Kris Wall reviews Just Cause 3…
Avalanche Studios are really staking their claim to be the masters of explosive entertainment. Following on from this years Mad Max, the latest entry into the Just Cause series takes their pyrotechnics to the next level with some of the most destructive gameplay I’ve ever seen in a video game, these guys seriously love blowing things up and now they’re challenging us to ‘Set the world on fire’ in Just Cause 3. Here, Avalanche have presented a ridiculous sandbox full of creatively explosive possibilities limited only by your imagination. Sadly a series of technical issues hold Just Cause 3 back from reaching its true potential. What it gives with one hand, it blows up with the other.
The island of Medici has fallen under the ruthless dictatorship of General Di Ravello, a man that would give Colonel Kurtz a serious run for his money in the unhinged militia stakes. Into this fray wades series hero, Rico Rodriguez, a ‘Dictator Removal Specialist’, the mission is to liberate Medici and this time the mission, of course it’s personal as Medici is also Rico’s homeland. Joining up with the rebels fighting to take back the land, it’s up to Rico to spearhead the liberation, take down General Di Ravello and give Medici back to the people.
Luckily, Rico Rodriguez is a fun guy to tour Medici, he’s like the lovechild of Antonio Banderas and Colonel John Matrix from Commando, with a quip for every occasion and more weapons than an entire army. Throughout the game his exchanges with his friend, Mario and socially challenged scientist, Dimah are a regular source of amusement. One of Just Cause 3’s biggest strengths is its sense of humour, which is just as well seeing as it’s near impossible to take this game seriously when you’re surfing atop a missile or attaching a booster bomb to a soldier and sending him rocketing into the sky. Tonally, Just Cause 3’s closest counterpart would be the Saints Row series where the humour comes just as thick and fast as the action. It’s just as well that the game has its tongue planted firmly in its cheek otherwise it’d be harder to overlook the absolutely insane amounts of innocent collateral damage Rico causes as he ‘liberates’ Medici.
Just Cause 3 is all about destruction, lots and lots and lots of explosive and creative destruction, and Avalanche have certainly given you a hugely impressive amount of tools with which to rain down destruction on Di Ravello and his army. From the standard pistols and machine guns to rocket launchers that split into swarm rockets and targeting systems than call in huge airstrikes, you’re never far from causing a massive scenery destroying explosion. One thing that Just Cause 3 does really well is improvisational gameplay changing your approach and tactics on the fly. The A.I of Di Ravello’s army can be probably be best described as ‘cannon fodder’, like those guys in Commando that ran on to screen to be cut down by Arnie, and rarely pose a threat unless you get swarmed, but still your best laid plans will rarely go as expected.
A great example of this would be taking down one of the many military bases that are placed around Medici and represent Just Cause 3’s most challenging liberation. You’ll study the base from a cliff or the skies and plan a route that causes the biggest amount of destruction in the quickest amount of time, you’ll call in a rebel drop with the weapons you think you’ll need to achieve the job and you’ll launch the first rocket or tether……………and then it immediately goes to pieces and you’re having to think moment to moment. During one attempt I’d hijacked tanks to take other tanks out, before grappling up to helicopters, throwing out the pilots and raining down missiles on the base before using my wingsuit to retreat to a nearby road to steal a sports car to use as a missile, surfing it to my target before parachuting up into the skies just before it exploding into a guard tower, then flying over a support fleet of ships approaching on the seas and taking them out with some grenades, before touching the ground again and using my tether cables and bavarium rocket bombs to level just about everything around, and then finally calling in an airstrike to finish the job. Just Cause 3 revels in this carnage and madness and when it works, it works extremely well.
Rico’s dual tethers are a brilliant idea and lead to some of Just Cause 3’s most wildly inventive and chaotic possibilities, they’re the swiss army knife of Rico’s arsenal and they’re absolutely awesome. At the beginning of the game Rico has access to two dual tethers which can be attached from object to object and then retracted, which doesn’t initially sound all that exciting until you start thinking about the ways they can be used and the fact that Just Cause 3 can be played using the tethers instead of firing a single bullet or rocket. Pretty much everything can be destroyed, torn apart and blown up with them. Need to bring down a structure? Why not tether a car to it and smash them together. Need to take out a group of soldiers? Tether an explosive barrel, smash it into them and take out the lot in one explosion. Guard tower with a sniper on it? Tether them supports and rip the whole structure to the ground.
It doesn’t end there though as Rico can eventually gain access to 6 tethers and upgrade the tensile strength as well as the force at which the cables retract. Towards the end of the game I was able to sneak into bases and place tethers around key areas before retreating to a hilltop and then retracting the cables to see bases tear themselves apart from a distance. At one point I managed to make a wrecking ball by tethering a car to a helicopter and swinging it beneath me as I flew around. On top of this madness I was also able to hang beneath my chopper and then tether in three more choppers who had arrived to take me down, before using the wingsuit to get away and retracting the cables to smash all of them together, escaping while everything exploded behind me. There are times like this when Just Cause 3 can be exhilarating in its moment to moment gameplay.
Rather unfortunately though, all the chaos and destruction leads to Just Cause 3’s biggest downfall, its wildly unstable frame rate. Any time you blow up anything larger than a car or a tank, the game starts to grind to a halt and chug along until the engine can catch up to itself, which is hugely disappointing given than the game is pretty much advertised on being able to set the world on fire and destroy everything. There were a couple of times later in the game where calling in an airstrike caused so much stuff to explode at once that the game had no choice but to crash and have to be restarted. I’m really hoping that Avalanche Studios are working on a fix for this as having a game that is primarily about causing massive amounts of destruction to run this poor is beyond ridiculous.
