Just Cause 3 Review

The Verdict

Just Cause 3 is a great game. It's a fantastic game even. The few nitpicks I had with Fast Travel and Supply Drops are issues I was willing to overlook. But I can't in good conscience recommend this game to anyone at the moment, not while the performance issues are so bad.

This is a plea to Avalanche Studios to go back and fix it. Give us a slew of patches, I don't care, just make the game play the way it was meant to be played. I want to actually finish it to its entirety. I want to keep playing, despite having Fallout 4 peek at me from my game shelf, begging me to come back to it. It's that good of a game, mechanically.

Know that I'm not saying to pass on it completely, just for now. And hey, apparently they're well aware of the issues, so fixing the game is only a matter of when, not an if. Until that happens, it's best to wait on Just Cause 3.

The Positives

• Just Cause 3, like its predecessor, once again puts you in the shoes of Rico Rodriguez, a somewhat lovable protagonist with a hefty appetite for destruction, and a touch of sarcasm that make his lines a lot more bearable.

• The destruction is fantastic. Items you're meant to destroy are again painted in red, which are always brilliantly contrasted against the lush greens of the island, while all the vehicles explode in such a glorious way, you can't help yourself but to chuck grenades at everything you see. There is nothing more satisfying than a perfectly thrown grenade that starts a chain reaction of blowing up gas containers, which blow up electrical transformers, that ultimately break the leg of a radio tower that comes crashing down, taking satellite dishes along with it. It's a beautiful sight, that's marred by the game's performance, but that doesn't really go in this section.

• The grappling hook, Rico's bread and butter, is back and better than ever. You can truly get creative with tethering different objects together and then reeling them in. Or better yet, tether objects together and attach rocket powered mines on it, and watch as the physics engine goes to town. The grappling hook can be used for practical reasons too, like tethering a statue to the ground and then reeling it in to topple it.

• Rico is more mobile than ever. You can grapple yourself to a building and then immediately launch yourself in the air using the parachute. Like in the Batman games, you can then use the grappling hook to boost yourself and stay in the air for that much longer. The real fun comes from the game's wingsuit. You can open it at any time while you're in the air, and zip through the sky at high speeds. Learning to chain the wingsuit together with the grappling hook or even the parachute will allow you to stay in the sky indefinitely. It takes some time to learn, but once you get the hang of it, it feels amazing.

• The side activities are generally a whole lot of fun. Some of them definitely take a page from the Saints Row series, like attaching a magnetic ball to a car and then trying to deliver a bunch of Bavarium attracted to it to a certain spot, while under fire from the enemy. There's also a ton of mayhem challenges that make you use various weaponry, as well as more practical challenges like wingsuit or plane challenges, which task you to fly through rings in the shortest amount of time.

• These side activities are actually worth doing since performing well in them unlocks Gears. Up to five Gears can be earned per activity, and they unlock based on your performance. Those gears then provide you with a slew of mods that will give Rico the upper hand, like the ability to carry more grenades or tethers, shoot while grappling, boost grapple, use nitrous in vehicles, and lots, lots more.

• My first few hours were spent avoiding the story missions and just doing my own thing of liberating settlements and destroying enemy bases. However, a lot of necessary upgrades like Fast Travel and Supply Drops are tied to completing these missions. If anything, Just Cause 3 does a good job at making every piece of content in the game meaningful and ripe with necessary rewards.

The Negatives

• Why is there a currency for both Supply Drops? For a game that wants you to forgo restraint and throw caution to the wind, it's odd that Supply Drops require Supply Tokens in order to be used. These either need to be found or they're restored ever 12 minutes or so.

• What's worse is that Fast Travel flares are necessary if you want to actually use the Fast Travel system. Now, I understand that Just Cause 3 is all about getting from point A to point B in some sort of crazy fashion, whether it's the wingsuit, a jet, a helicopter, your parachute or even just a badass motorcycle. However, sometimes you just want to focus on completing a bunch of those side activities you just unlocked after liberating the entire area of the island. Limiting my access to that feature because of an item seems completely backwards. Coupled with the fact that this game is enormous. With 400 square miles, you really need that Fast Travel system to be functional all the time. Sure, you can try and 18 different shrines that you can pray at to unlock this system for free, but that's so tedious.

• The loading times are atrocious. It varies depending on what you're doing and where you are, but just to give you an example, simply reloading an Activity that had me blowing up a base with a helicopter took 3 minutes. I'll let that sink in for a bit. Yep, 3 freaking minutes. Now, I realize the island of Medici is big, and most likely it's loading up a whole lot of assets at once, but 3 minutes is absolutely unforgivable. I was freaking out with Bloodborne's original loading times, and those were just under a minute.

• The game also crashed on me a few times. If these at least happened during intense and chaotic moments, I'd maybe judge the game less, but no. They happened when I was leisurely flying through the sky. Bummer.

• And now the obvious, the performance. Despite everything that Just Cause 3 does right, and it's a lot, the performance really brings the whole experience down. There are really two types of slowdowns in Just Cause 3; The camera rotating slowdowns, and the chaos slowdowns. The former is what I pretty much showcased in my Review in Progress article. Simply moving the camera back and forth would slow down the framerate so much, that it would literally skip frames or hang on a frame completely. The latter, somewhat more understandable slowdowns, come from causing a lot of chaos filled with lots of NPCs shooting at once, and explosions happening everywhere. The game literally goes slow motion during these segments. No joke. And like I've previously stated, Just Cause 3 is all about flow, stringing actions together. You're expected to grapple on to a building, open your parachute, rain down rockets, tether soldiers to a building and throw a grenade at them, then taking out your wingsuit and fly through the streets only to grapple yourself on top of a tank which you then get inside, and paint the enemies red with it. But good luck doing all of that when the framerate is constantly taking such a huge dip, that pulling even the first two things off is damn near impossible!

Well this was quite an eye-opening surprise. Ever since Just Cause 3's announcement, I was absolutely pumped to get my hands on it. Just Cause 2 was one of those stupidly fun games that allowed players to let loose on a tropical paradise, causing chaos, as well as have fun with the game's physics engine thanks to the grappling hook. Naturally, after having a blast with that game, I was eager to once again let loose in the sequel. And for the most part, I did just that in Just Cause 3, and it was extremely fun! Except when it wasn't.

I'll put a disclaimer here and state that I didn't finish Just Cause 3. I wanted to, I swear I did, but the game's technical problems are no joke. Seriously, I'm not trying to state some sort of hyperbole here, it's just fact. And I'm not even a huge stickler for performance issues with games. I usually grit my teeth and enjoy them for what they are. But Just Cause 3 is a new low. I've captured a few videos that I included in my Review in Progress article here, and you can see that nothing crazy even has to be happening for the framerate to take a dip. But those two videos are just a tiny sample size of just how bad the game can get. I played the game on the PS4, but from what I've been reading, the Xbox One version is worse, and the PC version is just as un-optimized.

Don't get me wrong, Just Cause 3 does a lot of things right. Hell, the game, mechanics wise, at least most of it, is designed in a way to ensure you're always either causing some sort of mayhem, or partaking in a slew of wildly different side activities, and I loved that. It's just that for every activity that I loved doing, the game's performance would completely cock-block my excitement.

Let's take a look at what the game does right, what flops (besides the performance) and my verdict.

The Positives / The Negatives

The Verdict