Just Cause 3 was developed by Avalanche Studios and published by Square Enix.
Developer Avalanche Studios is also known for their work on previous Just Cause games and most notably did Mad Max.
Publisher Square Enix is known for such games as the Final Fantasy series and Kingdom Hearts series.
Just Cause 3 is a third person action adventure game with an open world that allows you to live out your biggest action movie fantasies. The following review is based on the Playstation 4 version and recorded using an El Gato, which may or may not affect the recordings you are seeing now.
Just Cause 3 opens up with series protagonist, Rico Rodriguez, returning to his birthplace, Medici, on a plane with his colleague, CIA contact Tom Sheldon.
Immediately, he climbs onto the plane and helps destroy the anti aircraft weapons with the use of a missile launcher. Regardless of his efforts, the plane is hit and he goes down.
Luckily, he lands near his old friend Mario Frigo, who is about to be surrounded by soldiers. Together they fight through way back to Mario’s home and then begins Rico’s journey in taking back his homeland with the help of the rebellion.
STORY
The entire game is essentially you fighting with the rebellion against General Di Ravello and liberating Medici from his control.
This being a Just Cause game, the easiest and most simple comparison I can make is that Just Cause is your average action movie.
The story isn’t great. The characters are boring cardboard cut outs. The explosions and action sequences are the only reason you’re there.
Number one: the story isn’t great. I just said what the entire game is about. The cutscenes aren’t so much telling a story as they are just transitioning you to the end, if that makes any sense. They simply serve as a way to introduce a new character, a new ability, or a special mission that is outside the normal stuff you're doing out in the open world.
Number two: The characters are boring cardboard cut outs. I mean every word of that in that these characters don’t have any personalities and their character molds are cut and paste from literally any action movie. Rico Rodriguez is Cool Guy McGee that will survive whatever you throw at him. Mario Frigo is the little friend who think’s he’s the main character and instead gets into trouble. The side characters that are only there for the money but then randomly have a change of heart and help you because the story says so. The wacky scientist Dimah who gives you your cool tech.
I remember back in middle school when the first Transformers movie came out and everyone was hyping it up to me. I was never bothered and people were trying to convince me to go see it. Everyone’s biggest reason was the action and special effects. Not one person said, Yes. SHIA LABEOUF AND MEGAN FOX WERE BRILLIANT. Nobody gave a shit. Nobody saw that movie for 12 Years A Slave quality acting. They went for the big explosions. That is exactly what Just Cause 3 is to me.
The game is just a series of cliches.
AUDIO
That’s not to say the acting is terrible. I’ve seen some awful acting and those two in the first Transformers movie was far from horrendous. Same with Just Cause 3. The voice acting was actually really good.
If you had told me that they were actually Italian, I’d believe you. I liked the portrayal of everyone except Tom Sheldon, the CIA agent. He did his part well, I just hated his voice. An annoying character with an American accent like his, I found it extremely hard to believe he was a successful CIA agent.
The music was existent but it wasn’t great which is odd because Henry Jackman was attached to this project. For those of you who don’t know, I know Henry Jackman’s work from Captain America: The Winter Soldier and X-Men: First Class. The music for First Class was kickass.
Unfortunately, the music didn’t evoke that same feeling for this game which is odd because an action game ought to have a kickass adrenaline rush of a soundtrack. If anything, it was really passive most of the time.
VISUALS
Visually the game was stunning. Guess what else looked great at the time? Transformers!
For a game that was a massive open world that was incredibly destructible, the game performed considerably well. It might be that it was on a PS4 pro, but my frame rate only dropped a handful of times and when it did, it wasn’t that bad.
The fact that you can just go high up into the world and essentially see everything was impressive. It’s when you get close up that the game loses that.
The NPCs are invisible. I cannot comment on their models because realistically, you’ll never get close enough to notice. Like in major action blockbuster films, everyone is a blur but the main characters and it’s the same here.
Close up, the environments are all pretty much the same. With the exception of a couple of places, you’ll know the layout of every base and city after liberating a few of them so as cool as it might be at first, the feeling wears out incredibly quickly and you end up just going to what seems like the same places.
Also, this game takes extremely long to load. I could read pages of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness during the loading screens. That being said, I had to reread pages because I was half heartedly reading. The game will take awhile to load the main game which is fine considering how big it is, but then it also had to load into a cutscene, then load out of a cutscene and anytime you die, another long loading screen. So be sure to have something handy if you have this game to pass the time for loading screens.
Also, totally unrelated but as bad as the loading screens, the game continually wanted me to log into the Just Cause servers and that took a long time too. It didn’t even matter if it failed and I selected offline mode. As soon as I did anything big like open my map, the entire game would stop and try to log me back into the server. It was just a constant little pet peeve.
GAMEPLAY
The gameplay is where this game outshines the rest of the elements that make up a video game. The action is where it reigns supreme, as if that was going to surprise anyone.
