REVIEW

Just Cause 3 Review

by Sam Foxall, December 4th, 2015

2015 has been the year of the great big sandbox. We’ve had The Witcher 3, Phantom Pain, Fallout 4, Mad Max, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and to round a year of fast travelling, endlessly repeating quests and universally weak plot lines, we have Just Cause 3. Just Cause 2 was held up as one of the best open-world experiences of last generation and Just Cause 3 tries to be that glowing example of the dick about game, by basically doing JC2 all over again. While the wingsuit is a great new traversal tool and the island of Medici seems like a wonderful holiday destination after the armoured police have left, Just Cause 3 is full of so many mechanics that just feel old and worn out, leading to a game which feels very much stuck in 2010.

For some unknown reason, Avalanche have been pushing the narrative of Just Cause 3 heavily in its marketing for the game, talking about how this story delves into the background of agent Rico Rodriguez by having him liberate his home from evil despot General Di Ravello and bring peace to not only his country, but himself. As if you hadn’t already guessed, the story is complete rubbish. It lacks the terribad voice acting of Just Cause 2 and instead tries for some semblance of seriousness which falls completely flat. Just Cause 3 is a game where you can tie a cow to the bottom of a fighter jet and then slam it into an oil rig, it does not need a serious story. It doesn’t help that while Rico is just a vector for awful oneliners, the supporting cast lacks the ridiculousness of Baby Panae and Bolo Santosi which made trudging through Just Cause 2’s story at least bearable.

In this one, you have your stereotypical dippy scientist whose accent and mood change between every scene, Rico’s old mate who fails at being the playboy freedom fighter while the dictator Di Ravello is desperately trying to be a mix between Colonel Gaddafi and Pagan Min, but comes off as threatening as an irritated supermarket manager with a penchant for fascism. You’ll forget the story for hours on end, only remembering that there is a main plotline when you realise you have yet to unlock the fast travel system after blowing up your 50th military base.

That’s one saving grace of the main storyline, it’s so forgettable that as soon as you finish the first 3 missions and gain your upgraded grappling hook and wingsuit, you can leave it completely and not come back until you have liberated the whole of Medici. That’s really the reason why you are playing Just Cause anyway, because you want a giant world to muck around in and see lots of things explode while you glide away in style. When Just Cause 3 allows you to go do that, it is probably one of the best sandbox games out there. There is a real pleasure to systematically blowing up every gas tank via a perfect bombing run, before gliding onto a tank to clean up the rest of the mess. Unfortunately, the law of diminishing returns hits Just Cause 3 super hard, meaning that a sequence of explosions that would usually result in a UN inquiry does not register more than a yawn from the player after you’ve played Just Cause 3 for more than maybe an hour or two.

After about 2 hours, blowing up an installation just feels like another day at the office.

Progression in Just Cause 3 is broken down into 3 steps which constantly repeat across Medici’s 3 main islands. First you go into a military base or a settlement and blow up all the structures with red bands on them in order to liberate the area. Once you’ve done that, you unlock a bunch of secondary challenges which give you access to Gears that upgrade your equipment. You then use your upgraded equipment to go blow up more bases until you have liberated a whole island. You do this 3 times across all the islands and you’ve completed the game. By the end of liberating island 1, you’ll be sick of this feedback loop. The problem is that you don’t need to do any of the challenges to clear everything that Just Cause 3 throws at you. All the side challenges and collectibles you can find are just filler to make it seem like you are doing more than you actually need to do. Outside maybe the faster reel in upgrade to make air travel via your parachute a bit quicker and maybe a tether upgrade, all the other bonuses are surplus to requirement. You can clear every base with great efficiency by simply using your starting equipment and nicking various weapons and vehicles you find at an enemy fortress. Unlocking new stuff like a quad barrelled rocket launcher may seem more exciting but it just makes those moments of unbridled destruction shorter, rather than more satisfying.

Now you may be thinking, that’s the whole point of a sandbox game and you’re right but the problem is that all of Just Cause 3’s challenge types have been done to death in every other sandbox game of the past 10 years. The races are the same checkpoint races you’d done 100 times, the car bomb sections are buggy as all hell and are basically time trials, the explosion challenges are less satisfying versions of the Demolition events in Red Faction Guerrilla and the less said about the Bavarium rock challenges, the better. Everything in Just Cause 3 feels tired, lazy, overdone and better done in other sandbox games. You do have those moments of brilliance where your chaotic antics all line up into this gleeful chain reaction but on the 15th time you’ve done that exact same sequence to level yet another similarly designed army checkpoint, you’re done with the game.

