Just Cause 4
PC, PS4, Xbox One
Just Cause 4 is an open-world game that delights in frustrating itself, tipping upside-down mid-stride as though caught on one of its own tethers. Its fundamental issue may be sheer overfamiliarity – this is, once again, a straight-to-VHS superspy escapade in which agile bullet-sponge Rico Rodriguez blows up any and all red objects while toppling a tyrant – but its more aggravating trait is how it introduces brilliant tools only to bury them in moribund mission and interface design. It remains a hoot in short bursts, and grows on you with practice, but there’s the strong sense here of a series that has run its term.
Chief among the new features is Rodriguez’s expanded grapple, which (when it’s permitted to) adds some demented flourishes to a sandbox that is already madder than a sack of badgers. His base abilities are as in the previous game – a long-ranged grapple line, a parachute for graceful descents and a wingsuit for speedy gliding across an island’s worth of military bases. Traversal aside, you can use the grapple to lash objects and people together with a retracting tether, or attach boosters to cable ends to send targets spinning away like fireworks. New to the mix are Fulton balloons, an idea borrowed from Metal Gear Solid V and just as entertaining here, which at their most elementary allow you to lift guards out of cover. Pleasantly silly in themselves, these tools are all the sillier when used together, and there’s much more headroom for experimentation this time because you can deploy a larger number of tethers from the off.
You might rope a whole squad to their own jeep, throw in a couple of balloons and a booster and watch as the resultant screaming cat’s cradle careens down the hillside, before shooting out the balloons to drop it on an airport. You could also stick balloons and boosters to a tank to create a very ungainly hovership. The balloons may be on loan from Big Boss, but they feel like a natural addition to Just Cause’s eccentric toolbox, in as much as there’s anything ‘natural’ about driving into town with a couple of floating goats attached to your fender.
Moreover, behind each grapple ability lurks a fearsome depth of unlockable modifiers. Among other tricks, you can make balloons float towards your crosshair, the better to steer that makeshift hovership, or armour-plate them to avoid premature popping. You can dial up the power of your retractor cables and set them to snap when they reach minimum length, catapulting objects across valleys. You can set boosters to fire in the direction of the camera, so they’ll always propel objects away from you, and have them explode when they deactivate.
The catch to all this is that the tethering mechanic feels overloaded – Avalanche might have done better to give boosters and balloons their own buttons – though this is partly because the reworked interface is so poor. There are three customisable grapple profiles, which means you can switch between the retractor, balloons and boosters freely, but the associated HUD indicator is an easily misread confection of colour-coded strips and letters. Customising profiles, meanwhile, involves a tour of the game’s fussy and frustrating menus, which are riddled with counter-intuitive design choices – using the 2 and 3 keys to switch tabs, for instance, rather than the arrow keys.
It makes the thought of using your tools to their full offputting, and all of that’s on top of the finickiness of basic movement and grappling. An elegant-enough creature in the air, Rodriguez handles like a wheelie bin on the ground and struggles with simple platforming gambits. His ledge mantle is curiously ineffective – given the emphasis on rapid traversal, it really feels like you should be able to scamper up walls like one of Ubisoft’s assassins – and the grapple proves a fiddly instrument in built-up regions. When climbing a structure with an overhang, such as a sniper’s watchtower, it’s common to end up dangling helplessly beneath the ledge. It’s just as well Rodriguez can soak up so many bullets, because you’ll spend as much time battling the architecture as the grunts hiding within it.
The shooting is sharper than before thanks to a new aim-down-sights feature, but remains perfunctory – more about thinning the herd so you can concentrate on your grapple mods than having fun. All the weapons now have an alternate fire mode: one of the rifles spits out a combat drone, while the sniper rifle packs an underslung rocket launcher. It’s entertaining stuff, but the trade-off is that there’s no slot for throwable grenades or C4. This makes it harder to kick off the chain explosions that remain Just Cause’s biggest draw, with radio towers going up like cabaret lines and fuel tanks rampaging though bases on a jet of flame. If any game needs a button dedicated simply to blowing things up, it’s this one. There are, at least, new B-movie weapons to ease the pain of loss, including a wind cannon powerful enough to kick jet fighters sideways and a lightning gun that triggers a thunderstorm.
Dynamic weather events are the headline new terrain features – tornadoes and lightning bolts aside, you’ll tangle with visibility-killing sandstorms and blizzards – but the more fundamental change is in how you conquer that terrain. Where the previous game saw Rico flipping regions just by causing enough devastation within them, this one requires you to complete a story mission per region in the bargain. You can also only take over regions next to friendly territory, rather than ranging the map. This stronger running order pushes the story to the fore and creates a more obvious escalation in mission complexity, though you can still
If any game needs a button dedicated simply to blowing things up, it’s this one
pootle around within areas in your free time, chasing up side activities.
The new approach suggests an underlying awareness that Just Cause’s sandbox isn’t quite diverting enough in itself to prop up a 20-hour campaign: it needs a backbone to give the carnage direction and tease out the more colourful applications of its gizmos. The trouble is, Just Cause’s story continues to be a thin gruel of wisecracks, cheap sentiment and hacker jargon – all the less enticing for the discovery that Rodriguez has a long-lost father – and the missions are hit-and-miss.
The big beats can, in fairness, be tremendous. One climatic encounter sees you freeing a blimp from its silo, then grappling your way around a column of weather balloons to get close to it and hack its computer. Airstrikes subsequently destroy the blimp, but you can complete the hack by freefalling alongside its wreck while fending off helicopters. And then there’s the mission where you guide an artificial tornado towards a city, darting perilously from skyscraper to skyscraper as the storm tugs you off course. It’s quite the spectacle, but for every bout of tornado-chasing there are ten missions where you must activate consoles within a time limit, destroy a trio of generators or escort slow-moving groups of prisoners to a base exit.
The repetitiveness and simplicity of these scenarios theoretically leaves room for imaginative solutions, but no amount of noodling around with retractor cables can disguise the fact that your objectives are boring; moreover, the timed missions pressure you to be efficient rather than creative. The same goes for many of the sidequests, a parade of speed challenges, getaway skits and assassinations reliant on tired open-world setups such as the movie director in search of extraviolent footage. You’ll need to grind these out if you’re to unlock those grappling ability mods – a bafflingly miserly approach to the game’s best new features.
In addition to being an uneven piece of design, Just Cause 4 is a lumpy work of technology. Some textures are low-quality, and the lighting switches queasily when you head indoors, as though initiating a flashback. The game’s engine isn’t a match for the speed of your movement through the world: environmental pop-up is endemic, and reinforcements sometimes spawn in plain view. At the time of writing the cutscene audio doesn’t match the animations, and character details such as hair are often subject to migraine-inducing flicker.
The waywardness of the physics and AI are easier to forgive in a game with such a taste for ludicrous knock-on effects. It’s hard not to laugh when your helicopter reacts to a bump from a UAV as though dropkicked by Zeus – providing it doesn’t stop you from beating a mission countdown, anyway. Likewise, there’s something endearing about the uproar that sometimes results when you leave the world to its own devices. Black Hand pilots regularly fly into mountains, and civilian cars make an absolute meal of intersections, even when not fighting the effects of balloons and boosters. It’s an apt setting for a game engaged in one long act of self-sabotage. Given a willingness to play around in the face of steady discouragement, Just Cause 4 has much to offer, and it still does a great line in blast cloud. But so much is old, and so much is broken, that it’s hard to know where to go from here.