Just Cause 4

I had a lot of fun with Just Cause 4 and I’m sure you will too. If you have played number 3 don’t expect a lot more but if you haven’t then you are going to love this. I recommend giving it a shot as a title that will see hours of play over the summer holidays.

Taking more of a narrative approach while not really offering all that much narrative but definitely adding a little more marvel in the form of cataclysmic weather events as the major antagonist, Just Cause 4 is a shade more than just another Just Cause game. The major gameplay loop of orchestrating chaos remains true to the series but it is meted out just a bit more slowly while unlocking the goodies to perform your opus just a bit more freely. The real shine of the game comes from just whipping about the game world transitioning between grappling, wing suiting, parachuting, carjacking, plane-jacking, and inviting the player to turn the entire island into their own X-games playground on steroids.

Just Cause 4 is a very funny game but with a shallow and very repetitive story. A game with lights and shadows that does not manage to be outstanding despite trying.

My time as the god of Solís was highly dependent on the anecdotes I created, enjoyed, and suffered in my thirty hour conquest. I was joyously bemused by the world around me. I was incredulous at the state and scale of circumstances I was in and the solutions I was allowed to produce. The joy doesn’t boil over, it erupts with fanfare at the ridiculous set of circumstances enabled by a simulation that is concurrently shattering apart and performing as designed.

While it misses some of the best features from its predecessors, Just Cause 4 is a captivatingly fun experience, with enough new mechanics to be a staple for action fans.

Overall, Just Cause 4 is a fairly big improvement as an experience compared to the third entry. It doesn’t quite reach the heights of the second, which felt like the franchise’s peak at the time and has remained so to this day. This game lacks the thrill of “wow, the series is truly finding itself” – akin to Saints Row the Third doing that for the Saints Row games, and while it is better than the third entry, that’s a fairly low bar to fly over given how many issues plagued the console versions of the game. It performs a lot better, at the expense of the core graphics suffering a bit. The core gunplay and frantic action are better now than before though, but something still feels missing in the overall experience.

Just Cause 4 feels old in its mechanics, but it is incredibly fun to play. The extreme climate effects, the hook, the parachute and the flying suit allow us to develop some crazy combat maneuvers.