Discovery and embrace typically define the first two acts. The third act is a fork in the road. Either our hero can soothe his powers and correct his pain, or he can become consumed by them.
Just Cause, as a series of three games,parallels a superhero narrative. 2006’s titular debut saw the emergence of a scrappy new hero and the promise of a better horizon. Just Cause 2, released four years later (and scored highly by your truly), was one of the most chaotically attractive games of its generation. It embraced Rico’s incessant demand to destroy everything and performed with a conscious ignorance of reality. Of course you could ride on top of jets, naturally you had a backpack with infinite parachutes, why wouldn’t the grappling hook stick to everything, who cares about gravity? Like every superhero, Rico had his faults—screwing around with mechanics and blowing things up took precedence over objectives—but none severe enough to mortally wound him. Most notably, Just Cause 2 did all of this in an open-world format over two years before the fantastic and surreal Saints Row The Third.
Just Cause’s third act was poised for a supernova. Just Cause 2’s goofy multiplayer mod shoved the series back in the spotlight and the current generation of consoles promised a technical showpiece. Nearly six years of refinement is a generous gift, not to mention the inspiration provided by Shadow of Mordor, Grand Theft Auto V, and Sunset Overdrive. With all that he learned and all that he absorbed, how could Rico possibly fail?
Part of the problem is definition. Another part is a reluctance to break away from that definition. Just Cause 3 is more—and sometimes less—of Just Cause 2. Immediately apparent is Rico’s understanding of his place in the world. The game opens with a lounge crooner cover of Prodigy’s Firestarter and cements its place with a live sequence of Rico riding on top of a massive plane and shooting infinite rockets at everything in his way. Shortly thereafter Rico is granted most of his basic mechanics before he’s set loose in his homeland of Medici.
The world bends to his will, so why does Rico feel so powerless to stop its machinations? It’s certainly not the fault of Just Cause 3’s streamlined ideas. Rico’s weapon of choice, his signature grappling hook, can now multiply in number and retract itself after it’s detached. Heath regenerates on its own. A speedy wingsuit compliments Rico’s reverse-Spiderman parachute-and-grapple. Refills of weapons, vehicles, and ammunition are a very quick airdrop away. Chaos, the system-driving currency of Just Cause 2,has been massively streamlined. Just Cause 3’s refinements speak of a desperate need to (even further) empower its protagonist.
If you’re looking for Rico’s poison, it starts with Just Cause 3’s needless subscription to open-world principles, aka the metric ton of ancillary challenges begging for your attention. It has heaps of racing cars, boats, and planes. It challenges you to blow a bunch of stuff up with specific weapons or vehicles in a specific place in a specific amount of time. You can also wingsuit your way through a series of rings. The most inventive of these events combines these two ideas, outfitting your car with a bomb that detonates if your speed drops below a certain number; release is found only by making it to your target in time.
Completing these events is the only way to develop new skills or upgrades, called mods, for Rico. Traversal mods allow Rico to shoot a gun while his grappling hook is reeling in, or boost its retraction speed. Weapon mods control ammunition. Destruction mods offer a host of different ways for grenades to behave. Other than tether mods, which can have a significant effect on how quickly you’re able to tear things apart, few of these are essential for effective play. On one hand this makes the dozens of challenges optional, but on the other…why include a bunch of busy work for a set of options that aren’t necessarily useful?
Trying to collect and organize chaotic activity is another solution with its own set of problems. Just Cause 2 was populated with a seemingly endless number of enemy bases to destroy and control. Now, certain pieces of each city or base are marked as necessary pieces of chaos. A propaganda van prowls the streets, billboards are at every exit and entrance, statues of Medici’s dictator need to be torn down, and basically everything colored red—fuel tanks, mainframes, radar dish—beg for destruction. It’s all collected and categorized in a checklist on a pause screen, killing the ceaseless tedium that came with looking for every last thing to destroy in Just Cause 2.
Repetition is the primary antagonist. There are dozens and dozens of cities, bases, or giant airfields to destroy and take over and little variation between all of them. Once you figure out a way to complete something efficiently, there’s no incentive to do it any differently. Often times, when I ran out of ammo, I would just die instead of try to find more. Dying refills everything and, other than your chaos induced while taking over a police station, none of your progress is lost. To cheat death is a trick Rico hasn’t completely solved, but he’s on his way there.
Liberating towns opens up new fast travel points and creates markers for extraneous challenges. Each of Just Cause 3’s three acts demands you fully liberate a certain amount of provinces (each of which is outlined with three or five places to liberate) in order to properly progress, but it still never grows beyond a seed of an idea. Your toys get bigger and better, but they don’t fundamentally alter your approach. If I can get a jet that carpet bombs everything, what’s the point of even going there?
