JUST CAUSE 3 – A PlayStation Plus Primer

Just Cause 3 is this month’s free PS Plus game. Here’s what you need to know about it.

Is it just me, or is PS plus really getting its shit together lately? I’m mostly going off of one month here, but in that month we’ve had free copies of Until Dawn (a cracking horror game that’s an absolute blast to play when there’s someone else in the room laughing and squirming along with you) and the season pass to Telltale’s Game of Thrones – a game whose first episode alone, I believe, was once given away on PS Plus as that month’s big game. This upcoming month we’ve got bits such as an add on for Assassin’s Creed Black Flag that sounds quite nice indeed, but the main draw is 2015’s batshit loopy open-world game Just Cause 3. This is a game I absolutely urge you to grab a hold of and ahead of its deal, I have returned to the world of Medici in order to present you with a bit of an introduction for what you’re getting into. Because Just Cause 3 is a game with a very simple aim, but it’s also a complex, unwieldy little beast.

QUICK INFO:

Genre: Open World/Sandbox/Action

Install time: Moderate. Whilst the game is installing, you can run around an unpopulated island (except for goats) and blow things up to pass the time.

Platinum-ability: Ruddy difficult. The challenges alone will have you tearing your hair out trying to five star/gear them all.

What is Just Cause 3?

Ostensibly, Just Cause 3 is an open world sandbox game in which you play as Rico Something-Or-Other – an agent who specialises in the liberation of islands from their totalitarian regimes, through the power of explosions. Oh and a a grappling hook, infinite parachutes and a wingsuit.

As you might have guessed, Just Cause 3 is a sequel. I myself haven’t actually touched the first entry, but I have played Just Cause 2 – the game in which many believe the series found its key draw and moved away from the likes of Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row. That key draw? Stupidity. Stupidity and Explosions. See, Just Cause 2 had more of a focus on making the player feel like an action movie badass, with the various car chases and action moments that the player found themselves in, all constructed so as to emphasise as much ‘action movie’-ness as possible. The game was rigged in simple ways, such as how smashing your car into an enemy would have little effect on it, unless you exited the vehicle first, in which case it would explode in a fiery inferno. These little ways of rigging the game were such that the player could actually indulge in these ‘action scenes’ organically as and when they wanted. Wandering into an army base would do it, as would getting into a bog-standard chase with a police. Rico’s grappling hook and infinite parachute rounded off the experience with a game that remarkably enough, I still occasionally dabble in to this day.

And yet, thanks to retrospect, Just Cause 2 merely looks like a slightly noisy James Bond film next to the squealing Michael Bay descendant that is Just Cause 3.

Just Cause 3 is the developers gaining full awareness of its predecessors insanity, rubbing their hands together and turning the dial up to 11. The explosions are bigger, the world is larger, the grenades are grenadey-er. All those little things that Just Cause 2 did to turn things into an action film are made even sillier than before – a good example being petrol stations, which now explode for what seems like an eternity and will also respawn once you move away from them. Or how about the many bridges that litter the island, which explode in glorious ‘next gen’ o-vision if you attend to them with mines or missiles.

The game’s liberation objectives have been redesigned as well. Collectibles are in short supply, with the vast majority of liberations coming from destroying objects rather than acquiring them. It all adds up to make for a sandbox experience that’s really quite surprisingly unlike any other on the PS4.

So let’s take a (sky)dive into this a little deeper.

Story. What is it?

Basically non-existent. Well, that’s a lie actually. The game has a disarmingly dense storyline with lots of one-take cutscenes that go on for longer than should be legal in a Just Cause game. The reason I claim that the story is non-existent is that your brain just simply refuses to let you recall it after hearing it. It’s so bizarrely dense, so awkwardly executed and so antithetical to what you will want to be doing in the game that you will eventually refuse to even acknowledge its existence. The developers claimed that they were surprised to find people knocking Just Cause 2 as they believed the script to be excellent – a claim that only confirms them to be as insane as their games would suggest. I assume they view Just Cause 3 as gaming’s answer to Citizen Kane, because it is basically Just Cause 2 but more. It’s delivered with stunningly stale cinematography/editing and some of the funniest voice acting that completely blurs the line between intentional and not (Just Cause 2's voice acting can be sampled here). Like I said, the story is practically non-existent. At best, kind of amusing, but not quite enough for my tastes.

