Just Cause 4 lives in the mystique of a simulation that is concurrently shattering apart and performing as designed. Agency and Chaos are rival gods condensed into a single protagonist who uses the world's most outrageous toolbox to violently and preposterously address its most rote objectives. Limitations are explosive fuel for superpowers, somehow balancing the equation that allows Just Cause 4 to make sense.
My name is Rico Rodriguez. I am a god.
This is my fourth time assuming the powers of a god. I have been deposited in Solís, a faux (but very real to me) South American country, in order to depose someone named Gabriela Morales and annihilate The Black Hand. The former has connections to my late father while the latter is a band of mercenaries that has supplied endless henchmen to challenge me during my previous adventures in San Esperito and my homeland of Medici. I will kill approximately 40,000 people in order to fulfill my needs.
My primary and defining superpower spawns from my wrist-mounted grappling hook. Once used to create expedient and convenient movement, it has now become the Swiss Army Knife of physics-based death and tomfoolery. The tension and recoil speed can be adjusted freely, and I can also designate different effects based on tapping or holding down the button I use to deploy it. I have rocket boosters now, too, which I can use to modify various aspects of my god powers.
A real treat is the balloon I can now fire out of this thing. I use the balloon to air-lift vehicles or humans or humans in vehicles into the sky where I can shoot them full of holes or shoot the balloon and watch them fall to their death. I can also do this, although I have no idea what purpose it serves or why anyone would want to do this. I have three loadouts on standby for any combination of this madness and I use each of them to create messy but anecdotally perfect solutions to my problems.
My parachute is my cape. My wingsuit is my, uh, wings. Both are used in combination with the grappling hook to create reverse-Spiderman movement across the deserts, tropical highlands, and arctic peaks of Solís. Land-based vehicles are trivial novelties and only jets are faster and more efficient than my grappling hook and parachute. It is strangely difficult for me to overcome two-foot-tall guard rails, hills at any angle greater than 30 degrees, and chain link fences. Much of the ground in rural Solís unfurls in a way that its designers in no way anticipated basic foot travel, leading to some rough edges when I assume human-like locomotion.
As a god, I am a master of both weapons and vehicles. I have exceptional proficiency in machine guns of negligible difference, shotguns, rocket launchers, and a guns that shoots pure lighting and wind. A selection of these tools are supplied in nice silver cases at critical points in my journey. If I die—and by “die” I mean my vision desaturates before I wake up with almost all progress intact—my ammunition is completely resupplied. I can also fly several different helicopters, jets, tanks, cars, and motorcycles. The Solían citizenry and my band of followers, the Army of Chaos, are happy to surrender any transportation to me, even if my carelessness during the brief transition period results in their immediate and painful death.
Chaos is my only governing principle. I achieve chaos by destroying explosive and expensive red, white and silver colored infrastructure. Fuel tanks, large generators, and satellite dishes feed my desire. The amount of chaos I cause is measured by a meter in the top right of my screen. If it’s Black Hand equipment it’s worth twice as much chaos but I am also rewarded for destroying identical facilities at that belong to my worshipers. Helicopters with machine guns and missiles are my most efficient tools. Their crosshairs see red. I see red it too. When I wake up everything before me is laid to waste.
Solíans worship my chaos. Their infatuation leads friends and enemies alike to rebuild their equipment after an alarmingly short amount of time. If I impress my allies and gain new chaos levels, they will gather into Chaos Squads and slowly move across enemy-controlled Solís. I command their direction on a clunky map, but if I visit these places I can seem them fighting on the front in real time. Solíans either die for me or because of me. I suffer no penalty in how many of them are killed in vicious accidents, deliberate acts of violence, sadistic grappling hook experiments, and as unfortunate collateral in enemy combat. Chaos is my fuel but the people are my fire.
By taking control of The Black Hand’s outposts, I can allow my Chaos Squads to reclaim Solís. The nature of this process, however, is resistant to my normal drive for brutality. There is always a generator to shut down or wind turbine to destroy or some kind of switch to engage. I have to find these objects in green-tinted zones of outposts, then use my grappling hook to flip an impenetrable rolling door open, then usually destroy whatever was behind that door. This is divided across thirty or so outposts and you can bet I got tired of it all after about twenty.
Flipping switches is just one piece of a multi-part takeover process. Sometimes I have to drive a hacker around to computer terminals and defend him from dozens of angry, well-armed mercenaries. Other times I am the hacker and need to operate a computer terminal without getting shot until a mysterious hacking bar is completed. Infiltrating labyrinthine subterranean tunnels looking for god knows what was a thing that kept happening. I did find joy in the three missions where I had to drive ten (of like thirty) bomb-rigged cars into a large body of water in five minutes. It made no sense, but it also made excellent use of the precision movement skills I had spent the past twenty hours refining.
With outposts, there was a point when even my engine for creative demolition ran out of gas. Gran Central, in the Arena region, required me to hack a computer while a progress bar filled. This was complicated by an endless supply of soldiers, including two super mutant armored motherfuckers that seem resistant to full clips of my lightning gun. I could never stand still long enough without getting shot to fill the progress bar. Eventually I decided to leave the outpost’s boundaries, airdrop in an attack helicopter—oh also I can airdrop weapons and vehicles, basically whatever I want that I have unlocked, from multiple pilots on cooldown timers—then crash the helicopter into these guys. Eventually this won the day, but Gran Central was a hard spike in the process.
