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Just Cause 3: It’s difficult to know what to say about this game other than – BUY IT!
In a year of games glitching upon release, such as Batman: Arkham Knight and I’m still waiting for Call Of Duty: Black Ops III to behave, this title also had frame-rate issues early on, but just over a week after release and it’s all settled down and you can buy with confidence.
There is a plot, of sorts, which is set several years after Just Cause 2‘s events and sees Rico Rodriguez return to the fictional island of Medici in the Mediterranean, which is suffering from their own Fidel Castro-type dictator, General Sebastiano Di Ravello. He wants to take over the world and you’re the man to stop him. I could go into more detail, but you’re just there to blow shit up. As the song goes, “Hardcore. You know the score!”
Numbers fans will need to know that the game’s map is around the same size as that of the prequel (400 square miles) but due to (fancy word alert!) volumetric terrain, you can investigate the stratosphere a lot more – increased height, in layman’s terms, plus checking out subterranean caverns, while buildings are more to scale – so, it’s everything you like, but better.
As you proceed, you’ll unlock new missions and challenges, so it partly might feel linear in that you can’t do every mission instantly, but only so much as in Grand Theft Auto, for example, as new elements unlock as you go, but similarly there’s still plenty in there to allow you to choose which of those available you want to do and in what order. Challenges include the Wingsuit Course – basically, it’s like one of those games you’ve experienced before where you’re flying through circles floating in the air, the points increasing depending on how well you do; the Scrapyard Scramble gets you to utilise up to six tethers at once, while Destruction Frenzy presents you with homing grenades that explode on impact!!
Rather than simply gun down a load of baddies, I find it’s more fun to throw your grapple hook into one, kick him over as you arrive to greet his torso, then gun down some of the others, and finally turn on the one you just knocked to the ground. Hiiiiiiiiiiii-yah! (I’m channelling my inner-Hong Kong Phooey, there!)
I also love to attach one end of the grapple to an enemy soldier, then the other to a high wall, then reel him in and watch his neck break! YES!!!
You can also unock the Bomber Jet, Navajo Assault Chopper and also the UPU Grenade Launcher (see if you can guess what that does??), and don’t forget to try out the Explosive Hover Car and also the The Human/Cow Catapult (say whaaaaa?). Yes, I haven’t suffered brain damage – you can hook up two tethers to an object and a rooftop – instead of just the one I alight to above, then reel them in… Release at just the right moment and send it flying into the air. Throw in explosives and… KABLAMMO!! And get loads of points. And what do points make? ….yes, more points.
There’s an online leaderboard tells you who parachuted higher than you, or whether you’ve wingsuited further than them, and so on. It’s not necessary but it’s a bit of fun. It has been commented on the Steam forums that this element has reduced the frame rate because it’s constantly running in the background, although I’m running a very fast PC with a GTX980 graphics card and 16Gb RAM, so haven’t noticed any issues with this before the patch.
Before that, however, there were a few graphical glitches making it slow down on the PC, despite Avalanche Studios being the ones who made Mad Max fly by without any issues.
A couple of niggles. When the game tells me to get to an area before a mission starts, I wish it would place a waypoint automatically, so I know where I’m going. Also, it can get repetitive at times, but on the plus side, the adventures of Rico Rodriguez only come round every 4-5 years, unlike Call Of Duty and Assassins Creed which are annual and have reached the point where they need to be rested for a while.
There’s a couple of videos accompanying this review, but oddly, the game only goes up to 50fps rather than Mad Max‘s 60fps. Why is this?
Check out more videogame footage on the DVDfeverGames Youtube Channel!
Just Cause 3 is out now on PS4, Xbox One and PC, and click on the packshot for the full-size version.
Important info:
- Publisher: Square Enix
- Players: single player campaign; online leaderboard
- HDTV options: 1080p
- Sound: DTS 5.1
|
GRAPHICS SOUND GAMEPLAY ENJOYMENT |
9 10 10 9 |
| OVERALL | 9.5 |
Director: Roland Lesterlin
Screenplay: Katie Ellwood
Sound Department: Eilam Hoffman
Cast:
Rico Rodriguez: Kevin Collins
Teo: Joseph Ademola Adeyemo
General Di Ravello: Jon Avner
Dimah Ali Umar al-Masri: Sahar Bibiyan
Black Hand: Dennis Flanagan
Sheldon: Bill Lobley
Mario Frigo: Armando Riesco
Rosa Manuela: Barbara Rosenblat
Annika: Sandy Rustin
Propaganda Minister: David Tennant
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.