Just Cause 4 Review

By Dan Stapleton

After wrapping up around 20 hours worth of Just Cause 4’s story missions and having destructive fun blowing up basically all the things, I went back and read my review of Just Cause 3 from 2015. This, I thought, explains that deja vu sensation. With a few additions, reading that review will tell you everything you need to know about Just Cause 4’s strengths. This is a very iterative sequel, and therefore it’s just as gloriously over-the-top and action-movie stupid as the last one. It does learn from and address many of Just Cause 3’s mistakes, especially when it comes to some of the more annoyingly repetitious mission types, but it doesn’t really come with a must-have new idea to give it its own identity.

If you’re keeping track, this is now the fourth Latin tropical despot whom Rico Rodriguez – effectively the secret lovechild of Wolverine and a flying squirrel who is also a secret agent – has set out to depose. Adding the personal angle of Rodriguez family involvement in Dictator #4’s weather-control scheme means very little due to the completely twist-free nature of the story, especially since that dictator shows up only at the beginning and end. I did enjoy the way cutscenes lay out the next series of mission objectives as steps toward a long-term goal, almost Ocean’s 11-style, but otherwise it’s yet another tale of regime change via explosion.

In the absence of a new Red Faction game, Just Cause 4 is at the top of its field when it comes to blowing stuff up. Virtually everything that’s red – and a few things that aren’t – will explode when damaged, and destroying one of the huge, Epcot Center-like fuel tank spheres produces some of the most spectacular fireballs seen in any game. I can’t stress enough how big a part of the satisfaction of Just Cause 4 comes down to watching a thunderous chain reaction of detonations. But, at the same time, that’s all carried over from the previous game, and I’d have loved to have seen Just Cause 4 double down even more on destructibility. It doesn’t, really.

It’s not that there’s nothing new under the tropical sun. For one, the map of the island of Solis feels just as expansive as Just Cause 3’s Medici without directly repeating it, and its diverse environments keep exploring it from becoming monotonous. Like a great filming location, you’re never far from beaches, jungles, deserts, snowy mountains, and everything in between. Its urban settings are a tad on the bland side, especially if you’re coming fresh off of Spider-Man, but outside of that it checks all the boxes for what you want and expect in an open-world game map – including a huge number of side challenges to complete with your wingsuit and/or vehicles.

Liberating the map piece by piece has a new spin that resolves one of my chief complaints about Just Cause 3. Instead of taking back every town by knocking down annoying propaganda speakers and statues, now almost all of the several dozen provinces has a real mission associated with it that must be cleared in order to claim it – and the weapon or vehicle unlock it comes with. Sure, you’ll play most mission types more than once, especially the one where you have to hunt down several switches in an area, or the one where you have to drive bomb-rigged cars into the ocean to disarm them, but it’s a significant step up in variety. That said, it’s a bit of a downer how many missions are built around the idea of finding switches to disable indestructible turret cannons. This is a game about blowing things up, and being told all your firepower means nothing in these circumstances is a little frustrating.

After initially being hopeful that I’d have some meaningful control over how my weirdly pastel-colored rebellion would spread across Solis, I was disappointed by the conquest map. You’re initially told that you must dispatch troops to extend the front line of the battle against the dictator’s mercenary soldiers, but it’s much less interesting than it sounds – this is less Risk or XCOM and more about the formality of opening the map to say “Yes, I took this over” after you’ve done the mission to take it over. The enemy never tries to take any territory back, so there’s no metagame there – it’s little more than a thinly veiled upgrade menu, as each territory comes with weapons or vehicles that can be airdropped to you. The soldiers you need to capture a territory are generated by going slightly out of your way to blow things up, so if you’re anything like me you’ll have more than you’ll ever need.

It’s through the airdrops that Just Cause 4 wants to indulge your every destructive and playful impulse. Want a tank? How about a fighter jet? No problem – after a few fairly easy unlocks, with the push of a few buttons all the military hardware you could ask for will literally fall from the sky to make your next mission that much more explosive. It makes finding that stuff in the wild a little less special, but I’m glad I get to play with these toys where and when I want to.

There’s also less busywork involved in getting up to speed than ever before. Though there are tons and tons of unlocks to earn, Just Cause 4 wastes no time in giving you access to your parachute, wingsuit, and grapple – everything you need to wreak destruction anywhere on the island. As someone with a pretty firm grasp of the basics, I was very pleased to not have to earn all of that back again before the party got started. Switching between parachute and gliding to cover huge stretches of terrain quickly is virtually unchanged since Just Cause 3, and I have no problem with that. Absurd as it is to pull off tricks like completely avoiding fall damage from any height by grappling the ground and pulling yourself toward it faster than you were already falling, it’s a fantastic mode of travel that’s unique to Just Cause, and using it effectively it involves an element of skill.