Uh-huh. And the gameplay?

But who cares about story in a Just Cause game, except its developers (sort of)? The story here is really nothing more than a coat hanger to hold up the game’s preposterous open-world mechanics – it provides a huge island and lots of things on it that go boom. And when I say a huge island, I mean huge. You know that moment modern games give you where you open the map and zoom out, thereby realising that the area you have been exploring is in fact, only a tenth of the whole map. Well there’s one of those moments in Just Cause 3, only the scale that this game achieves makes you feel like you’re zooming out to reveal an entire globe. I have had Just Cause 3 since Christmas 2015 and I still haven’t reached the mainland (though that’s not from continuous play – something I’ll get back to later).

For gameplay, imagine the sort of bread and butter elements that make up your average GTA: on foot, cars, bikes, boats, planes, helicopters, police chases all that jazz. Now throw in a grappling hook, parachute and wingsuit and you have a pretty good idea of what Just Cause 3 is like to play. The (infinite) parachute is an element that sort of speaks for itself, but the grappling hook is a slightly different beast. Not just for hurtling around like Spiderman, the grappling hook can also be used to attach multiple tethers to objects and then retract the tether. The possibilities from this are, as you might imagine, potentially endless and often hilarious. You can take down entire bases without a single explosive thanks to these tethers if you want to. The same trick from Just Cause 2 still applies, wherein you can combine the parachute and grappling hook for quick travel. Or, you could use the new wingsuit – the fastest form of non-vehicular transportation and something which actually takes a decent level of skill to maneouvre properly. In fact, it’s this skill requirement that makes the wingsuit and the rest of the game mechanics so fun. The game doesn’t entirely spoon-feed you your badassery – you have to earn some of it. And yes, you can combine the wingsuit and grapple hook and effectively turn Rico into a human bird.

Objectives?

Liberate Medici (the island) province by province, ranging from towns to army bases and oilrigs. This commonly involves being presented with a list of items to get rid of, the completion of which results in the expulsion of the local authorities. This sounds dull, but it’s really just a bunch of basic objections that presents you with an opportunity to take Rico and his equipment (ahem) for a spin. Carry out the stunts properly and you can achieve symphonies of largely unscripted destruction that are unparalleled in modern gaming. There are also missions that you’ll want to do to progress through the island with a bit more structure, but will largely forget about afterwards.

But really, Just Cause 3 is a sandbox game, which means that often the most fun comes from your own objectives (or no objectives at all). Simple police chases can escalate into crazy you-against-the-army chases across the world map. Or how about when you realise that the enormous trains throughout the island can be fully derailed, for seemingly no practical reason whatsoever. Or how about fitting boost mines to the bottom of cars, slingshotting them into the air with your tethers and seeing whether the boost mines can keep it airborne? This is a game that encourages some inventiveness to get the most out of it and getting to play around in that area is an absolute blast.

So far, so good...

Just Cause 3 can be terrific fun and so far, it sounds like a pretty straightforward game. Big island, big action, ignore the voice acting and you’re sorted, right?

Well, unfortunately, this is the part of the primer where Just Cause 3 hits the skids and is also the part that kind of drove me to write this piece. Because the game does have problems and they are ones that are incredibly hard to ignore; ones that have stopped me from reaching the game’s main island, despite me owning the game for almost two years now. So let’s go through them…

Technicalities

By far the biggest problem with Just Cause 3 – certainly the most widely reported problem – is its technical issues. Put simply, Just Cause 3 feels like its hanging together with PVA glue, occasionally to the point of feeling unfinished. The main culprit is the framerate, which I would probably best describe as ‘malnourished’. This means when you’ve set off a chain of explosions large enough to trigger an event horizon, the game will compensate by grinding down the framerate to the speed of a CCTV camera. In case you were wondering, this is not an irregular occurrence. Then there’s the loading times which can reach a length so ridiculous that you will be forced to take a shave by the time a level has reloaded.

Compounding these kinds of technical problems is the games hideous insistence on online leaderboard and connectivity. Booting up the game incurs an irritatingly long connection test, regardless of whether you have an internet connection or not. Then once you’re in the game, a leaderboard of your friends (and strangers) stats will scroll uselessly at the side of your screen. Its useless and obnoxious and I’m somewhat convinced that it tanks the framerate and technical performance even further. So there’s that to enjoy.

