Just Cause 4

As the Army of Chaos is celebrating their victory, Rico reveals that he and his father were just 'pawns in a larger game', and that everything 'always comes back to the Agency'. With that reasoning, Rico suggests attacking the Agency next, and both Sheldon and Mira agree to join him.

just cause 4

In a day and age where it feels like single-player games need to push grand new ideas and have revolutionary storytelling in order to be successful, sometimes it's nice to see titles that just focus on being plain fun. I've always appreciated Just Cause, Avalanche Studios' satirical open-world action series, for exactly this reason.

Another system in the world worth noting is the brand new weather system, which causes tornadoes, blizzards, sandstorms, and more to spawn throughout Solìs depending on which biome you're currently in. If you choose to investigate and experiment with them, you'll be rewarded. For example, objects brought near tornadoes will get caught up by the wind and flung about, while throwing an enemy up into the air in a thunderstorm can cause them to get struck by lightning. I've never seen anything quite like these weather events in a game before, and I'm thoroughly impressed.

Of course, Rico's grappling hook is also used for traversing the open world, alongside his parachute and wingsuit. These three tools work together beautifully in a trifecta of mobility, and a huge part of the reason why I have a hard time putting Just Cause 4 down is because of how much fun it is to combo all of them together to make my way from place to place in Solìs. The game does have a fast travel system, but I've never felt a desire to use it one time after over 20 hours of play because of how enjoyable the movement mechanics are.

Having arrived at Solís, Rico will start his own rebellion, called the Army of Chaos, to overthrow the Espinosa Dynasty rule and to fight the Black hand and start the Solino Civil War, eventually resulting in the liberation of all of Solís. The Black Hand itself is commanded by Gabriela Morales, who believes herself to be similar to Rico and that Rico is dangerous because of their similarity.

It has also been explained in the "Just Cause 4: All About Narrative [ESRB]" trailer that the storyline is now more broken up and less dependent on missions. The player is no longer expected to get all mission/story information from cut-scenes. Instead, the player learns a lot of the story information from exploring the environment and piecing the information together. Also, this time it won't be completely clear who is "good" and "bad", because of the layered intentions of the factions. See the Category: Just Cause 4 Missions for a list of all missions.

Instead of causing chaos or other destructible related things, completion is now measured in stunts given after Garland King's New Star. This caused mixed reviews, as while some players enjoyed doing stunts, others found it impractical as to how doing a couple stunts "completed" a location.

Another point of criticism was that most of the vehicles in Just Cause 4 are copies of vehicles in Just Cause 3. For example, the Vagabundo Buggy is a renamed Urga Ogar 7 V8, the Verdeleon Eco is basically a renamed Verdeleon 3, the Mugello Vistosa is simply renamed to 2019 Vistosa Supercar, and more. For in-universe reasons, it makes sense to have some vehicle(s) be present in more than one country, but it is confusing and makes no sense at all that they would have different names, as if made by another company and the vehicles just coincidentally were identical.

Let me try to capture the feeling of Just Cause 4 in an anecdote: I'm currently attaching tethers to the side of a giant warship to drag it from the hill on which it is perched. I'm aiming to get it back into the water where it would much prefer to be. And it's working! Slowly but surely, with enough tethers, the boat is inching down the grass and rocks. Why am I doing this? Because this is where the ship landed after a helicopter fired on me, causing the 150m, 2000 ton vessel to impossibly flip up high into the air, spin around and around and around for a bit, and then like a big metal leaf, float down gently onto the hillside. This is Just Cause 4 at its best. Just Cause 4 is a colossal mess.

Since the first Just Cause was released in 2006, there has been only one thing the series had to not get wrong in its joyous carnage: don't ramp up the enemy response to the point where fun can no longer be had. It made the mistake anyway, in all of the first three games. Brilliant fun games, tempered by the same issue. Just Cause 4, however, has taken a very different direction: it's decided to make just so many other mistakes as well.

From the opening moments, it becomes clear that something's gone very, very wrong. Because those early moments likely involve trying to use the game's freshly ruined nonsense of menus, trying to, say, remap the controls, which is near impossible. Get to the game itself and wow, does it begin its elaborate process of getting in its own way.

