The Just Cause series is a strange beast within the world of video games. As I’ll soon describe for a video, it is often a sandbox crammed into being a game first instead of a game built around that sandbox. I think that like most people, I got pulled in by that demo back on the PS3 for the second game. He has guns, a parachute, some grappling hooks, and a number of things painted red that go boom, you say? With a set-up as crazy as an 80’s action flick, I’ve followed the series ever since.

Nevertheless, I won’t say I think it is the greatest series of gaming nor the best story, in fact, I think Just Cause stories are some of the worst in gaming. It returns me to the point that the sandbox is often squished into whatever the typical game of the time happens to be. Missions of “go-here and shoot the thing” or “go there and protect the thing by shooting something else” are a plague of Just Cause 4. Often confined to small areas, you are guided into using your guns to fight the countless henchmen of the Saturday morning cartoon villain. You have detachable grappling hooks, balloons, and rockets attached to those, and a metric ton (literally with containers) of physics objects.

I’ve had more successful launches of men into orbit in Just Cause than I have for the Kerbin space program. Just Cause shouldn’t be played like a typical Grand Theft Auto or Saints Row, as series protagonist Rico Rodriguez is as prone to falling over as he is deadly. Use the guns, but they aren’t your first port of call when in combat. Hanging men like Cirque Du Soleil from ceilings, carpet bombing them with cargo drops of oversized vehicles, strapping jets to them, and giving them personalized hot air balloon rides are just some of the many ways Rico likes to make “friends.”

Of course, one of the biggest changes this time to Rico’s loadout is the grapple hook system, now with the aforementioned balloons and rockets, alongside power yanking. I like to power yank some men for a few moments before bed, and apparently, so does Rico. There are three separate load-outs, with three separate toggles, three separate tools in your arsenal, and a number of peripherals for each tool and loadout create a massive number of opportunities to produce single parents. I never said Rico is the hero here. The tongue-in-cheek matter of the game glosses over the murder, unlike that of Nathan Drake.

Each tool, the balloons, yanking, and the jet-fueled rocket engines offer different ways to complete personal objectives, but hardly get used in actual missions as seen in-game. This is a real shame because when you set fire to a man by pulling the cap off of a fuel storage tank, it is funny watching him slowly die as he illuminates his mates. This, of course, happens while they continue the attempted murder of your protagonist as he yanks himself about. All before the tank gloriously explodes, killing everyone stupid enough to stand about shooting Rico. The game is about you and the environment versus the military, but missions often ignore this with the aim of protecting assets, or in some cases training the new liberation army.

Unlike the instructor for suicide bombers, Rico will have to show them this more than once. You’ll drag around some work-shy peasants of the tropical dictatorship to show them how to fire a gun as you destroy infrastructure. The series is built on this, and yes, it is as wonderfully satisfying as ever to break up a radio tower into tiny bits by dropping an entire cargo ship on top of them. Sadly though, these opportunities are often reserved for the open-world sandbox and not the missions themselves. They are often preceded by cutscenes that look worse than the actual gameplay.

I’ve seen some criticism of the art style, the quality of the explosions, and generally the game for numerous issues back at launch. I disagree with most of those complaints. The post-processing effects aren’t great, especially on consoles. The distance looks fine at times, with some textures looking dreadful when uncomfortably close. Nonetheless, the cutscenes are where I think the development team at Avalanche really dropped the ball. How do you make something that awful while the gameplay, which isn’t Cyberpunk 2077 (when it works), looks at least ten times better? Not that I would blame you for simply skipping them for other reasons.

Expectedly, the writing is wild but lacks the charisma I’d give, say, its predecessor, which I’d argue was equally quite crap. The truth is, no one comes to Just Cause or Rico Rodriguez’s story for the plot. Just Cause 4‘s troubles in spite of its otherwise fun and exciting additions come simply from an exhausting attempt to capture that Die Hard or 80s flick vibe that it is imitating. A businessman of a dictator has the 80s super-weapon of controlling the weather, with the ability to call down anything under the sun.

