from the off, and a new mix-and-
match tether loadout system. Here
you can have three different tether
loadouts, with each one containing
whatever mix of balloon, rocket and
retracting tethers you like.
It’s a good call, going all-in on the
sandboxy spirit of the series, even
though none of this stuff is
necessarily practical in a combat
sense. You can unlock fine-tune
features like making your tether
balloons explode on a trigger, or add
a ‘Power Yank’ to your retractor,
which makes even heavy vehicles
collide like toys in the hands of a
sugar-crazed child. It offers new
levels of playful possibility that I’m
sure people far more patient and
creative than myself will exploit to
make for some incredible YouTube
highlight reels. Just Cause 4 is
designed around these possibilities,
though that comes at the expense of
a well-paced wider game.
Rico remains a weightless
spiderman, retaining that joyous,
nonsensical means of getting around
that relies on well-timed sequences
of grapple-hooking, parachuting, and
wingsuiting. It still feels breezy and
liberating, though the novelty has
faded for lack of any major
improvements in this area.
But maybe all that stuff is
essentially a glorified Zimmer frame,
because on the ground Rico seems
stiff in the joints, with no ability to
sprint, dodge, or perform melee
attacks with any real menace. Guns
lack weight and punchy
sound effects, enemies
are incorporeal and
floaty, as if half their
insides have been
replaced with helium,
and driving remains
awkward. Even the
floppy ragdoll
animations look as
janky and unrefined as they always
were, which is less palatable in 2018
than the last game in 2015, or Just
Cause 2 in 2010.
COVER THE FIELD
Progression is achieved mainly
through territory-taking missions,
which is unfortunately the weakest
and most protracted part of the game.
It’s a small carousel of objectives that
vary between seeking out consoles
(so many consoles), standoffs against
mindless waves of enemies while
someone ‘hacks a terminal’,
‘overloads a core’ or other cyber
73
Still delivers the series’
sandbox mayhem, but
the game is underserved
by a dated framework
and some loose design.VERDICTVehicles collide
like toys in the
hands of a
sugar-crazed
childADRENALINE GAUGE
Highest highs, lowest lowsExcitementTimeBlowing stuff up
(but less than in
previous games).Wingsuiting through a storm,
flying into a building, surviving.Searching
bases for
generators to
open doors
to bland
underground
bases.To rm e n tin g
people and cows
with the new
tether loadouts.Escaping
in a sports
car that
drives like
a horse
and cart.cliches, as well as having to search
large sections of base for barely
discernible structures such as
generators and fuse boxes, which
open up drab underground bunkers.
The idea, presumably, is to give
these missions more of a ‘Special
Operations’ feel than the simple
destructathon of before, but they also
mess up the pacing, especially since
Just Cause 4’s controls are
unwieldy for smaller
spaces and fiddly
activities. It creates too
many tedious
comedowns from the
bursts of brilliant action that the
game thrives in.
The story missions are more
carefully constructed, though, with
some excellent
setpieces where you’re
chasing tornadoes, or
dashing through
deserts in the middle
of a sandstorm. But
even then things can
get the wrong kind of
chaotic, such as during
one chase sequence
where enemy cars and choppers
were spawning and literally piling
over each other to get to me so
quickly that it took me about five
minutes to find an opening to get into
a vehicle. It’s as if Avalanche
sometimes just cranks up the chaos
slider—which I totally envision as
one of the studio’s design tools—
without much design or thought
behind it.
The amount of destructible
structures—one of the very selling
points of the series—seems to have
been cut down from previous games.
The generic bases that manymissions take place in are populated
mainly by concrete buildings, with
fewer of those brittle metal
frameworks that so splendidly
collapse like matchstick houses. This
is accompanied by the other strange
decision to get rid of throwable C4,
replacing it with the rather rare mine
launcher. Where before controlled
explosions were always an option
thanks to a healthy supply of C4, here
they’re more of a luxury, which
seems like an unnecessary thing for
Avalanche to reel in.
Not that Just Cause 4 is lacking in
explosiveness, and when the fuel
tankers careen across the ground or
vehicles explode in seemingly endless
chains, it still stokes a familiar feeling
of awe. It’s possible that the
introduction of new weather events
like sandstorms, lightning storms and
tornadoes was intended to shift the
focus away from just smashing stuff
up (which did eventually get tedious
in previous outings). It’s a reasonable
trade-off, even if the extreme weather
is too infrequent to shape the game as
much as was vaunted.CHEAP THRILLS
Just Cause 4 ups the excess just
enough to get away with the fact that
its groaning framework feels about
one firm tether yank away from
collapsing. It still delivers the kinds of
uniquely gamey thrills that seem to
have been serendipitously borne of
gravity-defying glitches, but when the
smoke finally clears and you regain
your senses, the underlying
shonkiness of the missions and the
basic nuts-and-bolts are laid bare.
With so much adventure-holiday-
with-guns fun to be had here, it’s
frustrating that Avalanche is content
to just gloss over existing issues
rather than fix them (couldn’t the
studio even have looked at its own
Mad Max game for ways to improve
the way vehicles handle or melee
combat?). Just Cause 4 still taps into
that streak of reckless abandon that
resides in all gamers, but its impact is
softening. I have a good several hours
of tethering tomfoolery left in me, but
once I put it down, I can’t see myself
returning to this series until it gets
the refurbishment it deserves.REVIEW