izigame.me

Just Cause 3 is a videogame about destroying things and freeing a country from the evil dictator. Your grappling hook, parachute and wingsuit help you move around the island so you can destroy things quicker with your expansive arsenal of weapons and vehicles. If that got you interested, get this game on a big fat sale.
I really wish I could give this game the most neutral score possible. Not because it is bad, but because what I described is what you do in the previous games, and at least the second one does them much better.
TL;DR at the bottom, lots of complaining incoming.
The core loop is there and it's even improved. Going around the island is much quicker thanks to new and improved movement options, between the wingsuit adding a method to go faster horizontally and the slingshot ability to add further specialized movement. Destructive elements are more sturdy but can be quickly destroyed by hitting a specific weakpoint that you have to find yourself, sometimes behind a gate or by destroying a specific part. Activities like races, going through rings or destroying things now have a reason to be completed, being what unlocks new powerful abilities.
And I think that's where I run out of positive things to say about the game.
Locking character progression behind doing races and stuff is boring, especially because cars in this game SUCK. I cannot believe they were almost boasting about getting "Criterion Games" developers (from Need for Speed fame) to do vehicles, and they end up feeling the worst in the franchise. They have a weird "weight", like if Rico was actually handling the steering wheel inside the car, and like he needs to fully turn it to neutral before turning to the other side quickly. Cars are also made of paper mache, both because they lift into the air at the smallest bump and also because of how quick they explode over the smallest crash. Bikes are no different and this problem is visible, turning to one side physically rotates the bike and the character leans to that side, and so to be able to quickly turn to the other side they first need to lean back to neutral position, and then lean to the other side, making the action have a weird delay and like you're lacking control over what you're driving. This game didn't need realistic driving. I can't believe the most shared tip to complete a specific difficult bike race in the game is "Spawn a car before starting the race, then ride the car instead of the bike".
Storywise it starts somewhat interesting, Rico coming back to his home country and fighting over freeing his old friends, and hearing his origin story, and having conflicting decisions over who to trust. And it very quickly drops the ball, introducing reoccurring characters with no influence in the story, making conflicts be quickly resolved with no afterthought, making super weird plot decisions that no sane human being would actually do... they said they wanted to make the story more serious compared to JC2, and I don't think it worked out for them. The villain felt actually threatening, sure, more cunning and smart, but he didn't have the power or weaponry like Baby Panay in JC2 to back it up. I literally two shot the dude in the final fight.
And for a quickfire round for random problems I have with the game:

WHY DO YOU BLOCK SUCH A BASIC THING LIKE AIMING BEHIND PROGRESSION?!?!?!
Why is the best handling, heaviest, most durable car in the game an F1 car.
Why is turning with a plane bound to Z and C, and I'm unable to rebind it to something sane like Q or E because E ejects me from the plane with no way to rebind that. At least I got to use my controller I guess.
Why is my camera so far up my ass, and no FOV slider? I need a third party program to be able to edit it every single time I ran the game, it's honestly uncomfortable, and while it was close to the player in JC2 it was still at a more comfortable distance than now.
The minimalist HUD, probably intended to have less things on screen while you fly around, really plays against you. No way to track health, no way to track oxygen for the 3 times in the entire game that you need to go on water, randomly getting two shot because I didn't hear that the only indication of my health, a heartbeat sound which was drowned by gunfire, hadn't completely faded out, which meant I was still regenerating health.
Was my soundtrack bugged? I see the game has over 20 songs, but it felt like the same 3 played all the time, and it forced me to just mute the music about 30 hours in. I'm honestly playing some of these songs on Youtube and I have never heard them ingame.
Why is Denuvo still in this game 7 years after being released. Why do I need to confirm I still own the game every week. Please Square Enix.
After about 2-3 hours the game starts to break down on me. Particle effects stretch across my screen, models start stretching weirdly, low poly models don't unload; my GPU isn't running hot enough to cause this and the problems have persisted through driver updates.
Also to note, I almost immediately blocked this game from my firewall, and installed a "Skip Intros" mod. Doing both massively speeds up the game boot up time from over 3 minutes down to like 20 seconds at worst. The only multiplayer element in the game is Leaderboards so I really see no reason to have online activated. And disabling it improved my game performance.... what?
The only thing I'm missing to complete is the DLC, and I will update this review when I finish them.
I'm very critical over this game because I like the franchise. I like having this big fat "Ubisoft open world" map that I can quickly traverse across and cause chaos just because xd. Having them regress so much after a successful attempt, with no one catching it or recommending changes is baffling to me. I understand it was a "team B" developing this game while the "A team" developed Mad Max, but were they so far up theirs thinking that they were able to create a better game than the other team and just completely ignored all feedback, or even worse, thought that the game was fine? Did Squeenix force them to just launch the game as it was, but they weren't able to release bugfixes or changes to make the game feel better? I honestly need a post-mortem of this game, hell even the franchise in general, where did it go wrong?.
TL;DR: If you like shooting things that explode and cool fast movement systems and don't care for story, get this game on a big sale. It's a great experience for those factors I myself wouldn't recommend it to people coming from Just Cause 2 because it's honestly so rough seeing these changes. But it's not a bad, unfinished game, it just has weird changes, and maybe you can live with them. If so, hope you have fun. I certainly tried to.