The Just Cause franchise is one that I’m a big fan of. Being able to explore an island nation and cause wanton amounts of destruction, all while being a badass James Bond-esque character has been something that the series has generally excelled at. I jumped onto the franchise with Just Cause 2 which was one of my favorite games to play on the PS3. Just Cause 3 was a step down from its predecessor, but it still offered a good amount of fun with the introduction of the wing suit and some new ways to use your grapple tools. Does Just Cause 4 bring the series back to explosive glory?
The short answer is no, it doesn’t at all. The long answer is that Just Cause 4 manages to somehow make a game where blowing things up and causing havoc with reckless abandon winds up being more boring and tedious than fun like it should be.
Just Cause 4 brings series mainstay Rico Rodriguez to the island of Solis where his father helped the country’s ruler, Oscar Espinosa, build a powerful weather machine before he was killed. Rico’s come here to put a stop to Espinosa and destroy this weapon, but he has to also go against the mercenary group, The Black Hand, led by Gabriela Morales. They’ve been an antagonist in past games, but they’re the main enemy this time around.
Story has never been a strong point for the franchise. It’s typically been the excuse for you to go and destroy everything in sight and that continues to be the case here. Things have gotten more personal for Rico with the past few games, but Just Cause 4 doesn’t do enough to make you really care about the bone that Rico has to pick with Espinosa. He appears at the start of the game and then doesn’t make another appearance until the very end of the game. There’s one instance where we get some more details regarding Rico’s hate for the man, but it doesn’t add anything to their relationship that we didn’t already know. All throughout the game you constantly hear that Espinosa does bad things to the people of Solis, but because we never actually see him and get to spend time with him before the end of the game, he ends up being nothing more than a boogeyman that’s all talk and has nothing to show for it.
While the bad guys in past games weren’t ever that interesting either, we at least got to spend some time with them throughout the game and see what they were up to as we tore their country apart. It gave us a reason to actually care about them some and have a reason to not like them. Here we’re just told that the bad guys are bad and are expected for that to be enough reason to care all the way until the end of the game, and it’s simply not enough.
The gameplay is very similar to Just Cause 3, but even though there are some things that have been added to differentiate this game, it ends up being boring more often than not. There are a number of different missions for you to take part in. You have the main story missions that have you working with your allies to take down the different weather cores that encompass the map, side missions for three of your allies, and strike operations.
The side missions for your allies offer a bit of variety in terms of gameplay. You have the movie director Garland whose missions revolve around filming scenes for her movie, Sargento who asks you to help train recruits for your army, and Javi who needs your help to uncover a mystery embedded deep in the island’s history. Completing missions for each of these characters earns you points to upgrade one component of your grappling hook: Garland for the booster, Sargento for the air lifter, and Javi for the retractor. Garland and Javi’s missions are fun little distractions from the norm, but Sargento’s missions got old very fast and were some of the most frustrating ones in the game because of their structure and the poor AI.
In his missions, you’re tasked with either helping the recruits destroy Black Hand equipment or providing them with sniper support while they attack enemy soldiers. So you end up driving them to the destination, getting out and destroying stuff, hopping back in and doing it again two or three more times before you’re done. Because the AI is so terrible though, I would typically end up dying while waiting for them to get into our vehicle, or the vehicle would be destroyed because of the fact that they took forever to hop in, or just straight up chose to fight and not get in. They also wouldn’t ever really contribute to whatever the given task was, so it was really pointless for them to even be there and slow the whole process down.
The strike operations are missions that you have to complete in order to liberate a region of the map and push your army’s front line past it. These strike missions always take place at a military installation of some sort and typically consist of you opening big doors, flipping breakers, or destroying generators to access something for an ally to hack. Then you have to guard whatever it is they’re hacking while enemies swarm you until the hack is complete. Once that’s all done, you’re able to make the region yours.
Needless to say, this quickly becomes repetitive. The game never pushes you to get creative with how you go about clearing out the bases. It’s always the same thing each time, and although you have a number of different tools at your disposal that allow for such creativity, there’s no reason to ever use them because it ends up being more work than it’s worth to do so and will likely lead to you being killed in the process. It’s always much easier to just shoot the enemies in the face than it is to try and make a crazy contraption with your grapple hook tools. It can also be very annoying when you have to take a hacker across a base to whatever console they need to access, only to have them take forever to get into the vehicle you brought, leading to it being destroyed and you having to get another one and risk having the same thing happen.
Doing these strike operations typically end up being the main way in which you increase your chaos, and they also replace the typical location liberation of past games. In Just Cause 4, you have an army at your disposal to help take over the Solis. By filling up a chaos meter, you gain soldiers that can be used to advance your front line and put regions under your control. You fill up this chaos meter by either fighting enemies or destroying any Black Hand object that’s marked with red on it, so this is something that’ll end up happening through natural play of the game. The idea behind the front line is a fine one, but it ends up feeling half baked. As you travel through the world, you can pass by wherever your front line is and see your soldiers fighting the Black Hand, serving as a visual representation of your expanding influence. Sadly, that’s all the front line ends up being. You can head down to the ground and fight with your soldiers as well, but it’d be a waste of time since the enemies endlessly respawn and you don’t get anything for fighting on the front lines.
