The thing is, while there are a few new twists in Just Cause 4, it's by and large the same old shtick, which is more evident than ever this time round. Just Cause has never really known what to do with itself when the adrenaline dies down and you have a moment to catch your breath.
Its map-painting missions are protracted, its basic systems are creaky, and some of its design changes are ill-advised. And yet, thanks to some sparing improvements—mostly in the way of chaos-causing gizmos—Just Cause 4 is still capable of charming me.
For all its annoyances, it still says to me, with a mischievous twinkle in its eye, 'Yeah, but do other games let you do this high calibre of silly shit?' Which of course they don't, unless you count previous games in the series.
There's still the retractor which lets you, say, string two or more helicopters together and send them twirling into each other. Joining it now is the 'Air Lifter' balloon tether, which lets you attach several balloons to objects and send them off to orbit, as well as 'booster' tethers, which send their hapless targets fizzing around uncontrollably like cheap fireworks from your local convenience store.
The old upgrade system has been largely replaced, with many once-unlockable abilities now available 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 together 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.
Progression is achieved mainly through territory-taking missions, which is unfortunately the weakest, 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-clichés, and having to search large sections of base for barely discernible structures like generators and fuse boxes, which open up drab underground bunkers.
The idea was presumably to give these missions more of a 'Special Operations' feel than the simple destructathon of before, but they mess up the pacing, especially as Just Cause 4's mechanics are unwieldy for smaller spaces and fiddly activities. It creates too many tedious comedowns from the bursts of action that the game thrives in. The story missions are more carefully constructed, with some excellent set pieces where you're chasing tornadoes, or dashing through deserts in the midst 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.
Post a Comment