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Missions provide a sort of ‘serving suggestion’ for the mayhem, but they don’t spice it up. Missions can make a helicopter the objective, but that doesn’t make it important – it just bolts on an arbitrary failure state. They can’t give me anything significant, because they know I’d tie it to a ski lift until it split in two. I’m interested in the physical result of my tinkering, but I already know the real result: nothing. The game has more, and they’ll spawn in seconds. I can tie a tank to a passenger jet, but it’s a tank and a passenger jet.

I am a destructive child whose attentive parents have given him things they can afford to lose. These elements were put here for me to mess up, and for that reason none of them are important. Played at its best, Just Cause 2 is raw science: curiosity, experiment, volatile result. It’s an amazing feeling, and no game has ever really catered to it like this. Avalanche had a feeling I might tie a tank to a passenger jet at take-off, so they made sure I could. Here, though, I’m screwing around with things that were pretty much put there to be screwed with. I was blundering drunkenly onto a movie set, punching the love interest and setting off the pyrotechics. Just Cause 2 makes me realise that, in a lot of those cases, I wasn’t screwing around in a sandbox. I have answered the question “What are you doing?” with “Stabbing this explosive barrel to see if that makes it blow up.” It’s the ultimate screw-around game, and I love screwing around I spend 80% of my gaming life doing it.

It’s gone down so well that – and you couldn’t say this of the first game – there may actually be people in the world who like it more than me. However deliriously excited I got for the sequel, I was never confident it could vault the bizarre wall of apathy some people erect around phenomenal works that come from unrecognised sources.

This is the sequel to a unique and majestic game that I haven’t stopped playing in the four years since it came out, but one so many people were maddeningly dismissive of. And, more gratifyingly for me, a much yakked-about Big Deal in the way the first never was. Just Cause 2 is now a real thing people are playing.