You’re making things difficult…

Then there’s the game’s difficulty, which seems to be something that people are disagreeing about but I'm flagging it up anyway.

Just Cause 2 came with a handy selection of skill requirements, so that difficulty-averse gamers such as myself could sit back and play the game without so much as hint of perspiration. Just Cause 3, however, has opted for a more rigid approach of removing such a variety of choice, thus fixing the game to what is probably supposed to be a sort of ‘medium’ difficulty.

However, in practice this has resulted in what I can charitably describe as pure distilled bullshit. Enemies respawn behind you unannounced, the possess the aiming ability to bullseye you across a military base with a grenade launcher and can withstand more bullets than Ben Stiller at the beginning of Tropic Thunder. That’s not even counting the various challenges, which require upgrades (mods) to efficiently complete, but must be completed in order to unlock said mods. Those challenges actually really rankle me as they hide most of the game’s fun stuff (extra tethers etc.) behind a skill wall, which feels a little antithetical to a game so dedicated to making you have fun that it hands over infinite mines right from the off.

The difficulty is annoying, but now imagine it coated in a framerate whose favourite Aesop novel is clearly ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’. It’s excruciating and whilst I previously acknowledged my appreciation for how the game demands skill to fly the wingsuit properly etc., it would take an inhuman level of skill to properly navigate some of the BS that Just Cause 3 throws at you.

I flag these up as issues for the reason that it is far better to know in advance that they will be an annoyance. There’s no real getting over them, but knowing that Just Cause 3 is somewhat broken and that you can still have fun in spite of that, might just help you continue to enjoy your free PS Plus game, even when it is testing your patience.

Also…

But on top of all of that, there’s the slightly more esoteric issue that, unlike in Just Cause 2, there’s a feeling that the game is being a bit too encouraging when it comes to making things crazy. The way it forks over infinite explosives and has explosive-centric challenges amongst other things, eventually cobbles together an image that what you’re doing in the game is what you are supposed to do. Which, weirdly enough, kind of takes the fun out of things. In Just Cause 2, yes everything was rigged to work in your favour, but it wasn’t too obvious with it, almost to the point where you were unsure if the developers knew what it is they had come up with. As a result, dicking around in the game felt weirdly mischievous and it just made everything feel…funnier. I mean, think of a time you played a game and exploited some sort of glitch or gameplay mechanic to come up with something silly that wasn’t intended by the developers – its often incredibly funny. But in Just Cause 3, the developers clearly learnt from Just Cause 2 what it was they had on their hands and capitalised upon it. The result is a bit like a dirty joke that your teacher just googled the meaning of and is now dropping into conversation. It feels a little bit…lame. It’s probably why the most fun comes from mucking around with the new tether system or the new boost mines – the results are fairly unconventional within the game, even for Just Cause 3 and so as a result it feels fresher.

I think this might actually be the overriding reason why Just Cause 2 doesn’t yet feel obsolete for me. Aside from that game’s technical performance being a great deal more polished than its sequel, mucking about in Just Cause 2 can feel more entertaining. Even if it's very hard to go back once you've got a whiff of Just Cause 3's new toys.

But…

Having said that, complaining that Just Cause 3 wants you to have fun does have a whiff of grouchiness about it, even if I feel that it is a fairly fundamental part of why I’m not belting the game’s praises. This is still an open world game unlike any other on the PS4 – an ambitious crazy screaming maniac of a game that looked at the power of modern gaming and decided it was going to use it to render the most absurd explosions possible. It might have forgotten to point the power of the PS4 towards the framerate area but I guess if the various update files haven’t fixed that by now, then we should probably just accept it as part of the game by this point.

Look, if you’ve got PS Plus, you were going to get this anyway and frankly, you'd be slightly crazy not to. But through this primer, I hope I have managed to elucidate and illustrate just what makes Just Cause 3 such a good time, as well as what makes it such a frustrating one. For me, the good is worth sticking out the bad for. So get stuck in and experiment. Medici isn’t going to liberate itself.

Just Cause 3 is PS Plus' free game of the month for August 2017.

Also available on Xbox One and PC. Presumably not for free.

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