Disclaimer: I did neither play JC nor JC2 so I cannot compare it to either of those!
Well, as the title already states, Just Cause 3 is fun for a few hours but gets repetitive soon. The point I personally felt like "man, is there nothing else to do" came after freeing the first island. After that point, every military base, every city, every outpost became just a reassembly of basic structures. Those structures, as beautifully as they might go up in flames and fly around casting sparkles, are way too obvious to be spotted. There is no challenge in destroying them just grab your hook or a rocketlauncher an they are gone. Sure you can go around and mess with cars and stuff and try to figure out new, funny ways to destroy statues and so on, but most of the time it a) will not work the way you intend to and b) will make you laugh once but after you saw an ice creme truck tear down the statue of a tyrannic leader, there is no need to do it again. Don´t get me wrong, I enjoyed the time spend playing and messing around with all the stuff but I wouldn´t say it was worth the price I payed. So yeah it gets repetitive after a short amount of time but you can still have fun.
Let`s talk grafics: It looks gorgeous. Everything from the mountains, to the towns. the military bases and even under water the game looks pretty good. Of course the explosions are awesome looking, too, heck the whole map is designed fantastically. Medici looks like the place you would go on a vacation to. BUT there is nothing in the world you could explore. As an example I flew down a mountain down to the coast and saw a little hood thinking to myself "Oh Golly! What may be in there?". So I landed right at the coast and there was nothing. Nothing besides this good looking a hood (not even one of those collective items to find). The towns look all the same, there is no difference, despite the layout, there is nothing there to do besides blow shit up. The whole world feels just empty.
Some of you may say: "But there are all those challenges you can do!", and sure there are. But they are as annoying as doing homework and that is exactly what they feel like: homework. Being forced to do them to upgrade your grenades, cars, hook, wingsuit and all the things you need is just irritating. Most of the vehicles and ESPECIALLY the wingsuit (god I hate this thing) control so unresponsively that I gave up trying (at least the wingsuit) challenges. I play with mouse and keyboard, which works for the shooting but obviously not for any vehicles. BUT I have to admit I enjoyed flying a helicopter. The controls here are responsive and it was fun, but drinving a car is a nightmare. Sure I could plug in a controller but no, I will most definetly not. One more word regarding the shooting mechanics: Why is there no option for assault rifles to zoom in a little more. I don´t mean iron sight or such but (maybe like in GTA V 3rd person mode) the option that you can zoom in just a little so it gets easier to hit enemies further away because carrying a sniper rifle a) does remove your rocket/grenade launcher and b) has not as much ammunition laying aroung. For all the other weapons (assaults, pistols etc.) there is plenty of ammunition lying around. You will most likely never get into the situation where you run out of ammo.The bullets hitting the enemies can later be "looted back" from the bodies. This and the fact that Rico has a metric ton of health (seriously, I had whole structures falling down on me and barely lost any health; spare the enemy bullets, they are as effective as snowballs) which also recovers like he is Deadpool make the game way too easy.
Storytime: I couldn´t care less about the story. The charakters are unrelatable and just stereotypical strawdolls. Take the American spy (I cannot even remember his name). He is only interested in the technology Di Ravioli has to offer and doesn´t give a flying **** about the people living on the islands. Then there is Mario, the old, clumsy childhood friend who really wants to help the revolution but constantly messes things up. The main villain is boring as hell, too. Your steretypical dictator that has to be taken down. To be honest I don´t even know why, The people do not seem to suffer, he offers jobs in his power plants YOU blow up and destroy, researches new materials (sure he uses them for weapons and military goods, but don´t tell me Mr. spy-guy wouldn´t do the same with it for good old America) and all in all doesn´t seem that bad. And then there is you, the manifestation of most mens power fantasy: Rico Rodriguez. One of the most unrelatable main charakters in any game I have ever played. As I said, I didn´t play either JC or JC 2, but I want to know about his motives, his past, his all and all background story. But you don´t get anything, besides the few conversations between Rico and Damiah. And here comes my next point: charakter interactions. They don´t make any sense. Seriously, why are they talking to each other. An awkward silence would be much more pleasing than hearing them talk basically about nothing interesting. And this sets me up. The idea behind the story, overturning an dictatorship has so much potential in my opinion that it just feels wasted here.
Performance wise I didn´t run into any issues (AMD FX8350, GTX 970, 16 GB RAM). Frames barely dropped below the magic mark of 60FPS and were steady most the time. The loading time may be too long for some people but I don´t mind that.
So all in all: If you are looking for a game in which you can live your wildest power fantasies and which also looks gorgeous while blowing up and you don´t mind it being repetitive after a short period of time, Just Cause 3 should be right up your alley. But if you are looking for a good story with well written characters you should look elsewhere. Vehicle controls are clunky, but Rico plays pretty ok shooting wise, performance issues are bascially (at least for me) not existent. The all in all package you get is mediocre and not worth to pay for it as full price title. Maybe in next years Steam Summer Sale it will be 20ish bucks, which is a more than adequate price for it. I regret that I didn´t wait for it to drop in price.