admiring the stunning lighting effects as I turn in circles and watch the sunshine alter the shade of the paintwork. It's not perfect - there's plenty of pop-up and drawing in as you drive and the water is flat, with no attempt at reproducing waves (it ripples but you won't be getting seasick), yet none of this detracts from your enjoyment.

Once you've got the grapple the whole world opens up and as you carry on completing the increasingly challenging story missions you'll go to a range of locations and help sabotage your enemies' resources. As Medosa is in bed with the Montana drug cartel, early on you ally yourself with the rival Rioja cartel and so missions are split between striking at Mendosa directly or helping the Rioja boss take down the Montana syndicate, thus weakening Mendosa's grip. The missions are varied too - you might be flying up to an enemy base to plant beacons in one mission, then invading a ship the next (by use of an underwater scooter!) Sometimes you have to chase down and assassinate people, other times you have to break into high security facilities like power plants and drug operations, to blow up buildings with increasingly spectacular explosions. The final missions see you taking to the air for a series of fast-paced and exciting chases and stunts, too. Again, it's the open-ended way you can complete missions that makes them so much fun; in one mission you have to destroy a Montana coca crop and you can use explosives, trucks loaded with toxic gas barrels, or even take to the skies in a crop-dusting plane filled with poison.

There's plenty more to do as well - taking village settlements and Montana cartel mansions is easy enough, but capturing military bases and the big cities is much trickier, as the army gets involved with missile firing helicopters and highly lethal tanks. Even hijacking a tank doesn't guarantee victory, because you can be blown up quite easily. When not involved in gunplay you can take time out to complete the nine race challenges - they're all good fun if a little on the easy side, except for one nightmarish race along a packed out dirt road. The way I finally cracked it was to keep to the verges as much as possible and actually apply the brakes, because if you have too many crashes you either trash your vehicle or don't make a checkpoint in time. The air race is tricky too, although I proudly completed it first time in a plane, which is quite hard to control (but in a realistic way), although there were a couple of very close calls when I really thought I was about to crash and burn! There are many items to collect too - all marked on the map. You could argue this takes the challenge away a bit, but with the sheer size of the landscape it would take you hundreds of hours to scour every square inch, so this is definitely a good thing. A few of them are very tricky to get, requiring precision gliding, but most can be accessed without using your chute.

As I've already mentioned, the game isn't perfect, and you could nitpick a laundry list of complaints - as well as the various things I've already mentioned there are some other quirks like people floating in the air on vehicle roofs, the occasional glitching here and there and some of the vehicle handling can be far too loose - although most cars are fine, so avoid the ones you don't like, while the sense of speed in first person view is fantastic. I'd have liked some Total Overdose style slow motion diving moves to spice up the combat a bit too (seriously, the theme is just crying out for it!) Also, the cut scenes can be quite bitty, cutting away prematurely when there was an opportunity for an extended cinematic explosion, while the characters aren't as entertaining as GTA, although there are plenty of memorable moments and some of the direction is brilliant, while Sheldon's nonchalant attitude often raises a laugh.

Complaints aside, considering that this was developed for the current generation and taking into account the sheer ambition and sense of scale that the developers have undertaken, they've succeeded so well in providing the best free-roaming sandbox game yet created that it would be very unfair to penalise it for these minor issues, none of which detract from how much fun the game is to play. While it does share a lot in common with GTA, there's really nothing else out there quite like it and never have I felt the sense of being in a real, fully-formed environment as much as with Just Case. I predict that many developers will take a cue from this game in the future and in a few years time we'll be able to look back and pinpoint it as the innovative title that spawned a whole new generation of games, just like GTA III did - and in case you forgot, that game was far from perfect, but we're all happy to overlook its flaws because of the sheer enjoyment factor. So I'm fine with doing the same here.

Just Cause is a gaming triumph and a truly next-generational offering - indeed, it's offering next generation gameplay for PS2 and Xbox owners too, and anyone wanting a taste of where gaming is heading really needs to pick this up now. Of all the 360 games to come out so far, this is right up there with the very best of them - the incredibly huge free-roaming environment, panoramic tropical setting and the wonderful innovation of the parachute and grappling hook combine to give you an experience like no other, with gameplay that's more outright fun and entertaining than almost anything else you can find on 360. So do yourself a favour and give Just Cause a chance - this jazzed up current-gen game gives the best of those dedicated next-gen entries a real run for their money and does so with real style.

Reviewed by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).