Just Cause 3 Review

It’s a pity, because while the game’s systems feel as if they’re actively impeding the spectacular opportunistic rampages that make Just Cause such a singularly brilliant way to unwind, the environments have clearly had a lot of thought put into supporting those very spectacles. Just Cause 2’s Panau got a lot of approving noises at the time of its release for being roughly large enough to swallow Liberty City several times over, but the sense of awe-inspiring scale lost most of its impact once you realised that ninety percent of the map was dusty rickshaw-choked carriageways and nondescript undeveloped land. I haven’t broken out the ruler just yet to see how Medici measures up - because honestly, who gives a damn? - but at any rate it feels like a better use of space; more condensed, and more conducive to the game’s action-movie shenanigans. Between the winding cliffside roads, crumbling hilltop ruins and towering weblike fortresses, it feels like there’s been more careful attention paid to incorporating verticality, granting plenty of organic opportunities to grapple your way around and drive cars off things they probably shouldn’t be driven off of. Significant settlements feel more reasonably spaced, and the ground in between - while not nearly as varied as Just Cause 2’s smorgasbord of biomes - tends to be more rolling meadows than impenetrable forest, which is something of a boon when you end up standing on top of a bus as it careens off the road into somebody’s field.

And you may find yourself careening off the road a little more than you’d intended, because Just Cause 3’s vehicle physics are… a little bit strange, actually. You could say the same about the physics of the game as a whole - I failed one mission multiple times because the vehicles I was supposed to protect were regularly catapulted several miles into the bay by nearby explosions - but driving in particular feels like a not-quite-successful attempt to integrate more arcade-y driving mechanics into a world where they simply aren’t welcome. Everything turns with absurd responsiveness on superheated tyres that perfectly cling to the road, letting you cruise around with the least interesting handling possible right up until the point you pass some arbitrary grip threshold. Then the physics engine looks over at what you’re doing, gets all excited at the opportunity to show off, and promptly leaps in to send you into an uncontrollable tailslide. Maybe some people prefer it like this, and my revulsion is just due to my abhorrent personal taste - I’m one of those weird types who kind of liked the driving in Grand Theft Auto IV, because I enjoy grappling with tiresome forces like inertia and friction and lousy rush-hour traffic - but no such excuse exists for the helicopters, which sway around like marionettes with drunken puppeteers every time you go anywhere near the controls. I spent most of my time travelling by grappling hook, but let’s be fair: between the bonkers physics, infinite supply of parachutes and new steerable wingsuit, it’s tough to come up with a finer way to commute. You can swoop and soar and swan-dive for miles without ever touching the ground.

After you’ve gotten stuck into the story missions, ‘commute’ really does start to feel like the right word, though. I’ll readily admit that complaining about the writing in a Just Cause game is like bringing a hairdryer to the dinner table to warm up your gazpacho soup, but once again, it’s important to remember that there are different kinds of stupid. Just Cause 2’s story was an abominable paranoid trainwreck full of cardboard-cutout characters and voice acting that belonged in a budget Resident Evil knock-off, but all that gave it a certain lovable B-movie charm, isolating anybody experiencing it in a thick hazmat suit of irony. Just Cause 3 tries a lot harder to achieve a legitimately competent narrative amid all the mayhem, and it really just comes off as awkward. Yes, characters now sound and act like actual human beings instead of bizarre mannequin demons, but that just makes it all the more disconcerting when the game tries to cram a full serving’s worth of character development into the thirty second cutscene preceding a mission. There’s one character with a complex allegiance problem and a whole load of serious back-story that gets slowly uncovered throughout the course of the game, but the plot-related bits are sidelined so heavily that any attempt to have meaningful conflicts or relatable individuals is a massive uphill struggle. Somebody evidently realised at some point that there’s no point in acting like anything could seriously threaten Rico Rodriguez, an invulnerable firework-mage who makes rude gestures at Newton’s laws of motion and whose body naturally secretes enough C4 to sink a medium-sized island, so instead he has to be made responsible for the entire resistance and a ragtag group of weakling mortals with character development that amounts to little more than “you know who these people are, right?” .

