Just Cause 3
Publisher: Square Enix Developer: Avalanche Studios Platform: Xbox One Release: 2015 Players: 1 Genre: Third-Person Shooter / Sandbox Rating: 8.6 \ 10.0: Fantastic
Above is Rico, just causing some chaos.
Have you ever wanted to play a game you can decapitate a statue, attach the head to a heavily armed helicopter, and use the head as a wrecking ball whilst launching an endless barrage of missiles, and are morally obligated to do so? If your answer is "Yes", then Just Cause 3 is for you.
For those of you unaware, Just Cause is a series of open-world action games in which you take control of Rico Rodriguez, a man obsessed with freeing oppressed fictional countries from the reign of evil dictators ... by reducing countless military assets to flaming rubble.
This time around, things are a bit more personal, as Rico's homeland, the fictional Mediterranean archipelago Medici is being controlled with an iron fist by General Sebastiono Di Ravello. The general plans to use a precious ore known as Bavarium, which is found only in the region, to take over the world, therefore justifying any "crimes" committed by Rico. If you have any doubt that liberating Medici wont be exciting, then the game immediately proves you wrong; unless you don't find bombarding military property with an infinite supply of rockets from atop a plane to be the least bit thrilling. While this stunt is difficult to recreate, this opening gives you a good idea of what to expect.
Rico is eventually thrown off the plane, and meets up with his best friend Mario Frigo, who explains that he and his fellow Medician rebels are in dire need of help, and calls in a helicopter to bring Rico to the brilliant scientist Dimah Al-Masri, head of the rebellion. She outfits Rico with a wingsuit, an substitute to vehicular travel that's difficult to master, but incredibly useful.
After flying towards to a small unoccupied fuel station, Dimah also equips you with a brand new grappling device. Just Cause 2's grappler was a lot of fun to use, but could only really be used to tear down statues and yank enemies towards you. The all new device allows for much more destruction, as you can pull any object that's not rooted to the ground towards a solid surface or another object. You immediately get to put it to the test by tearing down several fuel tanks, resulting in a beautiful series of explosion. You're then instructed to blow up a nearby bridge to stop an incoming military convoy, which reveals that unlike its predecessor, JC3 gives you access to unlimited triggered explosives.
After the bridge is demolished, the mission concludes, and what you do next is up to you to decide. Will you go out of your way to free every settlement from Di Ravello's wrath, or travel around the beautiful landscape seeing what you discover? There's entertainment to be had whatever you decide to do, but it's easy to get lost if you don't stick to the optional objectives; the islands of Medici make up a whopping surface area of 400 square miles (1,000 square kilometers), and every acre is truly a sight to behold. This land is divided into three regions, each of which offer a unique experience. Insula Fonte is a rural, agriculture-focused area littered with vibrant fields flowers; Insula Dracon houses a large amount of oil stations; and the incredibly dangerous Insula Striate is widely varied, containing both snow-capped mountain ranges and Bavarium mines.
While there is tons to do in this game, the core of the gameplay lies in liberating the towns and military bases peppered throughout the archipelago. In order to free a settlement, you must destroy every military asset in the area. Towns will often contain speakers, Di Ravello Statues, billboards, and other means of spreading propaganda, and most restricted areas are littered fuel tanks, electrical units, radars, and satellites. Most civilian areas will also have a police station, which is taken over by calling in rebel reinforcements are taking out enemy troops and vehicles. After freeing every settlement in a province, you will be able to fast travel (extract) without using your limited flares, and the location of any collectible items is revealed. Reducing government control over Medici is loads of fun at first, but by the time that only a few settlements remain, liberation will feel like a chore. To make matters worse, the game's framerate will suffer horribly when there's too much occurring onscreen at once (or sometimes when there's hardly anything occurring), though this rarely lasts for long.
The one thing that keeps the action from becoming stale is the vast amount of freedom you you are given in combat. Say that you're being confronted by a helicopter; you could simply gun it down, hijack it, tether it to a nearby surface or hack a nearby anti-aircraft turret and have it take down enemy aircraft for you. I once saw someone down a copter by tethering it to a car, driving it off a bridge which weighed it down, and bailing right before the vehicles crashed. It's moments like these that simultaneously add of strategy and silliness amidst the nonstop chaos. If you'd rather take out Di Ravello's forces silently and stealthily, then this game unfortunately isn't for you; the closet you can get to an alternative to going in guns blazing is picking off the opposition from afar with a sniper rifle. (However, if you're in search of a "liberate bases in exotic nation"-style sanbox shooter where stealth is effective, than I'd strongly recommend playing Far Cry 3 or 4)
Making the combat even more enjoyable is the varied arsenal. While there is a selection of fairly generic pistols, assault rifles, and the like, there are also creative weapons such as dual-wielded automatic shotguns and a lock-on rocket launcher that splits into smaller rockets to hit multiple targets.
