Just Cause 4

I became intrigued with Just Cause 4 because I remember goofing off in Just Cause 2, ignoring the missions and installing a bunch of dumb mods.

I think I also wanted this game so I could ride a motorcycle across the game world, and sadly the motorcycles control terribly. They don't have the precision that the cars do, and you'll veer right into objects that you wouldn't mean to, or you'll overcorrect. I try to get used to this and opt to ride down a coastal highway on my bike to the game's airport for a mission. It was incredibly beautiful.

Square Enix ignobly dumped this incredible title with little fanfare or promotion (this is also the year they loosed The Quiet Man on an unsuspecting public) From what I've read this game used dynamic resolution scaling and a bunch of other tricks from a substantial rework so that it would overcome the performance complaints from Just Cause 3. My biggest complaint was that the game's motion blur turned the entire screen into one big smear, but a patch allows you do adjust this.

The game world is massive, I think this is something a lot of reviews don't mention. We take for granted now the size of game worlds. It takes about 10-15 minutes to fly from one end to the other in a jet, and about an hour to drive a car the same distance. At one point I drive a car down a lonely peninsula and look at the coastline stretching out in front of me into the distance. Entire mountains are used for single missions or even side missions. There is such a surplus of space that none of the scenery repeats.

Combat

After several iterations of Just Cause, the combat remains roughly identical. It's serviceable, but there's no nuance to it. You run out of ammo and have to scavenge for new guns, forcing you to switch up your style. There's the bullet guns with alt-fire explody functions, then there's the real blowy-uppy rocket launchers and grenade launchers. There's also the standard "please die" sniper rifle, but also laser rifles. There's a machine gun with a deployable shield that seems lifted right out of Rainbow Six Siege.

There's no real close range combat, which renders the shotgun mostly useless. There's a single melee attack but it's only useful if you've exhausted every other option and you can't run, for some reason.

Combat never feels cathartic until you start using the explosives to instant kill targets, disregarding accuracy for splash damage. It's frustrating because close range movements feel terrible, so if you get trapped in a situation the only good option is to grapple out of it. You do this a lot.

There is no healthbar, like many modern games, your screen just desaturates to red, white, and black as you hope to limp out of range of the 6-8 NPCs pumping bullets into you.

The combat is very forgiving, allowing you to pull off incredible hijinks and blow things up without having to get mucked up in tight tactical combat.

Movement

The Grapple + Parachute method of travel pioneered by Just Cause 2 was a revelation because you had on-demand verticality and could get in and out of any situation without having to worry about your feet touching the ground. Grappling makes everything fast. Even falling feels too slow, so you grapple to the ground and take zero fall damage.

The wingsuit feels like freedom and using it with the grapple feels like you're absolutely getting away with something. It's wonderful until you have to use it for any precision, and then it becomes finicky and cumbersome.

There is no close range combat and there is no close range movement either. When you run up to a car, or a computer terminal to "Press X to Hack", you'll overshoot, or zig when you want to zag. Correcting the movements to close the last 5% of the distance means you'll miss because Rico takes big steps all the time. If you want to get anywhere, from 'midrange', you learn to grapple there instead, because it's faster and more precise.

This game works best at the midrange and it's probably why there are so few interior spaces.

Missions

Describing Just Cause 4 missions is kind of like when you're 8 or whatever and playing with action figures and dump trucks in your backyard sandbox.

For one mission you're tasked with getting the 'schematics' for a battleship, criss crossing a naval base in a parachute and grappling hook while people are shooting at you. Eventually in order to get the macguffin you have to steal an actual battleship and park it somewhere. The Battleship can take a lot of hits, and has an instant-death cannon that you point at anything to make it explode. I shoot at every red-coded explosion prop and wipe out every single sniper that annoyed me.

At one point I'm presented with a drawbridge, in order to drop it you could go up and press a button. or you could blow up the control boxes and the drawbridge would drop on it's own. What I did was attach thrusters to the bridge, and then pushed it down, then pulled the other side down with retracting tethers.

An entire section of side missions is a physics puzzle where you're trying to get a massive stone head to roll onto a switch using nothing but tethers. I tried dropping a truck, attaching tethers between it and the rock, and tried towing it out of a river, but it was far too heavy. The tethers are comically strong and I was able to roll the thing out.

As you finish missions you unlock territories, each roughly the size of a state county and could pass for an entire game world in a PS2 title. There is one main mission tied to each region, and when you finish it you also unlock a new supply drop object. A gun, or a car, or a helicopter. As you finish them your control creeps outward and around the island.

Story

There's a story, yeah. Rico, our protag, his dad made some kind of massive weather control thing that was built into a mountain. But his dad tried to stop it, so some people murdered him, and Rico is mad. This guy, Tom(?) from "The Agency" is Rico's "handler" and they've know each other since Just Cause one and should just kiss already dang.

I mean it would be pretty progressive for a Character Action game to have 2 middle aged men kiss on screen, it's not going to be The Last Of Us 2's E3 trailer but whatever. I haven't finished the game so I don't know if they do but the headcanon scaffolding is there.

There is some palpable tension here, maybe? Just under the radar enough? Maybe this game is disguising it's bland action movie plot as a subversive love story?

During the game I never really felt like I was questioning why I was blowing all this stuff up and shredding hundreds of faceless NPCs with bullets as they did the same to me. Like, normally I have a pretty critical eye on this stuff, but Just Cause 4 is so absent with this that you can just kind of take it at face value.

Final Thoughts

Just Cause 4 is sadly overlooked on release. It represents the near platonic ideal of a sandbox vehicle open world character action game. It is a huge toy set, and while all the pieces aren't quite the highest quality, they more than make up for it in quantity and flexibility.

If I had to pass anything along to Avalanche it would be to make close range combat and close range movement better, make motorcycles control better, and to not be afraid of taking bold narrative steps. I think a Just Cause 5 maybe has a character creator, and maybe it's an online Game As A Service Thing. The tech that allows for this scale of game worlds could be used a lot of creative ways and I'm hoping they try to take it in a bold direction.

If you're reading this now and you don't care that it sometimes isn't 4k at all times will wait for it to be on sale at $30 or lower, and you'll get an excellent value out of it if you do.