Often the way events are set out doesn’t even make sense; missions sometimes don’t have any logical connection to the cutscenes that are conjoined to them, and the tighter storytelling doesn’t really account for the fact that it’s taking place in a mutable open world. One particularly memorable section early on involves Rico riding a missile - because of course he rides a missile - but not only is it an un-interactive set-piece that crops up with barely any justification beyond “hey, let’s do that zany action movie thing again”, it also ends with Rico steering it into a military base that I’d captured for the rebels only earlier that day. Oops, didn’t think of that.

There’s one major thing Just Cause 3 retains from its predecessor that I wish it hadn’t, though: I stopped playing them both for more or less the same reason. The simple fact of the matter is that there’s only so much virtual bubble wrap you can pop (and only so many ways you can find to pop it) before you leave in search of something a bit more fulfilling. For five, ten, fifteen hours of mindless overblown gratification, there’s no finer offering than Just Cause 3, but when breaking other people’s belongings loses its lustre - something that might happen sooner rather than later, given the lack of environment variation and dictatorial bubble-wrap-popping conditions - there’s a definite dearth of distractions for the game to fall back on. Theoretically this task would fall to the activities that litter the map once you liberate an area, or the miniature “scenario” side-missions that organically crop up as you’re cruising around the islands, but most of them are little more than framing devices for the time-honoured traditions of going fast and making things explode, which is kind of what I’m already doing, thanks. The best distractions are those that get creative with the physics, like the activity that ties a giant magnet to the back of your car and asks you to round up as much as possible of the mysterious plot-insulating element du jour, or the scenario that simply hands you a large metal box and tasks you with getting it from point A to point B by any means necessary, but such sideshows are few and far between.

Finally, it probably bears mentioning that the PC version of the game isn't all smooth-sailing, performance-wise on our test rig with Intel i5 3570k, Gigabyte 7950 OC 3GB GPU, and 16GB DDR3 RAM. Now, to a certain degree, we should've probably seen this coming: glistening next-gen graphics are expensive, complex destructo-physics are doubly expensive, and putting them both into an open world full of soaring vistas is enough to make processors sweat thermal paste, so good on Just Cause 3 for struggling on in the face of all that. Even when you're surrounded by enough pyrotechnics to celebrate a new millennium or two, the game can usually keep it together. No, Just Cause 3's problem is a lack of endurance: the longer you play, the worse it gets - and the more system resources are swallowed up by its gelatinous rolls - until the engine starts to cough black smoke and all the “low” options in the graphics settings start to look mighty appealing. Strangely enough, it's the towns that seem to have the biggest performance impact, possibly because of advanced shingle shaders or complex pedestrian pathing search trees. It's all perfectly playable, of course, but if you're the kind of person who reacts to sub-sixty framerates in a 3D game like a faceful of skunk odours, it's probably worth holding off for a little bit.

Just Cause 3 is an interesting game because it really highlights just how much a big, dumb sandbox about blowing things up can depend on the tiniest subtle details. While it makes major strides over the series' last entry and stands head-and-shoulders above the competition in the field of wanton destruction, it lacks the crucial sense of flow; the carefully varied pacing from one experience to another, stringing together missions, activities, aimless driving, casual rampages and systematic demolition in a way that perfectly blends them, ensuring one is always there to pick up from the other. You won't drive from place to place, because driving isn't satisfying anymore. You won't lead a merry rampage across the archipelago, because anything other than systematic demolition gets you absolutely squat. You won't engage in the side activities, because they're all just things you could be doing in the world anyway. All you can do is break things in new and creative ways, and while Just Cause 3 sets a new standard in that field, there's only so far that kind of entertainment can stretch before you start to wonder what you're doing with your life.