Chris Capel blows a lot of s**t up

It’s rare for a single developer to release two games within a few months of each other, especially if that team hasn’t released any games at all for five years. Avalanche Studios, creators of the Just Cause series and the recently released okayish Mad Max, are just such a developer since Just Cause 3 will be out on December 1st. Yes, this year. That’s two gigantic open-world games just three months apart. Wow. Pace yourselves, guys.

BOOOOOM

Suffice to say though, Just Cause 3 is the biggie. Previous game Just Cause 2 was and still is a revelation in open world gaming - a huge set of islands where fun and destruction was the name of the game, with so many options to accomplish just that. Storyline could frankly go hang as you hang-glided onto airplanes and crashed them into big floating casinos in the sky. Only Saint’s Row prioritised fun in open-world gaming as much, and those games were all confined to a single city each time whereas Just Cause 2 had a country to play with - including land, air, sea, and island from LOST.

So you’ll forgive me if I skip the usual preamble involving the story. Basically previous protagonist Rico Rodriguez (if you remembered his name you’ve got a better memory than me) has returned to his Mediterranean home country of Medici to find it under the brutal rule of dictator General Di Ravello. Rico plans to kick his ass by blowing up as much of Medici as he can manage by himself. Which is a lot. Anything else involving the story can be skipped as unimportant, something I rarely say about games (I even loved the story in Saint’s Row).

The main goal of Just Cause 3 is fun. And boy, was it. I tasked myself with attacking an enemy base and the sheer amount of options available to me made me want to try them all. Rockets, smashing a car through the gate and shooting up the place, leaving the car before it hits and using the momentum to carry me via parachute into the sky where I shoot soldiers from the air, ooh is that an attack helicopter I’ll have that, gun-down all soldiers and most explosives, accidentally crush myself under the roof of a building I just blew up, die, reload, play again a completely different but just as fun way. This is Just Cause 3.

It has guns too! THIS GAME HAS EVERYTHING

So far though it sounds also a lot like Just Cause 2. If anything this is my biggest worry about the game: that it’ll feel just like the last game in the series with a slight graphical upgrade. Still, what a graphical upgrade. This is a next-gen game only, and as such the physics, enemy AI and sheer amount of soldiers, vehicles and explosions on screen make it more impressive than its predecessor. This is a really lovely looking game, especially when it comes to explosions. I’m prepared to state that Just Cause 3 has the best explosions I’ve seen in gaming, and I’ve seen a lot of them.

Which is good, because they’ll be on-screen all the time. Destruction is the name of the game (well, other than “Just Cause 3”), and in this level it exceeds even the mighty king of destructability, Red Faction Guerrilla. One area I went to had a giant radar dish and several equally large antenna towers, all the size of skyscrapers and covered in explosives, helicopters, gun turrets and other things that the armed forces of Medici really didn’t want me to get my hands on. I did, and spraying a skyscraper-sized radio mast with bullets then watching the whole thing explode and collapse into the ground raining debris on the base below is a sight to behold. Then I tried the same on the radar dish and it fell on me. Impressive at least.

That particular area was part of a Challenge feature set apart from the main campaign. In it I was placed at the top of one of those big radio towers, given a rocket launcher with infinite ammo, a time limit of 1 minute 30 seconds, and a high score to beat. It was really kinda fun. It boiled Just Cause 3 down to “destroy everything as imaginatively and awesomely as possible” which I utterly appreciate. You have to get really strategic to get higher scores, such as choosing the right starting position, attaching explosive barrels to other explosives with the grapple to rack up the points, parking an attack helicopter next to a mounted gun, that kind of thing. That last point was where the radar dish hit me. Hey, I didn’t say I actually got that high score, but I’m looking forward to trying again. Hopefully there’ll be stuff like this in the main game too like there was in Saints Row, but otherwise I’ll be happy to play more of these Challenges as a break from the campaign.

These will be exploding and falling down shortly... probably on me

If I had one issue with Just Cause 3, other than it still feeling a lot like Just Cause 2, were that the controls were slightly fiddly. Granted I was playing with an Xbox One pad which is my current least favourite official gamepad, but I was still surprised how much of a struggle some things were. The Grapple in particular, the highlight of Just Cause 2, just didn’t work as well as I’d expected it to such as with knowing how far it’d reach. The new “attach two things together” ability proved particularly troublesome. The parachute/wingsuit combo were also fiddly, and I never really got all three working smoothly. I probably just needed more time with them.

And time is something I didn’t have enough of with Just Cause 3. I needed 20-30 hours and a lot of any energy drink that isn’t Tornado to really get to grips with Avalanche’s Mad Max follow-up. While Mad Max was a little disappointing we do live in hope that Just Cause 3 will be great, and I’m confident it will be. It has the solid foundation of Just Cause 2 to build from for a start, and from the little time I spent with the game I had a lot of fun and I already want to play more. Even if it’s just Just Cause 2 with better effects I’m looking forward to playing it come December 1st 2015.

Most Anticipated Feature: MASS-IVE EX-PLO-SHE-ONS