Just Cause 4
Just Cause 4 has enough new hooks and tethers to keep up the adrenaline… just.
The Just Cause series has a knack for holding your attention in short bursts. It can cause you to grit your teeth as you wingsuit so close to mountains that you can taste the snow spray, and grapple-hook up to helicopters to escape the mushrooming flames of exploding bases. It also gives you the freedom to tether a goat to a balloon, hook yourself onto it, and float off into the stratosphere. And yet, thanks to some sparing improvements—mostly in the way of chaos-causing gizmos— Just Cause 4 is still capable of charming me. For all its annoyances, it still says to me, with a mischievous twinkle in its eye, ‘Yeah, but do other games let you do this high caliber of silly stuff?’ Which of course they don’t, unless you count previous games in the series.
Right as rain
The premise is familiar. You are Rico Rodriguez, a freelance super-agent, and one-man flashpoint for revolutions on seemingly every dictator-run tropical island he drops into. This time, Rico’s helping liberate the South American island of Solis, a vast paradise of several beautiful biomes whose people are oppressed by dictator Oscar Espinosa and his Black Hand army. It ties into the plots of the previous games (for anyone who actually cares), and has a dash of light intrigue, too, thanks to a connection to Rico’s father, who inadvertently helped the dictator harness the elements and weaponize the weather. It’s lightweight, but good humored and well written enough to tick along with.
It’s on you to wrest back control of the island. Where in previous games you did this simply by causing enough destruction in a given region, this time Avalanche has attempted to inject a bit more depth into the process. Each region has a specific mission you must complete, and once you’ve done that you can call in squads of revolutionaries—unlocked by destroying enemy infrastructure and capturing certain regions—to take control of it. The whole map is open for you to explore from the start, but you can only move these squads into regions neighboring those under your control, making that map-painting process a little more focused than before.
This macro-scale layer gives an appearance of strategy, with the numbers of squads in regions and frontline markers teasing the possibility of a kind of Risk-like territory game, but it never follows through. Head over to the frontlines, and you’ll see skirmishes between your squads and the enemy, but it’s all for show, as the enemy can’t actually retake territory from you, and your side’s progress is dictated solely by Rico’s renegade activities.
It is, of course, these activities, not the pseudo-strategy twaddle, that are the real reason people play Just Cause. The series knows now that it’s dependant on the kind of all-action spectacle that makes Mission Impossible look like the most stolid of John le Carré novels.
So it’s expanded the player’s arsenal with everything from drone-firing railguns to weatherharnessing superweapons, which include a wind cannon that lets you invisibly blow away whole squads of enemies and structures, and the lightning gun, which not only zaps enemies but can create a mini lightning storm that fries everything in its perimeter. You can also now call in several planes simultaneously to drop a vast array of weapons and heavy artillery, giving you the freedom to turn Just Cause 4 into a vibrant warzone of ragdolls and explosions whenever you like.
Hook up
Progress is dictated solely by Rico’s renegade activities
Then there’s the all-important tether: The tool that single-clawedly set the series on its path of physics-based excess. This lets you attach objects and people to each other—creating a showcase of physics silliness—and it’s received a welcome upgrade. There’s still the retractor which lets you, say, string two or more helicopters together and send them twirling into each other. Joining it now is the ‘Air Lifter’ balloon tether, which enables you to attach several balloons to objects and send them off to orbit, as well as ‘booster’ tethers that send their hapless targets fizzing around uncontrollably like cheap fireworks from your local mall.
The old upgrade system has been largely replaced, with many onceunlockable abilities now available