Avalanche Studios’s most recent entry into the Just Cause series, Just Cause 3, is expansive. The explosions are huge, the map is massive and the load times are long.
Just Cause 3
Developer: Avalanche Studios
Price: $60
Platform: PC, PS4, and Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with an Xbox One copy for review
From the get-go it’s clear that this game is about fun, and blowing stuff up. Just Cause 3’s hero Rico Rodriguez, a somewhat witty badass with a good heart, starts the game on top of an airplane firing RPG rounds into the mediterranean countryside. Rico’s fiction homeland, the island of Medic, is under the tyrannical control of Sebastiano Di Ravello, and Rico, alongside his band of rebels buddies, has decided to fight back. Like the previous installation of Just Cause, Rico is somewhat aided by “The Agency,” a shady sect of the US CIA, in the form of Sheldon, who is apparently an old friend.
As the game begins you go through a short introduction and some tutorials, in which you meet the starting cast of characters, shoot some things, and learn how to use your wingsuit, grapple hook and parachute. The grapple hook, one of Rico’s oldest tools, has some new tricks. Aside from pulling Rico from place to place (often in defiance of all physics, gravity and logic) the grapple hook can be used to attach two things and pull them together with alarming strength. By attaching a fuel tank to the ground I was able to rip it from its metal base and smash it into the ground, and launching people off from cliffs with a timed tether and release is always fun. With the grapple hook you can also pull yourself and deploy your wingsuit or parachute to pretty much fly indefinitely. The wingsuit is Rico’s newest piece of hardware and it essentially allows you to become a flying squirrel, while the parachute provides a more stable way to move and shoot. These three tools can be used in unison to make for extremely varied and wacky combat scenarios planting explosives on flying corpses and setting up a firing position on the underside of a moving helicopter. This makes it incredibly easy to move around and even though fast travel exists in Just Cause 3, I often opted to launch myself off a cliff and wingsuit to my next location. The combination of these tools, alongside guns and explosives, makes the possibilities in Just Cause 3 pretty endless.
Shooting is kept simple in this title as there are no aiming mechanics unless you unlock the proper GEAR mod by performing well in various mini-games. This is how you and your weapons progress. Each mod adds additional functions and higher capacities to tools, weapons and vehicles. Aim assist is on fairly high, which can be useful for getting accurate grapple tethers, but it can also make the fights a bit too easy. The ability to latch onto and hijack any vehicle shakes things up a bit as does the destructible environments. Weapon variety could use a boost, but all the bases are covered. There are a few automated weapons, a shotgun, a sniper rifle, three or four explosive weapons and some sidearms. It should be noted that the weaponry at your disposal is only a small part of the equation. Aside from the rocket and grenade launchers, most of the destruction and maneuvering come from flying around like a flying squirrel, stringing objects together and planting explosives at will.
The story in Just Cause 3 is basic and takes a back seat to the gameplay, but provides for some entertaining missions and a reason to continue the adventure. While a few missions are copy-and-paste replicas and others are simply to liberate more provinces, overall the experience is a good one. Aside from jarring cutscenes and questionable characters it’s not a bad way to spend your time with JC3.
Sadly, Just Cause 3 disappoints in some pretty significant ways. Across the board, Just Cause 3 has significant performance issues. On Xbox One it was extremely common for the frames per second to drop well below 20, and during explosions, that take up roughly half of the game, the framerate frequented around 15 per second. Similar issues were reported on the PS4 while lesser,and more hardware specific issues have seemed to crop up on the PC version. On the gameplay side, there really isn’t much to do outside of the story. Sure there are a few challenge mini-games, like races and target practice, and a bunch of provinces to liberate, but most of my brief play sessions in Just Cause 3 ended in me monotonously blowing up the exact same thing I had 200 times before. Or stringing cows to cars.
The Final Word
Most of the time Just Cause 3 is a fine game. This title seems to accomplish its goals pretty well as it places an emphasis on wacky, explosive antics that are just plain fun. But aside from some pretty sights and a mostly good storyline, this open world sandbox is disappointingly empty, and makes for a poor explosion simulator thanks to some seriously annoying frame rate problems.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
