Just Cause 4 Reviews

Just Cause 4 is assuredly not as good as Just Cause 3. While the performance is better, overall the experience feels lamer, with too many gimmicks and yet not enough variety.

The biggest change between 3 and 4 is the addition of different tools to use with your tethers. I love that they give you a bunch at the start, but the use of the balloons, boosters, and pull are all pretty specifically-useful, and while they all have some modifications to use, I never saw a reason to use anything besides a specific set of them. Otherwise you jetpack around, blow stuff up, try to raise an army and that’s where the issues come in to play.

The Army of Chaos meter just becomes very unnecessary so quickly. There’s very little it is used for. You need Pilots, which get unlocked every few levels, for fast travel and supply drops. But they regenerate fast enough that you never feel like you need the max amount. As I played through the game, I intentionally tried to destroy as much as I could, to raise that level, and it’s very bothersome. I only needed to get to level 4 of the ranking (out of like, 14). By that point, every time I took a region, I was able to take it over. I finished the game, capturing all regions and finishing the missions, and I was level 11. Now there’s nothing left to go for, except the achievements, so that meant a lot of grinding.

And goodness, what a load of grinding this game is. It felt like playing an old Assassins Creed game, and not in the good way. The side-missions in Just Cause 3 were challenging but fun. It felt rewarding to beat a wingsuit course. Here, there’s no challenge. It’s “Go through 3 rings”, or “Go through this ring at a speed”, or “Go through this ring in a certain vehicle.” While some of those last ones are hard, it’s more an annoyance than challenge. Over 150 of these was an asinine decision, especially since you only need to do 40 or 50 to max out your missiles and jetpack. The rest is just filler to drag it out.

When it comes to grinding, there’s also the main side quests. There’s essentially just three side-quest-givers. Sargento, who gives you ‘training’ missions for the Army, Garland, who is filming a movie, and Javier, who is doing archaeology. Sargento’s side quests are typically assisting NPCs with a mission. Often you’ll be given a specific weapon and told to assist from afar but nothing stops you from just going in with a bazooka or shotgun. Garland is all races, and you get a checkpoint after every ring, so it’s impossible to fail, and Javier is just a few statues and ruins to unlock. One thing that’s also not made clear is there’s some randomly-generated missions for these three, and there’s absolutely no reason ever to do them. They’re just time-wasters. All they do is give you experience for their respective mods, but you easily fill those up doing the actual missions that give rewards. Ignore those.

The missions themselves are basically one of two tracks. Each district of the map has a mission to take it over, these are typically things like capturing a factory or destroying a prison. You ‘will’ get tired of these. It’s always the same thing. Flipping breakers, destroying generators, hacking computers, and protecting NPCs who get staggered way too easily. There’s so little variety that it’s haunting in how uninspired it gets. You do need to do several of these at minimum to unlock the main quest tracks, and all of them for completion. It will become tedious. But as a tip, if you ever need to ‘destroy the generators powering up the devices’, you are meant to track the power lines on the grid, but if this was mentioned in-game it’s very easy to miss, so you should hopefully spend less time fumbling around trying to find the tiny thing to blow up compared to me.

The main tracks are essentially three separate routes to build specialized vehicles to take out the villain’s weather-controlling devices. Each pairs you with a specific NPC as well. These are fun enough, and tend to be more varied, but they also kind of feel disconnected from things. Each time you beat one you do get access to the weather device but it’s heavily limited in what you can do with it. Once all three are done, there’s one final mission and it’s an anticlimactic fight. Game is over. The story is pretty much the same as Just Cause 3. However, in Just Cause 4, the villains are BARELY a presence. They sincerely show up once in the first part of the game and then you will not see them at all again until the final mission. I didn’t even realize the second-in-command was meant to be the sister of your main ally since nothing comes of that. At least Just Cause 3 had you fight the main villain in a helicopter, even if that wound up being anticlimactic as well (I unintentionally dropped a supply crate on it and blew it up in one hit). Here, the villain is fought in a cutscene.

You can have supplies dropped for you. But there’s a lot of vehicles and guns to select and some are clearly so much better that you will never need a bulk of them except for ‘go through this ring in a specific vehicle’ challenges. You will really just want either a fast car, a strong tank, or a helicopter. You may need the cropduster or a fanboat or other silly things for challenges but they aren’t fun to use at all, so they just take up screen space.