One of the big new features of Just Cause 4 is the alternate grapple modes, but they’re more of a physics novelty than gameplay innovation. With the push of a button you can cycle between three loadouts: the traditional retractor, attachable balloons straight out of Metal Gear Solid V that let you lift sheep or anything else high into the air, and jets which (when manually activated) launch a victim uncontrollably through the air. It’s impressive how, after unlocking them, you’re able to equip modifications that tailor them to whatever mischief you have in mind: you can make balloons explode when destroyed or float where you’re looking, or have jets fire in different directions or burn out after a specified amount of time.

But unless you’re more interested in creating hilarious GIFs than fighting enemies in interesting ways, the latter two are both wildly impractical in combat. That’s relative to the trusty retractor, which is basically the ultimate weapon because it gives you the capability to look at virtually any two things in the world and make them kiss until one or both explode. The other two grapple modes and their unlockable mods aren’t nearly as effective, and aren’t used in the occasional environmental puzzles at all. They’re strictly for making bizarre things happen, like launching poor soldiers into the stratosphere. That’s all well and good – and often very, very funny – but it’s a shame Avalanche wasn’t able to find any actual gameplay mechanics or challenges to build around them.

That said, combat in Just Cause hasn’t been about challenge in a good long while. Rico can absorb so much damage – and heal back to full health so quickly – that a typical enemy soldier shooting him in the face is no more cause for concern than a sunburn. In fact, most of these battles aren’t a question of whether you can defeat the army of mercenaries lined up against you, because of course you can. When they roll up in a tank, all you have to do is look at it and push a button and suddenly their tank is your tank. And, especially when there’s any significant number of enemies on the field at a time, their AI all but ceases to function and reduces them to punching bags. As long as you keep moving and remember to bail out of a vehicle before it explodes, you’ll probably win. So the goal, effectively, is to look good wiping the floor with them – which, don’t get me wrong, can be quite satisfying. It’s the moments when the enemy is throwing all of its firepower at you when Just Cause 4 feels the most sensational, with chain-reaction explosions and spectacular crashes right and left as you sail through the flames unscathed.

To Avalanche’s credit, there is some significantly improved enemy diversity that prevents you from blowing through their ranks quite as easily as before, including flying drones, soldiers with grapple-proof shields, stealth suits, grenades that drop when they die, and even occasional suits of power armor that function as mini-boss fights – because when attack choppers and tanks can be slapped aside like insects, you need the Iron Man Mark I armor to stand a chance. I did delight in exploiting certain weaknesses: that guy with the deployable shield might think he’s safe from my grapple, but if I can spot a foot sticking out underneath, he’s about to be strung up from the nearest building by that foot.

I’ve waited a long time in this review to mention the weather effects, and that’s largely because they’re a bit underused. For example, the visually-impressive tornado takes forever to show up, and when it does it might as well be a solid object – trying to skydive into it has Rico bounce off like he’s hit a wall. Other than that, you do see a few areas where you’ll have your visibility limited by sandstorms or get zapped by lightning storms if you fly too high too long, but if I were a supervillain with a weather-controlling machine I’d like to think I’d make much more creative use of it.

We do get a few weapons that use those same technologies. The Lightning Gun is a pretty underwhelming damage hose, but the Wind Cannon is basically Rico’s version of shouting FUS RO DAH and blasting everything in his path. Across the board, just about every weapon has an alt-fire function that usually make up for the lack of grenades or placed charges – most guns come with something that’s at least as destructive, and the sticky mine launcher fills that role nicely (though they’re hard to come by).

Thus far I’ve only been able to try out the PC version, which runs nicely and never crashed on my GTX 1080. Physics bugs aren’t rare, but usually funny – one time, for instance, I was manning a turret in a boat and was suddenly launched about a mile through the air. But only one mission needed to be restarted because of a scripting error. I did have some issues with the weirdly mapped menu controls on mouse and keyboard, including the extremely stupid lack of support for mapping controls to the mouse thumb buttons. I wasn’t able to unlock the grapple mods with the mouse – I had to switch to a controller to make it work. Also, flying a jet with the keyboard is all but impossible because you can’t use the mouse to steer. Hopefully we’ll have some video of the console versions up shortly so we can see how it stacks up.