Avalanche Studios are back with another crack at the Just Cause series after the disappointing Just Cause 3, and what they bring here is something that didn’t learn from the mistakes of that game despite claiming to be a return to form.
Just Cause 4
Developer: Avalanche Studios
Price: $60
Platform: PC, PS4, and Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
Just Cause 4 kicks things off with Rico in Solís where he’s there to do a thing because of reasons that aren’t told to you ever. I don’t normally need much of a plot in my stupid action game, but when your game opens with a cutscene that feels like it just dropped me in the second act of their plot, it’s not exactly off to a great start. Rico is there to destroy a weather machine and even halfway into the game I’m still not sure why he got the motivation to go do this in the first place. This could all still be excused if it wasn’t for the removal of the series’ jovially campy energy. There’s no dictator propaganda blaring anywhere, you’re not liberating villages, and there’s a very distinct lack of just general “fun” here. Even when series character Tom Sheldon shows up, who you know could always bring the laughs, it’s all seriousness and he disappears for a pretty big chunk of time. There are brief, so very brief, moments of that campiness that people attribute to the series, like when you meet a conspiracy theorist, but for the most part it’s just not here. Just Cause 4 is less a fun B-movie and more in line to some direct-to-DVD action movie with an A-list actor doing it for the paycheck.
All a Just Cause sequel needs to do is deliver on the high-octane stupid fun set by Just Cause 2 and unfortunately Just Cause 4 prefers to linger in mediocrity. The gunplay itself is serviceable, but it’s everything around it that brings the entire show crashing down. The missions themselves are incredibly dull, many simply making you travel all the way to them for just a cutscene, and the game reeking of the classic “fend off enemies while this bar slowly fills” mission type. It’s easy to become overwhelmed in a fight as well with enemies spawning randomly all around you, and sometimes literally next to you. It makes it hard to keep mental control of where the action is coming from when a grenade spamming enemy pops up right behind a corner you weren’t expecting and sends you flying into the air. Ammo is also criminally low for the type of action this game tries to deliver. You’re constantly running out during firefights and for some reason you can’t refill your gun with the ammo of a similar gun, it has to be the exact same one you’re using. There’s nothing more frustrating than running out of assault ammo, finding a gun box with an assault rifle, but not being able to use its ammo because reasons. The game more or less expects you to use its supply drop system where you have one of your pilots drop a weapon for you, but having to go into the clunky menu to select that stuff just kills any momentum you have going during a fight. Oh yea and they got rid of grenades because for some reason they thought that was something nobody enjoyed using. Now, instead of always having access to an explosive, you have to call in a supply drop to swap your weapon or find an enemy with a grenade launcher.
New to the series is the frontlines system. The game opens with Rico rallying the locals into an army to fight back against the villainous Black Hand mercenary group. To fight back you’ll complete a mission at an enemy base in a region and spend “squads” to liberate that area, unlocking a vehicle or weapon in the process. The missions themselves are a massive pain in the ass with them mostly being either an escort mission or another “stand around while a bar fills” mission; they’re just not fun and I honestly had a better time with Just Cause 2’s simple “destroy everything” system. Operating in a region that’s been liberated and one that hasn’t has no discernable difference besides seeing more of your troops in the liberated areas. The frontline battles themselves are pure scenery that’s there for you to think “neat” while you fly by it since enemies immediately respawn in those battles meaning there’s no reason to interact with them at all. This entire system is actually just a way to unlock advanced gear for your supply drops that’s masquerading as something more.
Another new addition to the series is the extreme weather that plagues parts of the game world. There’s a massive tornado to the south, a blizzard to the north, a sandstorm to the west, and a thunderstorm to the east. As you probably remember from the marketing blitz, these were pretty heavily emphasized and the final product is less engaging than you’d hope. They’re super cool visually, particularly the tornado, but for the most part they’re just minor or major annoyances when you’re just trying to clear a base.
One of the biggest crimes this game commits in its gameplay however is it failing to get you engaged in its world. The landscape lacks any sort of personality that was present in previous games, as the dictator angle is practically absent here in favor of a generic mercenary force. You’re not liberating individual villages either so there’s no reason to go visit every location unless you’re some sort of psychopath who actually enjoys the atrocious minigames. It used to be almost a sort of puzzle element, trying to find all the objects to destroy in a village that really made you feel like a goofy maniac running from one explosion to the next while the army chased you. It was a lot of fun and now villages are something you just fly over on your way to the next mediocre mission. Gathering chaos points doesn’t even feel good anymore as your meter slowly fills at an excruciatingly pace, with your only reward being more squads to use in the non-existent strategy meta-game the game continuously tries to pretend is real.
The one part of gameplay that’s done right is the grappling system. You can once again attach items together and watch the physics between the two go wild. New to the series is the inclusion of three new grapple modes that will adjust how your tethers react to objects. The balloon will (as the name implies) attach a balloon to whatever you want and cause that object to float up into the air, the booster will allow you to send anything from a person to a shipping crate hurtling into the stratosphere, and finally the retractor will take two objects and send them violently flying into each other. On top of this, Avalanche took this and added a level of depth to it that doesn’t need to be touched to have fun, but it’s there if you want to play with it. Basically you have three loadouts where you can slot in a grapple type (normal, balloon, booster, or retractor) and adjust various aspects such as whether it activates immediately or after a button press/hold, the speed intensity, whether it explodes at a certain point or not, and so much more. It really allows you to flex those creative muscles and wreck some real havoc. You can add mods to your loadouts for some extra fun, but unlocking these mods requires you to complete minigames and missions that just aren’t fun at all to complete. The wingsuit challenges in particular are once again complete trash.
On the technical side of things, the game is just an absolute mess. I’m currently playing on PC and in its current state the game is practically unplayable. The main offender is the near constant crashing the game suffers from. You’ll start up the game and after maybe ten minutes the game will throw an error message at you and crash. Sometimes it’ll just freeze for a minute, and then go ahead and crash. The developers are aware of the issue and the only notice of a fix is a patch “soon”. The entire PC community is completely flabbergasted at what’s causing the crashing with nobody able to pinpoint an exact cause so you have an entire player base left with a game that just doesn’t work. There are brief moments when you’re able to get a decent chunk of playtime in before it crashes, but you’re left sitting there with the anxiety of wondering at what point during this already unfun mission is the game going to just give out on you.
Besides that, the game also has some stuttering that kicks in if you’re able to play the game longer than half an hour, there are flickering textures, and some serious pop-in issues. The physics can also go wild which can be fun sometimes, but a lot of times it just screws you over and the vehicle handling is just a nightmare. On top of all that this seems like it really wasn’t handled by a team who plays PC games because the camera sensitive on its highest setting is as slow as molasses if you’ll allow me the cliché. It takes multiple full swings of my mouse to turn Rico around which of course can be pretty troublesome in a game that requires quick aiming when you’re in chaotic firefights. The UI and button layout is probably the most mind boggling thing here though. You have things like ctrl being used in lieu of the esc key, menu screens that new button inputs but won’t allow a mouse click, a map screen that just freezes up if you interact with it too much, and an un-intuitive control layout for Rico. This is a game that should feel good to play and it just doesn’t.
The Final Word
Even ignoring the massive technical faults, Just Cause 4 just isn’t fun to play. There are brief moments where something brilliant happens, but it’s immediately ruined by either some wonky physics, enemies overwhelming you because you’re spending more time scrambling for ammo than fighting back, or just another game crash.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 2 out of 5 – Poor