Taking over an outpost is enough for me to create progress, but extraneous objects appear immediately afterward. Instead of systematically murdering munitions in bases and cities, as in my previous three adventures, “taking over” an area consists of completing odd objectives positioned around a location’s immediate perimeter. I have made three friends whom, by creating these bizarre objectives, help me accomplish this. Javi is interested in uncovering Solís’ native history, Garland wants to use Solís as a location for her action film, and Sargento wants me to blow up some blimps.
Garland’s enthusiastic misanthropy appeals to me greatly. To film a city-spanning stunt scene, I had to drive a sports car half a mile across a city. On the way I accidentally ran over and slaughtered ten (presumably) real people. People with jobs and, presumably, families. When I finished the scene a man told me, “nice job.” For another shoot, I attached a person to a boat with my grappling hook, but the physics messed up and launched the person and the boat so hard everything exploded and both of them died. Again, I passed the mission.
Garland’s shooting style is all very fast and loose. Dozens of speed tests are positioned around Solís, where I have to pass through a specific ring above a certain speed. Despite clearly intended as vehicle scenes, I always use a helicopter. In one instance, after another mission where a rescue helicopter showed up to collect some guys I just spent twenty minutes rescuing, I took over that chopper, threw the pilot out at about 100ft, completed the speed test, then abandoned the chopped mid-air before watching it crash and kill everyone inside. The scene is complete and I am absolved from all responsibility. I suspect this could be a commentary on old Hollywood’s psychopathic proclivity to scorch the indigenous earth of foreign countries, but it’s probably just a neat excuse to distract me with traditional open-world objectives.
Sargento’s objectives are a little more routine. Blowing up the blimps that he hates opens his set of missions, all of which are geared toward training the local populace (the helicopter incident I just mentioned was full of his guys). It usually consists of me using a set of weapons against slightly-too-many waves of Black Hand soldiers. In one I had to provide cover for incompetent mortals with a sniper rifle that for some reason also shot homing missiles. I only did about half of these missions before getting bored and figured Sargento could handle the rest. These people would worship me without my divine intervention.
I’m still not entirely sure what was up with Javi. In the introductory mission I had to roll a giant statue head down a mountain to…open something? Tough to remember. For the other dozen or so I located the site of some ancient ruins but had no idea what to do there. It didn’t seem to suit my skill set. In any case, for all three of these clowns, I was rewarded with optional modifications to my grappling hook abilities. I could make the balloon follow me around or change its peak altitude. I could add something called “Power Yank” to my retractor. Power Yank.
What’s fascinating about this world is how quickly my immortality spreads to those who are close to me. During one mission Mira, Morales’ cousin and my good friend, absorbed the full impact of a fifth consecutive airstrike and did not receive a scratch. The hacker I frequently employ is game to get shot in the back of the head dozens of times and walk away unscathed. The only people who seem to die are the hordes of Black Hand cowards I send to hell and the innocent residents of Solís. My power, as it seems, is not absolute.
Taking over outposts leads me closer to confronting Gabriela Morales and Oscar Espinosa. I divide my conquest into taking control of four areas, each with their own specific twist on Morales’s weather manipulation contraptions. His command of wind, lightning, sandstorms, and blizzards is impressive. Four segmented missions end with me receiving the ability to engage these weather effects whenever I want. While each have their own appeal, watching a tornado wreck an entire outpost had a very specific and useful charm. Extreme weather conditions are intended to define the experience of my fourth adventure, providing an extreme 90’s edge in a time when we need it most.
Gaining control of these weather machines is where it feels like I’m supposed to have the most fun being a god. While they’re fundamentally different from obliterating outposts, they’re all subject to the same level of suspicious activity. A giant canal-blocking door failed to open when I was trying to push through it with my lightning-reflecting boat. One glitch was met with another, as explosive fire launched my boat in the air, and, after it landed and slid down a mountain, I found myself on the other side. This in no way was supposed to happen but I also couldn’t imagine it happening any other way. I endure across these hardships but profoundly suspect others in my position may not be as lucky.
The scale of Solís was impressive. Bustling urban cityscapes, vast empty desert plains, dozens of neatly constructed bridges, dense jungles, remnants of an even older civilization, and bizarre sequences out of known reality (I believe they’re referred to by the common folk as “easter eggs”) cover every corner of Solís. I will never visit 75% of this land but I take comfort in knowing that it’s there and someone, somewhere out there lost years of their life designing a vast amount of forever unknown space.
Like anyone who assumes they are all powerful, I do well to conceal my weaknesses. Cars, bikes, boats, and jets in Solís do not perform like cars anywhere else on this planet. They’re all monstrous contraptions that do not make any sense and, yet, native Solíans manipulate them across land, sea, and air with pinpoint accuracy. Additionally, the laissez faire nature of most of my obstacles suggests that my vast arsenal of weapons and resources need not be engaged with any sort of regularity. I (probably) could have solved every problem with a machine gun and a lot of ammunition. It wouldn’t have been as fun, but I may have never known any better.
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.
