Just Cause 4 Review

I finally finished the entire Just Cause series and... oh boy, wasn't that interesting. I already knew some details about Just Cause 4 not being the cherry on the top of the series, but I had some expectations based on the radical evolution from Just Cause 1 to 3. To summarize everything:

Just Cause was a buggy mess that many would not finish, but still I stayed with it until the end, even through I had to restart the final mission because my plane didn't spawn.
Just Cause 2 was a big improvement from the first, a complete game that kept you entertained from start to finish, except from the times when you just wandered around collecting health kits.
Just Cause 3 was the entire Just Cause 2 rebuild with better graphics and gameplay mechanics. The story was a little bit unpolished at the end, but still good.

The story

I can describe this story in only one way: rushed, not even unpolished, the story is unfinished; if in Just Cause 3 everything had a cutscene, now only the most important ones have one, and it's pre-rendered. There are only 3 cutscenes made in the engine, and those are 10 seconds long. Except for the fact that Rico it's Rico and Sheldon it's Sheldon with some remainders of Medici, the entire plot is not a continuation of Just Cause 3 DLC. Some context and a major spoiler if you didn't play the DLC from the last game, the Black Hand steals the tech plans from every DLC story, but the Mechs, Eden tech and the Luchador are not even mentioned, there's only a mech hidden in the Rebel drop, one that can go unnoticed the entire game.

Anyway the plot takes place in Solís, the home of Black Hand, where Espinoza, the cutscene villain, alongside Gabriela, the cutscene army leader, is using a weather weapon, built by Rico's father before he was assassinated. If it wasn't obvious, the cutscene villains aren't present in the game at all. There's no encounter whatsoever with any of them, you don't feel their presence like you use to with Di Ravello in 3 or Baby Panay in 2. The personality cult from the previous games where you just wanted to destroy every propaganda asset in the city with the annoying Baby Panay voice, like watch this video and tell me you don't want to destroy that thing.

But, let's get beck to the story, as we will have enough "remember the previous games" moments later. You encounter the weather weapon right at the start of the game, and realize that you can't go for Espinoza unless you destroy the main points that hold the weapon working. During your initial attack, you manage to destroy all your equipment, fortunately you have only a few minutes of walking without the cable, until you reach the first location. On this wonderful location, you encounter Gabriela directly in another cutscene... at least, this is one of the best cutscenes in the game - video here.

From here, the revolution starts with Rico as the main leader, something different from 3 where you're just a soldier, the revolution started long before your arrival in Medici.

Main missions

The main missions are as usual about 20% of the time you're going to spend in the game, but if you think you're gonna fast-forward through them and skip the rest of the game, you're kinda wrong, because you have to capture each region before accessing a mission. The system is interesting, because you only need to attack some strategic points like facilities and military bases before capturing a region. The bad part is that that's just it, the system even through it's interesting it could've been so much more, like you can only get a random event where you kill some soldiers at the border for chaos points because it doesn't matter if you attack the border, the lines are always still, the Black Hand doesn't conquer anything back, there isn't any management of the army, you're just deploying squads, that will stay there fighting the new border until the next conquer.

Another fact that shows that the game is unfinished are the cutscenes. This particular one shows that you can count the pixels on some objects from, again, the main mission cutscenes. And if you're thinking I have something wrong with my setup, remember that these are pre-rendered scenes.

Secondary missions

This is one of the main parts of the game, so it must be fun or interesting to do it... right? Nope, not in this game. These are the most repetitive and annoying missions you will find in a game. Why is that you're asking? It's because 9 out of 10 missions you're doing for the army is about helping recruits. In a game that you're playing with the best of the best killing machines, you have to take care of trainees, sometimes just piloting a helicopter waiting for the newbies to take the shot already, so you can finish the mission.

One more interesting than this, but also a little repetitive, are the missions from Javi, where you discover the history of Solis by solving puzzles, where you have to bring a big headstone to a certain point, something that annoyed me was the fact that you don't even get to explore half the location and the game shows you the answer.... Like, thanks, I was exploring already too much in this game.

Challenges

The number of challenges is considerable big in this game, but don't get your hopes too high, because these aren't the same as the ones from 3. They tried to give the best reasonable explanation for them, and this is about a movie director, 'Gaarland' that requires your skills for movie stuns. This is one of the things that annoyed me because the location completion is based on them. Don't get me wrong, I liked them and completed all of them, but because the location progression was based on them, I only did them and moved forward to the next location, for this reason I missed many things around the location, my attention being focused on the stunts not on the location.
If you remember the wing suit challenges from 3 you're gonna be disappointed because here you don't have to fly entire minutes through obstacles, hitting only the middle circle for maximum points; you just have to pass through 3 circles in a given amount of time.
There are also speed targets and passing with a vehicle that you have to find, nothing is given to you, but it's always close, ish...

The map

The map is literally huge, a big open world full of cities packed full of destructible environment and challenges. Too bad that's all of it...

The map is full of locations with respawnable objects, everything you destroy is back after you get far enough or fast travel to another location. The only purpose of these objects are to create chaos, to feed up the level of chaos that is also the level of the army. There's nothing more, which is somehow logic, but it takes away all the progression felling that was so intense in the previous games. This might not look too important, but it actually was one of the main attractions of this series.

One major disappointment for me for a map at this scale is the lack of collectibles, and I don't mean there are too few of them, there are none. One of the biggest open world in a video game doesn't give you any reason to explore it, except for Easter eggs, in this case, their number is unusual high, but I think I'm gonna left them for another post as this review is already getting long anyway.

Another thing is the dimension of the cities/locations, and I'm not talking about the fact that the capital is just a little bigger than an ordinary city, about 1/3 of what was in previous games. I'm talking about the fact that the next image is considered a location.... because what you see in there is the entire "village".

Theaters Upgrade system

Doing challenges, random events and secondary missions will grand you upgrade points to unlock mods, so many modes that you will lose yourself in them not knowing what to use. Besides the fact that you get way more points than you will possibly need in this game. For example I had 50000 stunt point out of 10000 needed to unlock every stund mode.
Every new system for theaters has 5 mods that each has even more customizable stuff. For example a mod for retracting speed will have 4 speeds: slow, mid, high or not retracting at all. Same goes for baloons and boosters. And you can combine all of them, which is nice especially for some stunts, but since I'm already complaining, the effort putted in this could've been putted in another part of the game that required more attention.