While last time out Rico got to command nuclear bombs, this time, he can call in the support of Dr. Tornado, Hector Lightning, and Mr. Sandman to break up the lines of war. That’s what I think makes this ridiculous series turn the volume up to the eponymous Spinal Tap 11. The way to progress and bring forth your army of chaos is to literally move the frontline by taking over cities, fuel depots, ports, power plants, and every bit of infrastructure protected by the villain’s henchmen behind enemy lines. Each region offers more toys you can call in from your support team. Yeah, the one-man army that is Rico Rodriguez has both an army and support team.

The worst of the new additions is simply the UX of menus to call in your cargo drop from the support team. On the Xbox One, you press the “Back button” to open the map menu, which also offers you everything else you use in-game. Specifically, it offers your grapple hooks, supply drops, and the ever useless feats that no one has ever bothered with. The trouble with this comes in how you change tabs in the menu. Instead of RB and LB, to change from your map of Solis to other tabs, you use RT and LT, often after swearing profusely over firstly pressing RB which changes the tab of the map’s tool-tips.

Similar to the modifications of UX and other portions of the game, including the addition of weather effects, supply drops have gotten rid of those beacons you swore about in Just Cause 3. Now as you grow your army of chaos via explosions and destruction, you get new pilots to drop in monster trucks, cargo jets, underwater mines, King Zuma’s big ball, a pinata, wind guns, and everything else your mind could think of in-game. You are still limited by wait timers for each pilot though. However, the biggest weight around the ankle of your outlandish dreams is the three of everything the army of chaos has in the back of Noah’s warehouse.

Evidently, with the catalog of changes made between Just Cause 3 and 4, you can throw three Boeing 747s guided by you and your helium balloons into a tornado to terrify the locals even further. I am sure Dorothy and Toto appreciate your insanity. Why do a number of people dislike Just Cause 4 over its predecessor? I would say I don’t know, but a majority of those complaints formulate out of a desire for the superficial to keep up with the insanity. If I am flying past a field while being shot by drones and helicopters in the middle of no-man’s-land, I’m not going to say, “Oh, the vegetation is a bit flat!” I’m having my genitals blown to kingdom come, I don’t care if the topiary is a bit flat.

Then there is one of my favorite alterations: The wingsuit. A minor change this time around after its addition in Just Cause 3, the wingsuit is one of those fun movement tools like Peter Parker’s swinging back in 2004. While I still hold that Medici was better designed for the wingsuit, the movement around Solis is just as satisfying. However, it often feels much slower for some reason. Foregoing the abundance of water surrounding the islands of Medici, Solis has a number of more flatlands for farms, some canyons for the tornado to go down, and generally a greater diversity in the number of biomes to explore.

All the pieces of gameplay come together well enough to create a fun game once you forget about the guns. Yet when the story presses itself into the conversation, the puzzle doesn’t come together at all. Despite enjoying Just Cause 3 for what it was, the game always had an anchor around its neck pulling down my opinion of it breaking into the actual world and post-story elements. Just Cause 4 and its open-world bucks that and makes the world so much more fun as a literal war takes place under you and above you. Following some updates, jets and helicopters fight all around you, little fights break out when the two militaries cross paths, and generally, there is more to do.

Those residual missions to hijack someone’s chauffeur service feed into upgrades for your grapple hook modifiers.  The fun missions for the action movie being shot also provide upgrades, as well as the temples you have to discover. Camp as all hell, the Garland missions that see you do stupid things like drive an F1 car off a cliff are exactly what I would want a majority of Just Cause 4 to be. Do I like the driving mechanics this time? In terms of the bikes, they are still god awful, but the cars feel better than they did in both Just Cause 2 and 3. Nevertheless, some of Garland’s missions do use your grappling hooks and the tools of the sandbox, unlike the story missions.

Ultimately, I appreciate Just Cause 4 more than many others seem to have on its initial release back in December of 2018. The insanity, the destruction, and the all-out fun of extreme weather alongside typical Just Cause outlandishness create one of my favorite games in the series. If there was one issue I found, it has to be the static frontlines as they just sit there until you decide to advance. I’d have enjoyed more active movement as if each side is actually pushing each other back and forth. Regardless of noticeable issues, Just Cause 4 is fantastic fun building on what came before it.

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Just Cause 4

$39.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Boom!
• Garland missions using the sandbox.
• Weather effects.
• Refinement of the wingsuit.

Cons

• Mission design without the sandbox in mind.
• Awful UX, creating clunky menus.
• What are those cutscenes, South Park?