You can also have guns dropped for you as well and I have big complaints about the guns. First is that the guns do not have descriptions so you will not understand what its alt fire does until you test it out, and it may not be clear. Those alt fires also cannot be refilled with ammo pickups. Once you run out of grenades on a machine gun, you need a new gun if you want more explosives. They got rid of throwing grenades meaning you’re kneecapped on explosions, and the explosive weapons have such little ammo that it’s annoying. You’ll love the mine launcher because it has 24 ammo, while the RPG only has 7 and doesn’t do more damage.

I've also played through the DLC now and they're all pretty subpar as well. It just comes down to repetition each time. The races are neat, at least the destruction ones are, but some of the S rank challenges can be a real pain. The zombie plague one is just a nightmare hassle with too much crap on screen, but a neat weapon to get. The third DLC I'm glad came last because you get a hoverboard that is annoying to use and every submarine to destroy is exactly the same. It may be worth, if you have the DLC, to start them all early so you can dig into each mission as the game goes on, and not do them all in a row.

I can’t say Just Cause 4 wasn’t fun. I had a few laughs. But the bulk of the game felt like homework and that’s not a great sign of its appeal.

Overview: Exciting, fun, low-pressure game. Just Cause 4 - and the entire Just Cause franchise - should appeal to gamers looking for open-world adventure games, and who want to avoid sweaty games.

Context: I'm an older gamer, with limited time to play games: 1 to 3 hours per day, max. I play to relax after work, and I've discovered that sweaty games are not my cup of tea. I only play solo/campaign, and only XBox & Switch. My favorite franchises are Zelda and Burnout. What do they have in common? They are fun and they don't punish you for making mistakes. After finishing Just Cause 4 (100%) and Just Cause 3 (95%) I am adding the Just Cause franchise to my "top three" list.

Rating: I give Just Cause 4 five out of five stars because it has beautiful scenery, a variety of gameplay, some puzzles, lots of exhilarating action, you can soar through the sky, and the game does not punish mistakes. The game is designed so most people can finish the game, and enjoy themselves in the process. Overall, it is an exciting, fun experience.

Ambience: The visuals are great: lots of scenery and water. It is an outdoor game: very little action takes place indoors. The outdoor ambience contributes to the relaxing, pleasant ambience of the game: you are surrounded by lakes, beaches, blue skies, rivers, and beautiful, snowy peaks. The developers put a lot of work into the environment: I appreciated the snow & rain & night/day cycle. And the waves and wind and sun and moon ... it was a very outdoorsy feeling, and invited me to return to the game whenever I had time. I especially enjoyed the Mesoamerican feel of some of the architecture & art ... evocative of Tomb Raider. My favorite missions were the ones in the snowy peaks, at nighttime: all the glimmering lights in the towns below were magical.

Graphics: I found the graphics to be pleasing: fairly realistic, but colorful & alive in a good way. They did not strive for super realism (like RDR2), but it is more realistic than the slightly cartoonish look of the Zelda franchise.

Movement: The most exciting part of the game, for me, is the player's movement: You can travel up, down, or sideways easily and quickly. After spending a large portion of my gaming history living in the Halo and Hitman franchises, where gravity is king and you are limited to walking or jogging: the Just Cause wingsuit & tether are a godsend (when Halo added the grapple into Halo Infinite, it was a huge boost to the thrill of that franchise). I was always a big fan of Zelda's paraglider mechanism, but frustrated by the lack of ability to go upward (only partially addressed in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom). Just Cause provides dynamic, exhilarating movement from the very start. It can be fun to aimlessly soar through the skies, weaving between trees and buildings.

Detail: There are dozens of small details that are in the game that improve the experience in subtle ways: from animals & birds, to dust, to echos in the audio when you are inside a tunnel or cave. Whenever I noticed such details, it gave me the impression that the developers really cared about the game and were going above and beyond to provide the gamer with a fun experience (my favorite: the Cow-Moo-Flage achievement).