Adding even more depth is the new leaderboard system. By performing a wide array of feats ranging from farthest distance ascended with the parachute without touching the ground to most enemies dispatched with a single clip of ammunition, you are ranked on list against a randomly selected pool of players and your friends that play the game. If you do something absolutely insane like drive out of a cargo plane multiple kilometers above the ocean and survive (just like yours truly did here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs-gJmiZ1NA) and you want to see if your friends can outdo you, you can send them a call out daring them to do so.
The equipment upgrade system has been given a major overhaul; rather than simply collecting weapon and vehicle parts to increase power, there is now a wide variety of optional "GEAR mods". Some of these can't hurt to have activated, such as mods than increase your maximum items and reduce the cooldown of equipment drops, while others are suited to certain play styles. For example, if you care more about witnessing objects go flying than causing destruction quickly and efficiently, you'll want to equip your planted explosives with rocket boosters. If you fall into the latter category, you might also want to activate the Glass Grenades mod, which causes your grenades to explode the moment they make impact with a surface. I developed a strategy of placing explosives with the Proximity mod activated at areas where I knew reinforcements might arrive that would explode as soon as an enemy approached them. However, these mods aren't available from square one -- in order to unlock them, you must complete challenges. Each category of gear has its own set of enjoyable challenges. My favorite challenges are the wingsuit courses in which you glide through wings to the accompaniment of an uplifting soundtrack and the Crash Bomb challenges that have you drive a bomb-rigged car towards a set of targets. Based on your performance in the challenge, you are awarded up to five gears that go towards unlocking mods. While the challenges are fun for the most part, some of them can be incredibly frustrating, especially timed Destruction Frenzies that take place in bases with chaos objects that are spread far apart or take an excruciatingly long time to destroy with bullets. I even encountered a glitch during one of these challenges that placed an invisible barrier in front of the targets, making it nearly impossible to get a five-gear score until I took a riskier alternate path to the objective. I was also mildly annoyed that I had to earn gears in order to unlock the ability to aim down the sight of my gun, which is essential to making the most of semi-automatic weapons, given this feature was usable from the very beginning of JC2.
Another aspect of JC3 in which it outdoes its predecessor is the presentation; the HUD and menus look sleek and professional, and the voice acting is a massive step up over exaggerated so-bad-it's hilarious performances in Just Cause 2 -- this truly feels like a Triple-A game.
If you're planning to complete this game 100%, then be prepared to sink around a hundred hours into this game, if not more; you'll have to liberate every settlement, bring one of each civilian vehicle to a Frigo Garage, earn five gears on every challenge, light every rebel shrine, pay your respects at every ancient tomb, dig up every vintage weapon and vehicle part, and collect every entry in Di Ravello's audio diary.
My final and possibly largest gripe with this game is that the repetitiveness can make even the most fun things I did in the game feel stale. My first time pulling a helicopter towards the ground felt incredible, so did wingsuiting over the beautiful landscape, but such activities start to get old once you've played the game for as long as I have.
Just Cause 3 isn't an outstanding game, but the sheer amount of replayability easily overshadows the flaws, and it will keep any fan of open world action entertained for a long time.
The System Difference: While JC3 is a blast on all platforms, but it is reportedly the most stable on PlayStation 4. I only played the game on PS4 for a couple hours, so I'm not sure if that version of the game contains some of the glitches I encountered on Xbox One. The game still lagged and eventually crashed when the action got too intense on PlayStation, so no player is safe from that issue. The console version also has annoyingly lengthy load times. If you own a powerful computer which an NVidia GPU, it's the best platform to play on. I've played the game on my PC which has a GTX 1070 graphics card with 8 GB of video memory as well as on my Xbox One and experienced no performance issues when using the highest graphical settings at a 1080p resolution. However, players who use AMD hardware or that had 8 GB of RAM or less have reported frequent crashes and memory leaks.
Ups
Massive open world
Engaging combat
Decent voice acting
Incredible visuals
Brand new leaderboard
Fun upgrade system
Downs
Liberation ends up feeling like a chore
Occasional performance issues
Lengthy load times
Some poorly designed and glitchy challenges
Also Available on PlayStation 4 and PC.
ESRB: M (PARENTAL WARNING: This game contains moderate amounts of realistic blood, intense violence, and some strong language) Content: Blood, Intense Violence, and Strong Language Price: $59.99 (Retail / Download)
