Just Cause 4 brings the thunder and the noise, but forgets its raincoat

There’s plenty of chaos, destruction and exciting action to be had in Just Cause 4, but there’s a couple flaws that hamper the experience.

If you’re a gamer of a certain age, you’ll remember with fondness the excesses of a big-budget 1980s action movie where everything exploded, the hero had an improbable number of abs, guns only needed reloading to facilitate dialogue, and corny one-liners were obligatory when doing something very cool.

The Just Cause series of games certainly remembers these times well, with each instalment coming up with newer, ever more chaotic ways to wreak havoc in its setting — and Just Cause 4 is no exception.

Developed by Avalanche Studios and published by Square Enix on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the game once again casts you as super-agent Rico Rodriguez, deposer of dictators, exploder of vehicles, destroyer of worlds and master of the grappling hook for fun and profit.

Described by one character in the game as “the da Vinci of violence”, Rico is a fun character who is well aware that most of the situations he finds himself in are some degree of ridiculous, and has absolutely no qualms about tethering enemy soldiers to rockets, attaching two helicopters together via rocket-grapples, or making a getaway via parachute.

Much like an FN Minimi light machinegun, Just Cause 4 is lots of fun in bursts. Bases are just full of things to blow up, enemies to be disposed of, and vehicles to be hijacked, and stuff which can go boom.

The problem is the pacing is uneven and even gets repetitive at times — the missions are largely, “go to this point on the map, shoot up this base or race around it trying to access consoles before a timer runs out” — and the one thing I never, ever want in my open-world destruction derby is a timer.

Skydiving into a tornado while things explode is a typical Tuesday for Rico Rodriguez.

Whereas Just Cause 2 and Just Cause 3 revelled in the chaos they encouraged the players to create, Just Cause 4 takes several hours to really build up to the fun stuff advertised on the tin, namely harnessing the weather to really mess your enemies up and generally getting thoroughly silly.

When it kicks off, it’s on for young and old, but then you’re overwhelmed with explosions and chaos and flying bodies and vehicles and debris and bullets and livestock.

The physics in the game are a mess, and not in the fun way they were last time. Trying to escape from an enemy ambush, my armoured personnel carrier hit a rock, flipped several times and then landed upside down in a river. A jet collided with my helicopter, causing my helicopter to barrel roll uncontrollably then seemingly teleport a jump to the left and then a step to the right. This sort of thing is hilarious when you’re doing it to hapless baddies, but it brings the fun to a grinding stop when it happens to you.

Your wingsuit and parachute are great for making a mid-explosion getaway.

There’s a terribly explained plot here, even by Just Cause standards — something to do with the El Presidente of a generic South American banana republic harnessing the weather as a weapon for reasons and maybe having killed your dad for not inventing the weather weapon enough — it doesn’t really matter since the point of the game is to make things go boom, and you’ll be too busy doing that to really care about the why. International geopolitics has never been Rico’s strongpoint, after all.

Unlike its predecessors, however Just Cause 4 never really felt like it was activating the giggle switch and just getting out of the way to let me have fun wrecking a bunch of stuff. While there’s plenty of stuff to blow up, it wasn’t quite as satisfying as last time in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

On that note, while there’s plenty of guns in Just Cause 4, there aren’t any grenades or C4 in the game — so no “walking away from explosions while not looking at them” anymore, either. It’s a curious misstep and their absence is sorely noted.

The star of the show remains Rico’s grappling hook, which not only allows him to zip around the world but also attach balloons and rockets to pretty much anything — and yes, you can attach a balloon to an enemy jeep, floating it into the air above a canyon before deflating the balloon and leaving the jeep to free-fall towards becoming an explosion. The menus and process for modifying his grappling hook are unnecessarily complicated, but it is a lot of fun and a big part of the game’s attraction is seeing what amusing scenarios you can create with it. His parachute and wingsuit return, further adding to the fun.

But between the missions which boiled down to the same thing, an army management screen that seemed largely irrelevant (the army never accomplishes anything, with Rico doing all the heavy lifting anyway), and weird controls (who on Earth decided the map screen should be “1” on PC and not “M” like nearly every other game in existence?), clunky interface and terrible AI, I just couldn’t shake the feeling Just Cause 4 wasn’t living up to its potential.

In fitting with the rest of the series, Just Cause 4 has quite the body count.

The game was full of embarrassing and inadvertently hilarious glitches and bugs which caused things like patrol ships to suddenly fly through the air, helicopters to teleport into each other, and armoured cars to tip over after hitting minor obstacles.

The only thing that stops these from being extremely irritating is the chaotic nature of the game, where you tend to just roll with this stuff — until it causes the game to break (such as by trapping your boat halfway up a cliff after failing to clear a jump properly), when a checkpoint restart might be in order.

There was so much potential here to build on the previous game and make Just Cause 4 a must-have title, but Avalanche managed to drop the grenade and present something that ended up being good but not great for me.

Part of the issue is that, alongside the bugs and glitches, this is the fourth iteration of pretty much exactly the same game, and even the inclusion of weather (which doesn’t play as big a part as the pre-release hype suggests, at least from my experience) wasn’t enough to shake the “Didn’t I already play this game?” feeling.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of fun to be had in Just Cause 4. But it’s still got some pretty glaring technical issues and given all the other amazing titles around at the moment, it’s hard to recommend this as a worthy recipient of your gaming time at the moment — at least until those issues are addressed and it goes on sale at some point in the future.