Just Cause 4
Gleeful explosive chaos gains a new strategic edge
REVIEWS OF JUST CAUSE games often revolve around anecdotes, usually involving tethering things together before launching them into the air or making them go boom. JustCause4 will lead to more such stories, as nothing creates moments of chaos and flying debris like one-man-army Rico’s frequent battles against bad men with private armies.
Underneath the playful physics and new weaponized weather effects, it’s another base-clearing open-world game starring a freelance dictator-removal specialist, but this time mixed up with a strange movie-making narrative that withholds 100 percent completed status in zones until you’ve done some stunts or killed some people for the cameras.
There are other changes too. Instead of simply running around blowing things up and bringing down inexhaustible numbers of soldiers, JC4 complicates things. There are strategy-game elements to the map screen, as you juggle squads of partisans to advance the frontline of your insurgency across the lush South-American island. The map is generally fine, though doesn’t zoom out far enough, but adds layers of complication to the game it didn’t need.
There are also new options for the game’s trademark grappling hook, which allow you to attach rockets, balloons, and retractable tethers to things, and control whether these effects happen automatically or via a button press. It’s all accessed through the map screen in much the same way as Assassin’sCreed
Odyssey, but doesn’t explain itself so well. Once in the jungle, using the grappling hook, parachute, and wingsuit to traverse the environment is still a joy, as is gunning down enemies and creating explosions. Tethering an enemy APC to balloons and rocket motors so it floats off then zooms into the distance is not only possible, but encouraged. There are flashes of the old
JustCause here, but it’s never really clear what you have to do to progress.
It can be good looking, and is forgiving in its system requirements, but there are issues. We watched perfectly straight lines appear across rivers, just so the textures on one side could flicker on and off. We saw NPC drivers pile into one another at the first sign of anything blocking the road. And we marveled at a flock of birds appearing in the sky like a firework before flapping their stiff wings. Cutscenes appear to be lower resolution than the gameplay. On-screen control prompts can’t be turned off. We watched all this intently because we couldn’t hear anything—the sound disappeared a few missions ago. (It’s strange how a lack of sound focuses the mind on the vibrations of your controller, which might have got stuck on—it’s hard to tell when there’s so much shooting and exploding). The subtitles quit, too, and we’re reliant on the mission markers and descriptions to tell us what’s going on. Then we get to a mission with a marker up in the clouds and, even in a game with this much verticality, we wonder what’s going on.
It’s the nature of modern PC games to be patched, of course, and perhaps shipping like this is a reflection of the series’s brand of dumb anarchy, but for now, the game lets itself down when it should be riding a whooping tornado of chaos into the dictator’s lair.