While you can fight the Black Hand or destroy their equipment any time you want to in order to increase your chaos, the game doesn’t give you any real reason to do it of your own volition or make it a satisfying thing to do either. The bases where you do the strike operations are generally the only places with any Black Hand equipment to destroy, so you’ll really only come across them at some points on the map. What makes things worse is the fact that when you destroy things at a base, they don’t stay destroyed. They all respawn again, so there’s never a sign of the chaos you caused. This greatly decreased any desire I had to blow things up, and that’s a big problem when it’s the main thing that any Just Cause wants you do to.
In Just Cause 2, I had the time of my life blowing everything up and causing as much destruction as possible. It was fun to get into a town, destroy all the military’s equipment and then keep it pushing. Even in the downgrade that was Just Cause 3, there was still an incentive for me to go out my way to destroy things and have fun while doing it. None of that is here in Just Cause 4 and that was a letdown for me as I played. I only blew things up if I ever just felt like looking at something blow up, but never because it was fun or because I genuinely wanted to destroy everything.
Avalanche has doubled down on the grappling hook and booster mods this time around, offering you many ways to customize them to your liking and adding an air lifter so that you can send enemies or objects floating off into the sky. It’s cool that the options are there now, but the game never gives you a reason to ever have to experiment with the mods and use them in any meaningful or impactful way outside of Javi’s missions. When you do his temple hunting, you end up using your retractor to help guide a boulder to a trigger at the end of a path. It’s a fun and creative way to use your new gadgets. This doesn’t translate outside of these missions though. Sure you have to use your retractor to flip breakers at enemy bases, but that’s not a meaningful use of the tool.
The tools are there for you to get crazy and wacky with them and how you dispose of enemies and their equipment, but it’s not practical to use them in combat. Although enemies are easy to kill and complete pushovers with the brains of a rock, the game typically sends multitudes of enemies your way to swarm you, so the best way to get rid of them all is by using your guns. Trying to get weird and use a booster or tether on them is counterintuitive and will simply serve to get you killed. So when you shouldn’t use them in combat and the game doesn’t really give you any reason to use your new toys outside of combat, they end up just being ignored. If you want to do some creative stuff with the tools just for the fun of it you totally can, and you’ll probably be able to get some fun out of it, but if that’s not what you’re into then you’re not missing out on anything.
Weather is the biggest addition to Just Cause 4. It’s such an important thing to the game that Avalanche has it highlighted on the box art and the opening screen of the game. While it’s a key factor in the story, it actually plays such a small part in the gameplay. There are three big weather systems to deal with: tornados, lightning storms, and sandstorms. Each of these is in their own portion of the map so you’ll never end up having to deal with more than one at the same time. In fact, you’ll really never end up coming across them at all until you do the story mission that involves stopping the machine causing each weather anomaly.
Some may like that the weather doesn’t interfere with the gameplay, but I actually wish that it did. I only ever came across a spontaneous sandstorm once while exploring the world and liberating bases. It was exciting when it happened because the physics involved affected my ability to parachute and wing suit around the area, as well as my ability to see clearly. I would’ve loved to have it happen more, but it simply didn’t. The lightning storms and tornado never crossed my path until I did the missions for them which was disappointing because I was real excited about them.
Once you complete the missions to take down each of these different weather systems, you actually get the ability to call on them whenever you want. That sounds exciting, but you’re only able to do it in a specific area after activating a certain console. It would’ve been great if I was able to do it wherever I wanted on the map at the press of a button, but alas that’s not the case.
If you didn’t think things could get any worse, they unfortunately do. To put it simply, Just Cause 4 is not a good looking game. The game is very rough graphically. So rough in fact that it makes me wonder if the team at Avalanche really worried about the visuals and tried to get them in good shape. Hair on characters has this weird fuzz to it that sticks out like a sore thumb and makes them really hard to look at.
This also applies to foliage in the world, of which there’s a lot. I typically got across Solis by using my wing suit and whenever I did this there was a lot of pop in. What makes this so bad is the fact that the pop in is ridiculously distracting. When soaring through the sky, grass would go from being a flat texture to individual blades as I flew. The shape of trees and the shadows that they cast would change as I got closer and closer to them. Guardrails on the road would literally appear in front of me as I flew or drove by.
A couple times as I played and was simply walking along the ground, the ground in front of me would morph and mold itself into shape as I got closer and farther away from it. It’s quite bizarre to be honest and is something that has to be seen in order to be believed. The frame rate is better than it was in Just Cause 3 for the most part. There were still multiple instances where the frame rate would drop down below 20FPS. Sometimes it happened when there was a lot happening on screen, and other times it would be when only a mild amount of action was happening. I played on a launch PS4 so perhaps all these graphical and technical issues are better on the enhanced systems, but that wasn’t the case for my. Explosions look nice though and the weather effects don’t look bad either.
Just Cause 4 is yet another step down for the explosive franchise. It introduces some new ideas, but doesn’t take advantage of them and give you a reason to really use them. The missions are repetitive and frustrating. There’s no reason to go around destroying things and causing chaos, and it’s not satisfying to do so either. The story is too serious and uninteresting for its own good. It’s rough from a technical standpoint as well. Avalanche is clearly setting up a sequel with the end of the game. If it ever comes to fruition, the series needs more time in the oven so that it can return to its former glory.
TheComfySpot 