Just Cause 3

First released in 2010, Just Cause 2 was a bit of a cult classic. In a pre-Saints Row the Third World, it served as maybe the most enjoyable open world game to just dick around in. It certainly had its warts and suffered from bugs and content issues, but you got the feeling that given both proper time and resources, it could serve as the framework to a truly great game. Sadly, numerous baffling design decisions along with a host of technical issues sink Avalanche's efforts to bring Rico Rodriguez's adventures to a wider audience.

The core of this game is quite good, and perhaps is the explanation behind why the game's issues were hard to detect from early previews. Rico moves around well. You can quickly move from grappling to parachuting to your wing suit so freely that you're unlikely to ever get in a vehicle except when travelling over large bodies of water or when the game forces you. Rico has a generous lifebar, allowing him to fly over bases and almost ignore enemies while slowly dismantling a base. There are things to blow up aplenty in this game. Even early missions and territories can put you up against dozens of soldiers, tanks, helicopters, and ships. Rico has a sizable arsenal at his disposal, including his ability to tether objects together. This is where the game can truly shine, as tethering and sending explosive barrels flying into fuel tanks to start chain reactions that destroy half a base is immensely satisfying.

What sinks the game though is the numerous odd design decisions surrounding this base game. For starters, the game's actual content is a real mixed bag. There are only about two dozen story missions, and way too many of them are escort missions, which range from tolerable to just plain bad as most escort missions do. Perhaps the lowest point of the story campaign is a mission where you have to deliver a truck full of wine barrels to a location and are trying to prevent them from flying out of the vehicle. Of all the reasons I came to Just Cause 3, carefully driving 30 miles per hour in a pickup truck is not among them. Worse, during any mission in which you escort a vehicle or drive a vehicle yourself that has a health bar will checkpoint with those health bars in tact, so there is a high likelihood you will have to restart a mission from scratch if this happens with say 10% of your lifebar left. Much of the open-world gameplay consists of liberating towns, bases, and other locations. In order to do this, you destroy "chaos objects" such as billboards, gas tanks, water towers, and generators. This starts off as fun, but quickly becomes repetitious and dull. You have to complete a certain amount of these each time before you can continue with the game's story, and when there are about a hundred of these, more variety is sorely needed.

The most egregious gameplay issue is the upgrade system. Rico's equipment upgrades are locked behind completing liberations. Meanwhile, unlockable skills are trapped behind the game's challenges. There are 112 challenges in the game, ranging from firing ranges to flying and driving through courses to driving around with a magnetized ball attached to your vehicle while trying to collect balls of Bavarium that you need to bring back to a pit. Based on how well you do, you'll score from 1 to 5 gears on any challenge. These challenges are fairly basic, kind of boring, and quite frankly about as lazy as you can get. They're so out of place in a game that seems to strive to be as over the top as possible that you have to wonder if a different team worked on them. You also can't actually spend gears you earn on specific upgrades. Instead, specific challenges earn you gears towards a specific upgrade "tree." In addition, there is a sequential order to unlocking skills. That could mean doing over a dozen of a particular category of challenges to unlock a skill you want. Then to top it off, the majority of these upgrades are just plain kind of uninspiring. Weapon zoom is an actual thing you need to unlock for instance.

There are plenty of other aspects of this game that smack of laziness. The story tries to hit similar wacky notes that a Saints Row game does, but the humor tends to miss a lot of the time. Perhaps this can be best illustrated by the radio announcements from Medici's Propaganda Minister that are played over a "radio broadcast" (to be clear, there is no in-game radio station to play music on) when you liberate certain territories. The role is played by the always excellent David Tenant, who basically plays himself as a trapped celebrity being forced to read these announcements. The first time you hear one, it's amusing. Then you realize they're going to basically just repeat that same joke dozens of times with almost no deviation. It's a waste of an extremely talented actor and a waste of what should be a really amusing idea. The game's cast is entertaining to some degree, but kind of bland. Di Ravello is no Pagan Min to say the least.

Perhaps the oddest element of the game worthy of an entire paragraph devoted to its failing is the overworld map. When you are in an area you can liberate, there is a red hue highlighting that section of the map. Here is where the problems begin. You can't zoom in nearly far enough. To make matters worse, chaos objects appear as small red icons in a section with a red hue over them. You don't even need to suffer from color-blindness to have difficulty trying to spot them on a 50-60 inch television. Making matters worse is objects don't appear on the map until you move within proximity of the object, and if you die, the map is reset. When you highlight these objects, the game typically fails to translate their location from a 2D map to a 3D world.

If there is one compliment that can be given toward this game without any caveats it's that it looks fantastic. Just Cause 3's world utilizes vibrant colors to separate it from the bland feel many open-world games have. This game is all about explosions, and things both blow up real well and look damn pretty in the process. The explosions in this game might be the best looking ones in a video game to date.

From a technical standpoint, Just Cause 3 is a total mess. I've lost count of the random deaths I've experienced due to jank. I've had objects such as poles clip through cars multiple times (twice on the same challenge) and instantly cause them to explode. Enemy helicopters have such bad pathfinding that much of the time they just kill themselves colliding with objects. The frame rate can get appallingly bad at times due to the amount of explosions occurring on screen. These issues pale in comparison to how bad load times are in this game. Loading back into areas upon death, after fast travel, or upon entering challenge missions can take anywhere from ten seconds to two full minutes with little rhyme or reason. Some have theorized it is an issue with the game's connection to online leaderboards, but I have played the game offline and have still run into the same abhorrent load times. This is not even an issue that can be handwaved due to technical constraints on consoles, as none of Just Cause's contemporaries have anything even close to load times this bad.

2015 has been a hell of a year for gaming and has served as the needed remedy to the heaping trashfire of disappointing efforts that comprised much of 2014's AAA production. Just Cause 3 sadly reminds me of something akin to those efforts. There is plenty of content, but so much of it ranges from lazy and uninteresting to straight up bad. The upgrade system is a total mess. Technically, the game is a disaster. There is no excuse for the load times this game is experiencing. I can't see recommending Just Cause 3 to anyone at $60 in the state it is in. Minus the technical issues, this would still be a three-star effort, but I felt the load time issues were so bad that it deserves two. Should this game be patched and this issue resolved, or if you're considering the PC version, consider this three stars. If there's one thing Just Cause 3 accomplished, it's reminding me how good of a game Saints Row the Third was and how much effort it took to pull it off.