Starting with the main missions, I absolutely hated most of them because most of them were escort missions.
Escort missions are missions where you have to escort someone or something while protecting them or it.
I hate escort missions because I have yet to play a game besides The Last of Us or Red Dead Redemption that has done them correctly. Two games in my entire life are the only two to have done them correctly and that is because The Last of Us is one giant escort mission and they don’t let who you’re escorting **** with your shit and Red Dead Redemption’s escort missions strikes a perfect balance between fun gameplay, not being too hard nor too easy to do, and the space of the mission was perfect.
Just Cause 3 was not made for escort missions but they stuffed them into the main storyline and it really felt uninspired because it’s like, “Well, they’re already doing all this cool shit, what else can we think of?…I got nothing, ESCORT MISSION!”
Just fresh from finishing this game, I can’t think of one mission that was memorable and wasn’t an escort mission. An added difficulty to these escort missions was the damage your enemies did to your allies. The game wants you to be YOU and complete missions however you want but for example, in my case: a helicopter was chasing Mario, so I hijacked it and followed him in the heli. In the time, I took the heli, Mario lost a nice chunk of his health. By the time I destroyed one enemy with the Heli, another group of enemies killed Mario.
In another mission, I have to protect this gate and I have to destroy Helicopters, jets and cars filled with people. Imagine that. Having to grapple up to destroy jets that are coming fast at you and if you can’t get a beat on them, you still have to worry about the people running up to the gate shooting from below.
Both times, the enemies did too much damage and as much as the game gives you free space, there’s really only one way to do these missions. If you try to have fun, these escort missions randomly become more difficult.
So while the main story is mainly escort missions, outside in the open world, your on your own to liberate areas of influence and complete challenges.
To liberate an area of influence whether it be a checkpoint, a massive base or a town, you have a checklist to complete. You need to destroy everything on that checklist to liberate the area of influence from Di Ravello. After a few hours, these checklists will be memorized and you’ll know generally what you have to blow up or tear down. If that checklist doesn’t help, you’ll see what’s destructible: anything in white and red.
It almost takes you out of the experience when you’re high up in the sky and just see the white and red. They’re like red barrels in first person shooters. You can see them a mile away and you know what’s going to happen if you shoot them.
Most of this game will be rinse and repeat. Do it once.
Now, do it again a hundred times.
Sometimes, the game will reward you. Other times, the game won’t do anything at all. A few times, they’re necessary to further the main storyline. The rewards are usually new vehicles but that doesn’t really matter.
The main way of getting around the world of Just Cause 3 is going to be using your rappel, wing suit and parachute. Use these correctly, and you’ll move around faster than you can in any vehicle anyways. So when the game rewards you with a vehicle, it’s pointless. Whenever I needed one, I just made do with whatever the enemy sent out. If I wanted a helicopter, I’d take the one that was hunting me. If I wanted a tank, I’d steal the one shooting at me.
Unless it’s during a big battle, I had no reason to use a vehicle because it was just a slower way of getting around not to mention that the car driving is horrible.
You can upgrade your equipment via mods. Mods are acquired by completing challenges and the perfectionist in me hated these challenges because most of them were simply timed. Depending on how you do in a challenge, you get a rating out of five. You get like this number of gears out of five. To get a mod, you’d need a certain number of gears. The perfectionist in me was never happy with three. I needed to have five.
That personal problem aside, the challenges were decent. For example, to get more grenades, you’d have to destroy an entire base and get a good score using only the provided helicopter. For a faster car, you’d have to race and so on and so forth. The mods did help out as I got further into the game but they were never really necessary and I never really felt any sort of joy in doing them.
Just like liberating areas of influence, the challenges just got repetitive over time. The only thing that changed was the setting but you were still doing the same thing.
CONCLUSION
Like I keep saying over and over again, the game is just like a Transformers movie. A whole lot of fluff and very little substance in anything. You can enjoy yourself for about two hours but if you marathon this game, the fun will wear off.
The story is standalone so if you're a new comer to the series, there’s nothing to worry about. This was my first game and I had no problems understanding the simple story. If you fail to understand this story, then the problem is with you, not the game.
The story is boring, the characters are flat, the audio is decent, the visuals are nice and the gameplay is repetitive.
i got this game about a year ago and I can see why I just stopped playing it. After those first two hours, there were other games that grabbed my attention and so I went for those instead. There is just so much to do and so much of it is repetitive that it almost becomes overwhelming.
My recommendation is that if you’re a casual player, pick it up on a sale because it’s easy to pick up and drop off. When you come back to it, there’s no catching up to do. If you’re a little more hardcore and are looking for something to hook you in and never let you go, this is not the game.
This is basically the game you play when you’re bored of everything else, you play for about an hour and realize that “Hmm, I've got better stuff to do.”
So from me, Just Cause 3 gets a 5.5…out of 10.