This leaves Just Cause 3’s “story” missions as its primary means of definition and expression. In concept, these seem pretty OK. You ride a maniac train and defend it from viscous helicopters. You drive a car in a taking-off plane and protect it from rogue jets. You make friends with a bunch of locals and then defend them for all sorts of angry armies. Other than a mission where I was carrying a bunch of wine barrels in the back of a rickety truck, it’s hard to think of any mission where I wasn’t explicitly defending someone or something with a health bar.
On its own, explicit defense by way of overpowering offense isn’t necessarily a bad idea. Just Cause 3 prides itself on its burning penchant for destruction and ensures Rico has plenty of tools to get the job done. The problem is most of his tools all sort of run together. There was always an enemy tank or helicopter around to commandeer, and the opposition always wilts under a hail of supreme gunfire. Like the liberation missions, it’s just not sustainable over a long period of time. Worse, it seems to fail the freedom implied through Rico’s ridiculous abilities.
Just Cause 3, by way of pure mechanics, is an extremely technical game. There’s a ton of room to grow inside Rico’s grappling hook + parachute relationship, and layering vehicles, weapons, and a wingsuit in between leaves room for even more potential. Accomplished Just Cause 3 play is going to create a ton of YouTube clips and unbelievable moments of applied spontaneity, but there’s very little of the game that demands this sort of style from its audience. Rico may have all the power in the world, but challenges deemed accessible feel beneath him.
Nowhere is this demonstrated better than Just Cause 3’s trio of chapter-ending finales. An entire region of Medici is enveloped in chaos, with various factions battling each other not unlike those massive city riots in PlayStation 2-era Grand Theft Auto’s. Rico is expected to appear where he’s immediately needed and push his rebel friends to victory (as indicated by a literal progress bar fight on the user interface). These amount or surface level tasks like destroying a convoy or stopping an onslaught of oncoming tanks, and successfully completing them helps ensure a victory. Improvisation is the intended action, but, again, Just Cause 3 retreats into familiar motions. You know what to do and, other than impressive one-off sequence where Rico rides a missile, you know exactly how you’re going to do it. Just Cause 3’s shuffles its systems rather than allows them to work together.
There’s also the issue of succession and evolution. Just Cause 2 built and expanded the foundation of Just Cause. I made my own fun in spite of its monotonous objectives, like the time I bailed out of a helicopter and completed an aerial reentry or lugged a rickshaw to the top of a mountain and rode it down. Just Cause 3 adds another layer to Just Cause 2, but it doesn’t fundamentally expand upon its most basic concepts. Beyond the opening hours of tethering two cars to the sides of buildings and blowing up a menagerie of vehicles and local wildlife, I was kind of done making my own fun. I had already been down that road five years ago, and there wasn’t enough inside Just Cause 3 to facilitate additional experimentation.
It gets monotonous. By the time I got to the last act I had abandoned extraneous challenges entirely and, rather than liberate entire regions, I did the bare minimum required to call off the annoying airstrikes. If Just Cause 2 felt like a world of wonder where anything was possible. Just Cause 3’s shiny new paint provides the same feeling, but it’s just a facade behind lackadaisical mission design. Of course, this feeling isn’t applicable of this is your first Just Cause game. If it’s new, stunt positions, riding on top of cars, tethering enemies to virtually everything, and living through a 30,000 foot face plant are neat and novel. These tricks don’t work so well the second time around.
From a technical standpoint, the entirety of Just Cause 3 doesn’t work very well either. An enormous two minute startup load is understandable. The same amount of time spent either after failing a challenge or dying is inexcusable. Challenges in particular rely on one or two minute sequences and any incentive to replay them and get a better score are immediately extinguished by facing down the barrel of repeated two minute load times. Sometimes Just Cause 3 loaded literally forever instead, necessitating a full game reboot.
Load times are augmented with Just Cause 3’s inane insistence on connecting you to your peers. Helicopter killing sprees, reeling in my tether, various instances of driving a car—Just Cause 3 is obsessed with collecting arbitrary stats and ranking them against random people I was not friends with. I didn’t care about any of this. If I put my PS4 in rest mode I would come back and it would give me the option to play the game offline, but whenever I accessed my map it would sign me back on. I could not find a way to opt out of any of that short of turning off the Wi-Fi at a system level. This is just another thing to deal with on top bloated loading times, and while I sympathize with a developer looking for ways to enhance the player experience, removing the option to opt out seems like a gross oversight.
Just Cause 3’s shortcomings are so painful because Rico Rodriguez was expected to become a modern superhero. He’s not. He’s just another guy who has grown complacent behind his extraordinary set of powers. On a base level his (and by extension Just Cause 3’s) explosive areas of expertise remain impressive, but his application falls well short of expectations and ultimately becomes inert. What good are the world’s greatest explosions when you stop caring to see them?