Feasible: I'm not a skilled gamer: I don't have great reflexes; but I was able to get all the achievements in Just Cause 4 ... only the third game (out of about 50+ games I've played over the years) I was able to do that. I had to work for them: it took me 74 hours, but it was very satisfying. Hats off to the Avalanche development team for making a challenging game that can be completed by an average gamer. [NB I am not able to get 100% in Just Cause 3 ... getting perfects scores in its Wingsuit & Sooting-Range challenges is beyond my ken].

Vehicles: The game has a wide variety of weapons and vehicles, but - if you're like me - you'll find a few that are your favorites and use them most of the time. But Avalanche does engage in what I call "developer's conceit" ... where they force you to try out various vehicles (in order to perform certain challenges and achievements) ... their way of ensuring that their vehicle-design labor does not go unnoticed.

Puzzles: There is some brainwork required to solve the "get the vehicle through the hoop" puzzles: Some of these were hilarious, and required some clever problem-solving to figure out how to accomplish the goal. When I started the game, I found the balloon & rocket attachments to the tether to be overly confusing, but as the game went on, and I was confronted with these Vehicle Stunt problems, the utility of the balloons & rockets became apparent.

Story: I tend to ignore storylines in games: I know many view the story as critical (RPGs, for example) but I view the story as a mere hanger that displays the garment of gameplay. Still, I thought Just Cause 4's story was useful. I especially appreciated that the plot revolved around dismantling an oppressive autocrat and restoring freedom to the working class ... it may seem cheesy:, but with what is happening in the real world these days, it is good to remind us what corruption looks like, and what we should do about it.

Not too easy: As enjoyable and relaxing as this game is, it is not a push-over: to move forward in the game, you have to destroy enemy bases: and the tasks required to do so (e.g. incapacitating some equipment) involve a lot of focus. The game does not have a user-selectable difficulty level, something it shares with the Zelda franchise. And here is what I like best about Just Cause: when you die in battle, all your progress is retained, and you simply respawn outside the battle area to carry-on. What a joy, compared to games where your progress is lost when you die.

Contrasted with Just Cause 3 I notice that some other reviewers spend a lot of time comparing JC4 with JC3. I've played them both, and they are both great: their similarities far outweigh their differences.

Summary: the game is fun, exciting, pleasurable, and is played in a colorful, outdoorsy open-world environment. It is not excruciatingly painful, and it can be 100%'d by gamers with limited time on their hands. I'm surprised I've never heard of the franchise until two month ago ... I only stumbled on it because it showed up on the XBox Game Pass. It should be more well-known. It is a blast to play. The joy and adventure found in Just Cause 4 is comparable to Zelda (indeed, is not too far-fetched to consider that Zelda transplanted into the real-world would produce gameplay similar to Just Cause). I especially recommend it to part-time gamers that are put-off by sweaty franchises. I'm eagerly waiting for another installment in this franchise to be published.

Just Cause 4 is one step forward, but three steps back for the Just Cause series. A lot of features that made Just Cause 3 a favourite in the series for me were either abandoned in the sequel or improved upon with varying success. So how good is Just Cause 4 on it's own? Here is my review on Avalanche Studios' 2018 title Just Cause 4:

Story
The game takes place a few years after Just Cause 3, and now takes place on the fictional South American island of Solis. As Rico Rodriguez, you are now tasked to take on the ruler of Solis, Oscar Espinosa, and his new weather project. Along the way, you will be confronted and attacked by the Black Hand mercenary group. But you will have the extra help of the rebel group known as the Army of Chaos.

Overall Just Cause 4 has a weaker story than 3 in comparison. So that is why I rate the story a 3/10. You do meet new characters in the story, but they aren't interesting enough to make me care.

