Official Score
Overall - 60%
60%
Just Cause 3 quickly becomes repetitive and you will find yourself asking "Is it over yet?". The potential for a great game is here but the end product leaves much to be desired.
Just Cause 3 launches and tries to live up to the hype of the much loved Just Cause 2. Does Just Cause 3 bring the magic Just Cause 2 brought to the table? Check out this honest game review to help you make your choice!
Just Cause 3 Honest Game Review
You will play in the world of Medici which is ruled by the tyrannical Dictator, Di Ravello. There is a rebellion brewing to take down Di Ravello, but it is currently being out gunned on every front. Enter Rico Rodriguz, hero of the rebellion and savior of the people. Your job is to even the odds in the fight against Di Ravello and his men. Story wise, this mostly consists of protection missions, escort missions and the occasional battle. The story is one of the weaker points of the game and it ends very predictably and with a terrible boss fight.
Thankfully most people are buying Just Cause 3 for something else: the chaos! I can tell you that there is plenty of that to go around in the game. I can also tell you that the game was not ready to launch. Tons of frame drops, broken textures and horrible load times await any who decide to tackle the world of Just Cause 3. You will be in the midst of taking a base with a few explosions going on and everything will just slow right down. Once or twice it would kind of be like “hey whatever” but it happens at nearly any base you attack with a missile helicopter. Just avoid explosions, right? Wrong. Everyone wants to blow things up, that’s what we picked the game up for. A couple months of polish could of greatly helped this game.
Since we are on the subject of load times, let’s talk about the games challenges. These are how you get the games many upgrades for the various weapons, vehicles and grappling hooks. There are three key problems with the challenges in this game. First, since each challenge upgrades a specific piece of equipment, you don’t get to pick where your points go. Technically you can pick where the points go in a specific tree, but each point is stuck in that tree. I know what you are thinking “oh that’s okay, I’ll just do all of the challenges!”. Let’s go ahead and dive right into problem number two: the load times. Each time you retry, it will have to reload and you will retry each challenge at least once to learn the course and get the maximum amount of gears. If you plan on doing all the challenges, you will spend around five hours just loading them up. If Fallout 4 can get things sorted in a decent amount of time, I have no idea why this game can’t. The last problem may not even be considered a problem but I beat the game with three upgrades. Put simply, the whole system can be skipped.
Let’s jump into the “online” portion of the game. You know what I think always replaces co-op? Leaderboards. Leaderboards that you can’t turn off and are constantly telling you about some random person across the planet beating your score for something you did hours ago. If that didn’t sell that fact the leaderboards replacing co-op was sarcasm, nothing will. The game would of been a much better game if you could fly around with yourz buddies and just cause havoc, heck I might of even forgave the frame issues a bit. Instead I get to learn about how Donkey_Kick221 beat my challenge score. All I want is the option to turn that off, or switch it to friends, who I might actually care about beating.
The game looks pretty good when everything loads in, I’ll give it that. The physics seem right on point when you are trying to use the Grapple to topple over a tower. The metal bends just how I would expect it to do in real life, bravo there. The explosions sound pretty epic but the gun shots sound weak by contrast.
Oh something else I want to bring up is the fact that every enemy is a bullet sponge. The game literally have one tactic, throw troops at you, troops that take a clip each to bring down. By contrast your ally rebels are absolutely terrible. It is shocking how bad they are. I’ve seen a single enemy troop put down four rebels with no trouble at all. Guess we know why they were losing the rebellion.
Last thing I want to hit on is the currency system, or rather a lack thereof. There is a plus side to not having any currency, everything is free! The down side is that everything is on a ridiculous timer. You mean to tell me that, I, the guy who just liberated the whole island for you guys, has to wait 30 minutes for a helicopter that I got for you!? I would rather earn cash and be able to call in my vehicles whenever I want. OH and you don’t have a beacon you can’t even call anything in. Good thing you could hold so many! Oh wait you get to hold one. I kind of wish I could join Di Ravello, he’d appreciate me a little more.
Just Cause 3 quickly becomes repetitive and you will find yourself asking “Is it over yet?”. The potential for a great game is here but the end product leaves much to be desired.
