Just Cause 4

[AndyKurosaki]

I spent the end of last year finally getting around to Just Cause 3. It had been languishing in my backlog for ages,so one day I thought “I really need to play this”. Leading to me happily playing through to the end,taking over the entire region of Medici,and doing the DLC,which increased the carnage with a missle+machine gun wingsuit,and mech.

 

Having had so much fun with it,I bumped JC4 to the top of my Boomerang rental list. It just arrived today,so spent an hour or so playing it. 

 

I noticed a number of reviews say it looked graphically worse than JC3. Having that game fresh in my mind,I have to say I agree. It doesn’t look awful,but something is definitely off. I’m not entirely sure why,but at the moment I prefer the way JC3 looked.

 

At the moment my weapon inventory is limited to two guns,as opposed to the previous system of two guns and a pistol. Maybe that changes as you progress in the game. I don’t like that the button to swap weapons is the same as reloading. You press Square (on PS4) to reload,hold it to swap weapons. It feels weird.

 

As for taking over regions? Gone is the whole “go to an area,blow up everything and take it over” setup. Instead, you get rebels to take over places by assigning them to a region. You have to unlock more people for your army by causing Chaos. I haven’t played enough yet to judge how that properly works. But it feels like an unnecessary change. I liked liberating everything myself,so I’m not entirely sure how this will play out. 

 

I intend to play plenty more of it, as the series has always been fun. But I can see why this got a mixed reaction in reviews.

[AndyKurosaki]

That’s when I added JC3 to my list,when it hit Plus a long time ago. I liked it,despite the jankiness.

 

I do like the Fulton-style idea they’ve knicked from The Phantom Pain. One tank was chasing me,so I went “You can go bollocks”, attached 3 balloons to it,and off it floated into the horizon. That was pretty funny.

 

 

[AndyKurosaki]

Played a few more hours of this,and I’ve had enough. With being limited to only 2 guns,I ended up running out of ammo constantly,leading to running around picking weapons off the floor. Might not sound annoying,but when you’re in a massive fire-fight,as you so often are,it’s a right ball ache.

 

Explosions look worse than JC3. Part of the fun of this series,is running into a base,and gleefully blowing everything up. Didn’t really happen here. And they even feel pointless. In 3,taking over a place involved blowing the propaganda and enemy placements to smithereens. Not the case in 4. So even when you do blow stuff up,it barely even registers on the Chaos bar.

 

Eventually I asked myself “why am I playing this?”,as I honestly couldn’t be arsed with it. So I’ve jacked it in. One of the most disappointing,backwards-step of a sequel I’ve ever played. I loved JC3,and would happily have had more of the same. But this seems to have stripped away what made the game fun,and just gone full mediocre. What a waste.

[mfnick]

That’s  shame, I watched the giant bomb quick oook and thought the balloon system looked great fun and how you can modify how all the abilities worked seemed a brilliant idea. Was worried the core gameplay wouldn’t hold up though. Damn shame. 

This could really do with a sandbox/challenge mode similar to Red Faction Guerilla where you don’t need to worry about getting shot all the time and solve puzzle like explodey areas using those abilities. 

[AndyKurosaki]

That’s another thing that’s missing,the challenges from the previous game. From racing to hit checkpoints,to blowing up a facility to score highly to a strict time limit,to driving a car full of explosives to a target and then bailing out at the last minute.

 

They were all a right laugh,and worth doing to unlock more gear.

 

What did this game do? Remove all of those completely. Baffling.