Gameplay
I have to address this now, they removed the base removal system of JC3 and replaced it with a mission-based takeover system where you take over massive chunks of the map just by protecting a computer. Personally, the base / settlement removal system of JC2 & 3 where you destroy all propaganda and military instalments was a fan favourite of mine that could only get better with each JC game. But they went for a more linear, Far Cry-like approach to reclaiming territory and it sucks. You can destroy military equipment and instalments, but it doesn't contribute to taking over a map like in the previous games. What I do like about this is that there actually appears to be a struggle between the two main forces in the game. Aside from it being 'me vs the world' in JC3.
The gunplay is solid like in JC3, but they removed grenades and C4 outright (basically the bread and butter of the series as of now) and replaced it with the secondary fire mode. This game has just as much weapons as the last game, which is fine - no complaints there.
Enemy types in JC4 are more varied for once, now they have different gameplay styles instead of rushing towards you and shooting you down. This is another thing I don't see any reason to complain about.
Vehicles are more predominant in JC4, and the game forces you to use them at times. Although the driving is better, I'll stick with the much faster, more fun Bavarium wing suit and the grappling hook & parachute (maybe choppers but idk). Flying around the sky has never been as much fun than in JC4.
Solis is an interesting open-world, similar in veins to Panau. The issue with it is that you can't just take over bases in the traditional sense of blowing stuff up!
There are now many challenges that the game will give you, and they will reward you with mods for your grappling hook. There isn't many challenges in the game, and most if not all of them are vehicle based, or wing suit based.

Overall Just Cause 4 has solid gameplay, but it doesn't excuse why they removed the base removal system I enjoyed from JC3.

Graphics
The game looks slightly worse than JC3, which I think is intentional because while JC3 looked great on Xbox One, it has extremely bad technical difficulties and crashes often. However, in JC4 the game runs smoothly throughout and the game never crashed on me through my playthrough on it. Although I don't mind a graphical downgrade, so long as the game plays great, I don't understand by Rico looks younger in this game, even though he was obviously middle aged by JC3. There is also the issue where the game's weather will just change randomly, along with the filter.

Overall, JC4's graphics are not as bad as people say. But they don't hold a candle to JC3. So that's why the graphics score a 6/10.

Voice Acting
All I'm going to say about voice acting, since most of it is pretty standard, is what happened to Rico's voice actor (Kevin Collins) from JC3? I personally think he had the best voice for Rico, because he sounded stoic and heroic. Now they replaced him with someone who tries to sound like Collins, but you know it isn't him.

-Editor's Note- Found out that the same Kevin Collins that voiced Rico in JC3 played the game master on the original XBOX LIVE ad back in the day! Cool, huh?

Overall, the voice acting gets a 4/10. I'd rate it better if they had Collins return as Rico's voice actor.

Soundtrack
JC4 has a similar sounding original score to JC3, but I personally prefer JC3 because of Henry Jackman. However the game also has added radio stations a new feature to the Just Cause series. However there isn't many tracks in the game, and they aren't from English-speaking artists. So yeah.

So the score of JC4 gets a 6/10. It's decent, but not Henry Jackman levels of epicness.

Achievements
The achievement set of JC4, like all other Just Cause games, is single-player based so you can easily get these achievements if you wanted to spend your time on them. The hardest achievement would have to go to finding every location in the game (as they aren't marked on the map from the start and you could miss a few areas). But I haven't completed the game. Good luck on achievements and happy hunting!

Overall the achievement set gets a 5/10. It's not too hard, it's not too easy. It's probably time consuming, but they aren't too bad.

Conclusion - 2.5 OUT OF 5
Just Cause 4 is a watered-down version of JC3. With a few interesting things scattered here and there, Just Cause 4 is good for those who want a basic experience and a fun sandbox to cause mayhem without any crashing or major lagging.

I honestly don't think I'm playing the same game as the reviewers are.

Better gunplay? It feels as janky as Just Cause 3. Aiming and snapping to enemies has been like this and doesn't feel that much, if any, of an improvement over the last game.

Missions saved by the way you can handle the missions, cause there was ever a limitation for the Just Cause missions, ever. It's always been like this, so it's nothing new.

The maps huge, but with so little in it it's kinda pointless, made even more aware by being so big and so much of it goes unused. Pretty world, but dead.

Twisters are cool the first few times. But afterward, it's kind of an annoyance. Yet another thing to slow down progression during a mission or collectible hunt.

The "fake" war at the borders are nothing but map detail to show you visually where the border between your captured areas and the enemies. That's it. No side will ever win and push the other forward or backward. Even if you destroy every enemy, more will just turn up.

The stupid skill challenges are back, easily the worst part about Just Cause 3 was to progress you are required to do these pointless challenges, over and over to unlock new skills. Why bring that back. Urgh...

My experience with the series is that I have 100% the first and second. A great many hours on the third. And way less on the forth. Will not be going back into it. Except for an eventual Achievement hunt. Even then, it will be a chore to do.