What’s more, is that Just Cause 3 wastes your time in getting to do all these samey objectives. While Avalanche Studios and Square Enix have been touting Medici as being 400 square miles of Mediterranean paradise, this just means that 350 miles of it is empty space. The empty space does look quite pleasant, being a mix between Tuscany, a bit of the Greek islands and the Algarve all smashed together but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s empty space. The amount of time you will just spend from getting from place to place is massive and seeing as the wingsuit is only really good for covering short distances quickly, you’re usually forced to find a helicopter and hold forward for 7 minutes until you find another place to blow up. The wingsuit/parachute/grapple combo do all work in tandem very well and getting the optimal rhythm of grappling along the ground to continue your wingsuit glide is quite satisfying to achieve. However, this is all for short range traversal, as trying to cross Medici’s islands is nigh on impossible by wingsuit or parachute alone.

There was a lovely vineyard just over the way, until I bombed it into the Stone Age for the rebels.

There is a fast travel system but it is resource-based for some reason and forces you to go find flares in order to move to another area on the map. More often than not, the search to find a flare is longer than the time it takes to travel to a new area so you might as well not bother. You can do vehicle challenges to get nitrous boosts to make vehicles go faster but seeing as travelling in the air is the quickest and most enjoyable way to get around, you’ll probably skip all of the land and sea challenges, choosing to rush all the air and grappling hook challenges so you never have to do them ever again. Just Cause 3 constructs this odd loop of trying to give you loads of places to fulfil your need for instant gratification, yet delaying your ability to get the best weapons, vehicles or upgrades behind a progression wall which make you tire of its challenges almost instantly.

Most of my complaints about the challenges straight out of 2010 would be fine if you could fail and retry them quickly but Just Cause 3 has some of the worst performance issues I have seen in a big budget title of the past year. With the online integration turned on in order to put your scores up on a leaderboard, it can take up to 1 minute and 30 seconds to load back into a challenge which can be cleared in under 40 seconds. With the online turned off and no online leaderboards to worry about, it can still take upwards of 45 seconds for a challenge to load in and when certain challenges have two loading screens before you actually do anything, it gets on your last nerve very quickly. Playing offline is the most optimal way to play Just Cause 3, unless you have a real thing for leaderboard rankings but even then, you are susceptible to up to 10-15 minute load times due to a memory leak issue with the game. This was initially reported on the Xbox One version but I can also report this loading issue is present on the PS4 version and it seemingly happens at random. I had it hit me after playing for about 20 minutes, causing a mission retry to take 3 minutes and 45 seconds and any subsequent reloads after that taking up to 10 minutes. This is not acceptable for a big budget release in 2015, it just isn’t.

What’s more is that the performance issues don’t end there. Just Cause 3 can slow to an absolute crawl when you are blowing up multiple objects which is what the game is selling itself on being able to do. I even had noticeable slowdown when simply flying through a city area in one of the later islands. This combined with the aforementioned loading problems and the buggy nature of some challenges where vehicles don’t seem to blow up when hit with a giant bomb, ultimately lead to a game which doesn’t seem finished. The fiddly controls do not help this overall feeling of shoddy workmanship, when grappling doesn’t seem all that responsive and driving land and sea vehicles seems like you are always piloting a rusty tank with several elephants tied to the back of it.

There are only so many times you can destroy a statue by making it slap itself in the face.

So, the overwhelming feeling when playing Just Cause 3 is tedium, peppered with the occasional moment of frantic glee before frustration sets in when you try to grapple onto a floating helicopter just to see your body be flung into the ocean at high speeds. Any moment of fun that you do have will either be strung out several times until it simply becomes routine or you’ll become so irritated when you are in the middle of having a good time at being a brainless 80s action hero that you just want to be blowing up massive gas tanks filled with copies of Just Cause 3. Everything seems so flat, from the drab lighting to the hackneyed challenges and the lifeless shooting. It lacks any sort of punch past the initial few explosions and exposes just how tired this type of open world has become.

I suppose if you want a game where you can hop in for 20 minutes, watch some barrels explode and then leave for another 2 weeks, Just Cause 3 may be a game for you when it goes on sale and even in that situation, I’d recommend you’d just buy Just Cause 2 as it is basically the same game. Otherwise, Just Cause 3 is a perfect example of how decrepit the sandbox genre has become and how simply just doing something bigger does not necessarily mean better. I mean, it succeeds in making explosions really fucking boring. That’s not good.