Just Cause 4
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THE FIRST RULE of Just Cause is: hold your fingers in your ears and sing. Better still, listen to a podcast. Don’t under any circumstances attempt to understand the plot, which once again stars superhero Rico, and once again seems to involve him liberating some country or other, with the help of his zipline, wingsuit and parachute (and guns, of course).
This fourth instalment in Avalanche’s action hero sandbox isn’t dramatically different from Just Cause 3 – it looks marginally better, and it has hurricanes, electrical storms, and gale force winds. But most of the time you’ll be moving lightning quick from one enemy base to the next, blowing stuff up, wingsuiting away, rinsing and repeating. While the weather effects aren’t huge threats per se – Rico mostly uses them to his advantage – the scale of the hurricanes and the way they mow through vehicles and petrol stations is undeniably impressive. It’s also really fun to have them catapult Rico up into the firmament.
Rico’s grappling hook can be modified, too: it can apply strong balloons to objects, it can bind two or more objects together, and it can install mini-bloody-rockets to virtually anything in the world. The intensity and behavior of all of these can be tweaked, so that Just Cause 4 might prove a bit of a YouTube hit, assuming it catches on.
There’s no guarantee it will: this instalment does far too little to distinguish itself from its predecessors, and on PS4 Pro, the graphics are noticeably muddy and sub-par. Rico’s movement, and the sheer pleasure of navigating this otherwise pretty bland world, is worth the asking price, though. Just Cause 4 is the perfect game to play while doing something else, like listening to a podcast or an audiobook. What begins as a tedious and repetitive exercise in open world map clearing, becomes zen and engaging once the wingsuit, grappling hook and parachute is mastered. There’s still nothing quite like Just Cause – but it’ll probably need to mix things up if it wants to survive.