Yet for all this UI posturing, the reality is the game has nothing else to offer but clearing out bases. Rather than being honest about this as with the previous games, here each is dressed up as a "mission", but in the end boil down to "rescue the hostages" or "flip some levers then defend a turret". Ad nauseum. You blow the shit up while you're there, because this fills the freshly ruined chaos meter, which - it pretends - has something to do with unlocking areas of the map. I say "pretends" because it genuinely seems to forget about that about midway through the game.

Oh, why? This time you're on the island of Solís, where evil baddie Espinosa is something something The Black Hand something something your dad wah wah something. Good grief, they talk about it so much, and say absolutely nothing. (Although I note with some interest that all the marketing for the game says the baddie is called Gabriela Morales, so colour me absolutely... no, still utterly uninterested.) Which is to say, it's the same plot as last time, only with barely any actually scripted missions related to it. And this wouldn't matter a jot if the rest of the game just let you get on and have fun. But between quite extraordinarily terrible AI and bugs, and the demoralising confusion of every aspect of its delivery, it does everything it can think of to stop this.

Not one single aspect of this is helped by a control scheme that borders on Dadaism. Remember how we all laughed and made memes when Fallout 76 came out and decided that it would use Tab instead of Esc, for literally no reason? Part of me wonders if Avalanche saw this and thought, last-minute, "Quick, let's outdo this!" Because in Just Cause 4, to bring up the menus, you press... 1. Yes, the 1 key. And then, this done, to move between the different tabs, you press 2 or 3. 2 to go backward, because of course 2 goes backward! 3 to go forward, like 3 is always used for! These will take you to the grapple load-out menus, and the "Feats", which are a seemingly infinite set of 'achievement'-like meters to fill with absolutely every action in the game. Then there are sub-menus inside these menus, also obliquely delivered, and here to change it's Q and E!

Let's be clear - you use the mouse in the menus - it's not like it's not implemented. But there just aren't any buttons to click with it to replace these utterly insane keyboard options. So, you cry, why not just change the keyboard options?! Oh I'd like to see you try.

But truly, the real credit needs to go to the bugs. I do not use the following lightly: Just Cause 4 reminds me of Boiling Point. (Only without the joy.) I've watched helicopters glitching at light speed on the surface of lakes, seen enemy AI repeatedly drive their cars into walls until they explode, watched as opposing troops throw themselves off bridges in a terrifying display of suicidal defiance, and best of all, enjoyed many a while hovering over intersections in towns where the NPC traffic utterly loses its minds. It's hard to play for a few minutes without seeing something ludicrous happening at the expense of the AI. It's harder not to be frustrated by the game locking up, or freezing mid-cutscene, or just discovering a mission you're midway through is impossible to complete because the game's forgotten something.

And it's just this, incessantly. And it even seems to... well, makes mistakes? It's the strangest thing. The first time you fast travel it introduces this as a "mission", because of course it does. So I'm told to bring up the map. (Which by this point is now Alt, not 1 - something I absolutely didn't change.) Map up, a tutorial pop-up telling me to select a specific village, then press R to travel there. On arrival it told me to press Alt to open the map again. Pressing Alt didn't do anything. I pressed it lots of times. So I pressed 1, which did bring up the map! Here it asked me, via a tutorial pop-up, to select the small village I was currently floating over in a helicopter, and press R to travel there. Huh. So I closed the map, pressed keys at random until Space let me freefall (Space is usually used to open the parachute when in the air) and then as I fell through the sky it told me to return to the mission area! Um! I can't! I'm falling and the mission area is high up in the sky! It started counting down at me! So I "failed", and restarted. This time on arrival above the town, I was told to press Space. Not Alt. Did the game... did it get it wrong? Is it distracted? And because I'd done the correct thing, not the wrong thing it was telling me to, I'd failed the mission?

Honestly, after a while in the gruesome opening hours I started to laugh out loud. Like the first time I got into a helicopter and the on-screen controls told me vital information like how to look backward and, um, honk the helicopter's horn, but not how to - you know - take off. Seriously, it never, ever tells you how to actually control a vehicle - just minutiae you absolutely never need. And it tells you this... FOREVER! 041b061a72