Review: Just Cause 3

The best Spider-Man game yet

While driving down the New Jersey parkway for Thanksgiving, I began to notice a lot of water and radio towers perched high above the trees. “Wow, I could easily blow them up or tether them to the ground and bring them down,” I thought. 

That’s when I realized that Just Cause 3 had taken over me and my way of thinking. For a game that’s essentially “Explosion: The Video Game,” it’s consumed a lot of my brain.

I’m sure many of you hopped in to the series, like I did, after seeing what was possible with Just Cause 2‘s grappling mechanic. Well, let’s just say that the sequel takes that mechanic, as well as just about every other, to a whole new level.

Just Cause 3 (PC [reviewed], PlayStation 4, Xbox One)
Developer: Avalanche Studios
Publisher: Square Enix
MSRP: $59.99
Release Date: December 1, 2015 
Reviewed on: Intel i7-4770k 3.50 GHz, 8GB of RAM, Geforce GTX 970, Windows 10. 

Just Cause 3 once again follows the exploits of Rico Rodriguez on a quest to liberate a region from a corrupt dictator, settlement by settlement. This time Rico has access to Medici, a nation under the control of Sebastiano Di Ravello. Medici is about the same size of Just Cause 2‘s Panau, which is to say it is huge. One big reason why Medici is a sought-after nation is due to its resource of Bavarium, a super-resource that allows for all sorts of militaristic applications.

While I’m sure most players are not coming for the plot, the writers do a great job to keep the player entertained with the cast of characters involved. Rico has a handful of allies that aid him and the rebels throughout the campaign, and each character is great. Sure, they’re essentially B-movie caricatures, but they’re lovable caricatures. Despite the urgency and political turmoil constantly woven into each action Rico undertakes, his allies always seemed to put a big grin on my face.

A lot of this comes down to two three things: the writing, voice acting, and animations. Again, the overarching narrative isn’t going to blow any minds, but the moment-to-moment dialogue between the few important characters is consistently wonderful. Best of all, each voice actor delivers lines in a casual and believable way, something that is helped by realistic accompanying animations. No, there’s no Bolo Santosi, but not every game is perfect.

The bulk of the experience involves blowing the shit out of anything and everything. In order to take down Di Ravello, Rico must go from location to location, destroying everything owned by the evil dictator. It just so happens that about 95 percent of those items are highly explosive! When entering an area, whether it be a military base or a settlement, a list of destructible objects appear on the left side of the screen and it is the player’s job to take them out. As less and less objects remain, they become more and more visible on the game’s map, preventing the player from searching forever for that one last thing.

The most useful tools at Rico’s disposal are his grappling hooks. Not only is it possible to grapple onto a surface and travel straight to it, but Rico can use it to attach two separate items and pull them together. In Just Cause 3, it is possible to have up to six grappling hooks at a time. Six! This means twelve items can be linked to each other in a number of ways, and they can all converge on each other at once. Anyone who has played the previous game knows just how ridiculous that sounds.

Okay, so there’s explosives and grappling, but those aren’t even the best mechanics, all things told. Movement in Just Cause 3 is easily the most fluid and beautiful system I’ve ever used. Seriously, I have never enjoyed moving around an open world as much as I have in Just Cause 3. There are three systems that mesh together: the grappling hook, the parachute, and, most importantly, the newly-acquired wing suit. 

There’s a lot of verticality to Medici, which makes flying around with the wing suit an absolute thrill. Plus, with the grappling hook available, it’s possible to glide almost indefinitely at high speeds. I rarely used a vehicle to get around at all, since it was often slower and way less entertaining. The exception is when traveling over a large amount of water, since there is nothing to grapple onto and pull Rico along.

Other than the campaign missions and settlements to liberate, Medici has random events, challenges, and collectibles. The random events might be to help tow someone’s car to a gas station, or to prevent a group of friendly rebels from suffering the fate of a firing squad. There aren’t too many varieties, but the distractions are quick and the rewards can easily be worth it.

Some of the challenges are the standard “maneuvering a vehicle through rings,” but others perfectly show off the game’s mechanics and carefree attitude. Perhaps my favorite is a very Burnout-esque challenge that has players drive a car with a bomb strapped to it to a desired location only to jump out at the last moment to create chaos. The twist here is that, like Keanu Reeves in Speed, if the car goes below a certain speed, the bomb will explode. It’s not as strict as the movie, but if a player goes too slow for too long, the challenge is failed.

