izigame.me

Just Cause 4 should have been the sandbox to end all sandboxes. The franchise itself represented a departure from the usual rules of the open world sandbox by allowing the players un-parallelled mobility, and Just Cause 3 took this player mobility to it's logical conclusion as well as abandoning any pretense of trying to gate keep the player's power level behind contrived obstacles.
Just Cause 4 was a day one purchase for me. I was a huge fan of the franchise when it existed, and within an hour of firing it up I had already rage quit and didn't touch it again for 6 years.
Where did it all go wrong? There's a whole story here about the closure of Avalanche New York, private investment, tax policy, greed, and art for profit's sake, but rather than marinating on the game we should have played, lets talk about the one we got:
Solis is beautiful, but dead compared to JC3s Medici and especially JC2's Panay... there is actually quite a lot of character to the world and some incredible location design... but the game only bothers to engage you with it once. The story missions, strikes, etc never start to feel like an organic part of the world around you. Just Cause 4's challenges never rise above the level of menial nonsense. Everything just feels like it was pasted into the world. Did you find a light house? You bet your sweet bippy there's gonna a wing suit challenge where you have to flop lazily to the ground through the exact same three rings as the other twenty lighthouses pasted along the shore. There's something to the order of 300 such challenges the game asks you to complete, but if I had to guess I would say there are actually fewer than 30 unique challenges and the rest is just "That other challenge, but over here now."
A not-insignificant portion of the game just... literally does not work. Stunt ramps are placed against oncoming traffic, which in itself would not be a problem except for the algorithm the game uses to populate the world around you. The game will ALWAYS draw a car at a position relative to your location to keep the world busy. In the event of oncoming traffic, this system then works with the NPCs self-preservation, to guarantee that on five out of five approaches to a poorly placed ramp, an NPC in the oncoming traffic lane will ALWAYS stop between the player and the ramp.
So you start problem solving. Maybe if you block traffic, you think, that will solve the problem. But it never does. Now imagine spending multiple minutes/attempts/deaths trying to get just ONE of what should be some of the easiest stunts in the game, and when you finally manage to set it up so that you can actually hit the ramp, it dead-stops your vehicle killing you instantly because the stunt ramp was never set up at an appropriate level to the ground in the first place or the developers just never bothered to check if the vehicle they assigned to that challenge had the wheel clearance to actually use the ramp they placed.
At the highest level, you really only have two or three attempts at any given task before the background noise of freedom fighters, Blackhand soldiers, panicked bystanders, and exploding combinations of all three makes success, if not survival, an impossibility. A cascade of small annoyances quickly gather strength into an Avalanche of bullshit. The faster you learn to never trust the developers or their intended solutions to any of the missions or puzzles in the game, the happier you are bound to be.
Every Strike mission in the game relies on an infinite supply of enemies to make the challenge. Most of the times this doesn't make much of a difference... but on a few select missions the game decides to add another infinite supply of enemies which quickly breaks the game.
Sargento's storyline culminates in a mission called Beachhead that mandates you be pursued by two gunship helicopters at all times. It also mandates that you sink several large warships. The type of ammunition that you need to handle both of these tasks is finite, and if you're at all clever you quickly see where that mission becomes a seriously un-fun slog. Even if you luck out and are able to tether the two gunships together before they can start making your life difficult, two more instantly spawn. I don't mean, "two more will eventually show up." I mean, two new helicopters will INSTANTLY spawn behind you. They will already be targeting you before the last two chassis hit the ground.
Negotiating enemy escalation with the AI in this game honestly feels like arguing with someone who is too committed to admit they were wrong. On a fairly regular basis, the game will just forget that the enemy is supposed to stop looking for you after a while. Like when you're grappled to the top of a cave, in the middle of nowhere, with no enemy soldiers around for kilometers.
Like before, this would just be a minor annoyance by itself... by the time you have boosters and air lifters dealing with most enemy units is facile. But after a long enough time being hunted, the game seems to decide that the only way to deescalate is to just kill you outright. Enemy air units will literally start to kamikaze you with a predictability that would make Darth Bob blush. The combination of these two factors does occasionally result in hilarity, like when you spend ten minutes grappled to the ceiling of said cave just to listen to the game endlessly call in air support only for the Blackhand jets to explode trying to fly through the mountain to reach you.
If you're a huge fan of capture & control game play and sandbox games, you can probably squeeze enough blood out of this stone to make it worth a deeply discounted purchase. However, if you're a die-hard fan of the franchise who just finished 3 and is hoping for the next big blow-out... keep looking.