When Just Cause 3 launched in December 2015 it was a game
people wanted to love because it was massive and generally fun, but an abysmal
framerate and lengthy load times killed the joy a bit. Fast forward to 2018,
though, when the game can regularly be found on sale complete with all of its
DLC for dirt-cheap and suddenly all of those issues sort of fade away. If you
love giant sandbox games that let you just goof off and have fun, and you have
$12 to spare, there is no reason not to play Just Cause 3. Continue reading for
our full review.
Game Details
- Publisher: Square Enix
- Developer: Avalanche Studios
- ESRB Rating: “M” for Mature
- Genre: Action
- Pros: Incredibly fun gameplay; intuitive controls; tons of content; nice visuals
- Cons: Exceedingly poor performance; a bit repetitive
- MSRP: $45* (buy it on sale for much less!)
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| Buy PSN Gift Card at Amazon.com |
I’ll start this off by saying that I gave the original
release of Just Cause 3 a lower score back when I reviewed the Xbox One version
for About.com. That was back when it was $60, though, and things change as time
goes on and prices go down. These days the Just Cause 3 XL Edition, which comes
with the base game plus three huge DLC expansions that add things like mechs
and other cool stuff, is on sale on Xbox Live and PSN pretty regularly for
about $12. I wouldn’t buy it for more than that, but for $12 you are getting an
incredibly good deal on, and I’m not over-exaggerating, 100+ hours of content.
It still does have some problems, which I’ll detail below, but for $12 you’ll
definitely get your money’s worth and have a good time.
Since the game is a few years old at this point, I won’t get
into the nitty gritty details too much. You play as Rico Rodriguez, a special
agent who is essentially a professional match that lights the powder keg of
revolution against brutal dictatorships around the world. In Just Cause 3 it’s
personal, however, as he returns to his home country to free his people.
The way Rico leads rebellions is by blowing up pretty much
everything he sees that carries the distinctive red paint job of the enemy.
With a combination of explosive weapons, grenades, and remote mines, as well as
standards machine guns and shotguns and stuff, he takes over military bases and
liberates towns and villages. You spend about 90% of your time freely exploring
and playing in the (massive) open world attacking bases, freeing towns, finding
hidden collectibles, and completing challenges (that give you new abilities and
upgrades) and about 10% doing story missions. The story missions are tightly
scripted and like an epic action movie while what you do in the open world is
totally up to you.
What makes the Just Cause series so fun is that traversal
around the huge maps is effortless and easy thanks to the fact that Rico has a
Spider-Man-esque tether he can swing around on as well as an infinite parachute
he can use to fly all over. Just Cause 3 makes it even better thanks to
smoother and easier controls and the addition of a wingsuit so you can just
glide all over the place. You can also use the tether to tie things together as
well, such as tying cars together, tying a soldier to a propane tank that flies
up in the air and explodes, you can tie a helicopter to the ground and reel it
in until it makes impact and blows up – pretty much anything you can imagine
doing, you can do in Just Cause 3. It’s freaking awesome.
You’re totally free to do whatever you want and you can
accomplish it pretty much whenever and however you wish. You can approach every
military base and every encounter differently and do different crazy stuff and
it always works, and it’s always fun. With that said, it’s all maybe a little
too big. You can play for hours and hours and feel like you’re accomplishing a
ton of stuff only to have a huge chunk of the map left untouched. The game can
start to feel a bit repetitive after a while because attacking bases – all with
identical fuel tanks and radio towers and other stuff – and liberating towns –
by blowing up identical speaker systems and statues of the dictator – does
start to get old after a while. As long as you don’t just grind away at the
same objectives over and over, however, and make sure to go do some other stuff
in between, it’s not so bad, though.
Of course, the elephant in the room whenever you talk about
Just Cause 3 is still the long load times and poor overall performance and,
unfortunately, not much has changed since launch. The initial load time when
you start the game is much shorter than it used to be, thankfully, but other
load times such as when you die or want to restart a challenge are still pretty
lengthy. The overall performance is still pretty abysmal, though, with
framerates regularly dropping into the single digits whenever you do, well,
pretty much anything. It can be argued that blowing stuff up looks cooler in
slo-mo, which it does, but the game just crawls along at some points.
Another issue is that the game, for whatever reason, has
extensive online integration so it can keep track of everything you do and
update it to leaderboards. This is sort of cool, but Square Enix’s servers suck
and constantly disconnect you. Then the game tries to connect again and it
always takes ridiculously longer than it should. This was a problem back in
2015 on Xbox and is still a problem in 2018 on PS4 (which I’m playing it on
currently). Even when you select to play in offline mode, the game still
constantly tries to connect. They really should just turn the online features
off.
Even with these still lingering issues, however, Just
Cause 3 is a ton of fun and the XL Edition is an absolute steal if you wait to
buy it on sale. Blowing stuff up is awesome and moving around the world just
feels freaking great. The wide variety of activities you can do and the huge
amount of toys the game gives you to play with is unmatched. Just Cause 3 is
janky and runs like a pig, but dang is it fun. Don’t hesitate to buy it for
cheap.