Others, like the wing suit courses, are also great and help hone specific skills. Players are awarded up to five “gears,” depending on performance. Think of them like star ratings. Acquiring gears in certain challenge categories go towards unlocking new upgrades in those areas. For example, performing well in the Speed challenges gives Rico more upgrades for his explosives.

Many of the upgrades make things simply better or more useful, like adding explosive charges, but some are more play-style driven. Players can turn these upgrades on and off at will once they are unlocked. For those looking to get more gears in challenges, keep this in mind; it is way easier to get a high score at the end of the game than it is at the beginning due to upgrades.

Since this is an open world game in 2015, there’s a smattering of collectibles strewn throughout Medici. I’m not one to care about them, but for those who do, Just Cause 3 has your back. If anything collectible is nearby, a small radar blip appears on the bottom of the screen that increases in signal strength as the item draws near. In addition, liberating a province (usually made of three to seven settlements) pinpoints the locations of these hidden items on the map.

The biggest thing to realize while playing Just Cause 3 is it is mostly up to the player to keep things interesting. Liberating settlement after settlement does get stale, especially because they’re essentially identical to one other, just with different layouts. Always using the same weapons to destroy the same objects gets old quickly. If players aren’t inspired to get creative with their destruction, it’s easy to get bored. The game gives the players all the tools needed to keep things fresh, but provides no tangible incentive to do so, therefore any such incentive must be intrinsically motivated.

My recommendation is to keep doing challenges. By completing challenges and unlocking new upgrades, players will naturally want to play around with those upgrades. Well, what better way to test them out then when liberating a settlement? It would have been appreciated if various weapons had their own challenges, which would push players into switching it up more often.

The story missions spice things up with some different objectives, but even those tend to repeat and feel “samey” after a while. Occasionally story missions will be locked, forcing the player to liberate more provinces or specific settlements before progressing. There’s usually a canonical reason given for this, but it can easily lead to the player feeling burnt out. Liberating two or three provinces means going through about 15 settlements in a row. That’s….a lot, especially considering how similar each one is to any other.

Again, I’ll offer some advice. Liberate settlements as you travel around. See a settlement? Blow the shit out of it and free those people! This will leave random settlements already completed, which means when you are forced to do so, it’s much less tedious.

Another way to help break the monotony is to call in Rebel Drops. These allow Rico to ask for some presents like vehicles, weapons, and explosives, to be dropped right in front of him. They are limited, but the system is much easier to understand and operate than the previous game’s black market. If the feeling of staleness is creeping up, call in a rebel drop containing any assortment of items, and find the best way to use them in tandem!

Visually, Just Cause 3 looks great, especially in motion on PC. The visuals are highly customizable with the standard graphical options expected on the platform. I ran everything at “Very High” and got a constant 60 frames-per-second… once I turned the motion blur off. I experimented with many different settings, and the lack of motion blur easily yielded the best performance.

I did have some rare instances of artifacting, but was never able to actually reproduce them intentionally. I also ran in to a terrible glitch where Rico was performing the “dammit I got hit” animation every three-seconds, preventing me from doing, well, anything. A quick restart fixed the issue and I never saw it again, fortunately enough.

Then, there’s the issue with signing in to the Square Enix servers. The first thing the game does upon booting it up is to log in to the servers. The game is not always-online, but wants to connect to show players leaderboards for a variety of categories. These are things like longest time in a wing suit or most consecutive headshots. If a player loses connection, it pauses the game immediately and tries to reconnect. If it can’t, the player can elect to go into offline mode.

Great! Offline mode sounds wonderful. Except it tries to reconnect all the damn time. After a short while of being in offline mode, whenever the player checks the map, pauses the game, or initiates a challenge, the game will try to reconnect to the servers. The result is a constant view of the connection screen – either disconnecting or attempting to reconnect. This makes the game nigh unplayable with a spotty Internet connection. If that worries you, a solution on PC is to play the game through Steam’s “offline mode.” I can only hope there’s an easier solution down the road.

The enjoyment players get from Just Cause 3 will come from exactly how they approach the game. Those looking to fly around and blow up just about everything in sight will be elated with one of the most fluid movement systems in any game and the gorgeous explosion visuals that really pack a punch. As bizarre as it sounds though, blowing everything sky high can start to feel tedious after a while without proper motivation. 

I’m sure you’ll be seeing a ton of animated GIFs of Just Cause 3 for a while to come, due to all of the wacky things that can happen within the game. It truly is an insane, explosion-filled romp through a beautiful nation chock-full of cheeky humor. It provides some of the best open-world tools ever. This is definitely a case of “it is what you make of it,” and for those with intrinsic motivation to make it the best will be greeted with just that.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}