Rather oddly, Just Cause 3 really shines and explodes to life in its quieter moments of simply getting around Medici, with one of the most joyous traversal systems seen in a game since the Arkham series. From the outset, Rico has a parachute, a wingsuit and a grappling gun that he can switch between to propel him skywards, and learning to combine the three will see you able to conquer the skies above Medici as well as making a quick escape from any ground based threats. The wingsuit in particular is superb, if a little twitchy at first to get used to how it handles. Once you’ve got it mastered though it consistently proves to be the most thrilling part of Just Cause 3’s package as Rico dive bombs Medici, narrowing skirting the side of cliff faces, flying low over traffic through tunnels, dropping through cavernous networks and skimming the tops of ocean waves, before grappling and parachuting back up into the skies. In all my time with Just Cause 3, this is the one area that constantly thrilled and wowed at every turn.
In fact, pretty much everything about traversal in Just Cause 3 has been designed with the sole intention of making you look and feel awesome, with Rico being able to ‘stunt’ with anything he comes into contact with. Surfing on the roof of speeding sports cars, walking on the wings of planes while flying high over Medici or hanging upside down from a chopper while you rain an absolute hellstorm of fire down on an enemy base. There was rarely a moment while getting around the island where I didn’t feel like the greatest action movie hero ever, along with the ridiculously satisfying smug grin that came along with that feeling. The only thing is that Just Cause 3’s core air game is so strong with the wingsuit and parachute combo that I rarely felt the need to use the plethora of cars, boats, planes and choppers that you have access to, they’re a fun and welcome and addition though, and just add more variety to your ways of exploring Medici.
During production, Avalanche boasted that the island of Medici was one of the largest ever created in video games at 400 square miles. It’s certainly an impressive feat, but while the island of Medici is certainly a vast technical achievement, it’s also one of Just Cause 3’s biggest problems. From high up in the skies, Medici looks stunning in its vast Mediterranean beauty, spreading out around you in all directions encompassing three large islands. It looks and feels endless and every inch can be explored from the outset, see a small island out to sea? With careful use of your parachute and wingsuit or a rebel drop vehicle, you’ll be able to get out and explore it. There is literally nowhere in Medici you can’t get to if you can see it.
However, in filling such a vast space with meaningful and interesting things to do means that repetition sets in long before the end credits have arrived. There’s a hell of a lot to do in Just Cause 3 outside of the main story, from taking part in gear upgrading land, sea and air based challenges and locating huge daredevil jumps, to collecting tapes revealing the twisted history of General Di Ravello and digging up parts for powerful weapons. Most of your time boils down to liberating towns, settlements and military bases though and while the military bases are always a fun and chaotic experience to try and take down, constantly having to liberate the smaller towns of billboards, speakers and statues begins to get stale by the time you have to do the second and third islands.
Just Cause 3 is held back from its full potential by some pretty crippling technical issues at the moment. As I’ve already mentioned above, the frame rate judders to a halt whenever the screen starts exploding and many times during my play through it crashed altogether. It becomes more of a problem as the game goes on and the bases get bigger and more elaborate and the explosions inevitably get large and more chaotic. It has surprised me that a game that is solely based around massive destruction is held back by an engine that currently can’t handle what it’s trying to do.
On top of this, Just Cause 3’s load times are some of the worst I have ever encountered in modern-day gaming. The initial load from the title screen to the in-game menu can sometimes be upwards of 5 minutes while dying in the game will see you sent back to a load screen that can sometimes take upwards of 3 minutes to get you back in to the game. Trying to get 5 gear rankings on all the challenges in the game is not only a test of skill but a huge test of patience as well as it’s impossible to just quickly restart a challenge, many times I was sat twiddling my thumbs for minutes at a time before a challenge reloaded, other times the game just decided to crash after a huge loading time which just made me give up and play go and play something else instead. I’m not sure if these huge load times are the technical downside of having to load in such a massive playing area, but I’d much rather have had half of the playing area of Medici along with 3/4 less of the time I’ve had to sit waiting for everything to keep loading while playing through.
Due to the severity of the loading times, Just Cause 3 begins to start forcing you to stop taking risks and playing the game safe to avoid death and having to reload it, but seeing as Just Cause 3 is all about making death-defying stunts and risks, it renders the game almost pointless as playing it as a run and gun shooter against the almost non-existent A.I is average at best, and deathly dull at its worst. If you’re not wing-suiting into the middle of a maelstrom of chaos and destruction, this game has little to recommend it above all the other third person shooters who have a much stronger game at their cores.
I wanted to love Just Cause 3, but it is probably the most frustrating experience I’ve had playing a game this year. The lure of raining down such creative destruction on Medici was too good to ignore, but at almost every turn in the game I found my enjoyment being hobbled by serious technical issues and punishing load times that really put me off playing and hold it back from being great. Just Cause 3 challenges you to ‘set the world on fire’ but the moment the fires start, the game grinds to a halt and when the entire core of your game is based around this moment to moment destruction, having an engine that can handle it should have been the highest priority. When Just Cause 3 is good, it’s great, absolutely thrilling at times, but all too often it goes wrong and blows up in its own face. I really hope Avalanche Studios can fix the technical issues here as there is a truly great game just waiting to explode out of this package. As it is right now though, Just Cause 3’s spark never becomes a flame.
Pros:
+ Fun inventive gameplay
+ Wonderfully thrilling traversal system
+ Tether Cables are brilliant
+ Medici is a vast sandbox
+ Consistently funny
Cons:
– Painful load times
– Serious frame rate drops
– Repetitive structure
– Poor enemy A.I
Total Score : 5.5/10
Kris Wall – Follow me on Twitter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng&v=WWU57JuvPl0
