Just Cause 3

Repetitive in every sense of the word, Just Cause 3 is a disheartening example of a sequel moving two steps back from it's progenitor

Kill Screen kind of already knocked this one out of the park but here we go.

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More than any other "open world" game, I remember Just Cause 2 not for it's "Chaos system" or upgrade system or variety of different shit to blow up and people to murder, but it's world. The island nation of Panau is etched in my mind as one of my all-time favorite virtual landscapes that I've experienced -- more than the weapon upgrade system or grappling hook/ parachute gimmicks or the insanely low-fi nature of the game's campaign, I remember spending hours just... flying around and exploring. I would literally start the game, head to an airfield, put on an album or podcast, and just... tool around in a plane and do whatever. Bomb the shit out of an oil rig? Sure! Hijack one of those sweet heavy bomber jets? Hell yes. What I was actually doing didn't matter, because the varied environs of Panau were so damn good looking (I have no idea how they got that game to look that good on the 360) and convincingly realized that I spent hours just wandering around and exploring.

Fast forward 5 years: it is now 2015. Video games... have changed. Games festooned with clutter (Fallout 4) and never ending lists of side-chores (Ubisoft games) have become very popular. Avalanche Studios didn't exactly hit a home run with Mad Max, so the sequel to the purest open world experience was hotly anticipated. Unfortunately, yours truly was to busy playing Mad Max and uninstalling Fallout 4 to realize Just Cause 3 was very nearly upon us.

For starters: Just Cause 3 definitely still feels excellent in the movement department. The addition of the wingsuit (coupled with the more forest-y landscape) gives off a pretty pungent whiff of Far Cry, but that doesn't diminish the fact that Rico soars around the isles of Medici more gracefully than he ever has, which Avalanche definitely deserves recognition for. The gunplay also feels less hilariously trashy this time, but it's still stuck in the Crackdown wheelhouse of floatiness and nonexistent recoil so not much has changed there besides the fact that your small arms are surprisingly effective at destroying what I would assume were hardened military equipment --- radar systems, generators, and fuel tanks will all fall to the continued fire of your weapons (honestly) quite easily.

On the opposite side of things, vehicle handling has been imported almost flawlessly from Just Cause 2 -- that is to say that any kind of ground vehicle handles amazingly, vein-meltingly bad, but planes and helicopters handle a bit better than before, where they were completely fine. I'm sure this issue will be fixed with mods eventually (at least on PC), but most of the difficulty comes from the fact that the camera tracking Rico is apparently a heavily zoomed feed from a satellite. Coupled with the "less than competitive" level of response from the controls and you have an open world game that really doesn't seem to want you to use vehicles. Infuriatingly, this design philosophy also applies to the large amount of "mods" Avalanche has added as optional upgrades to your starting equipment, which can only be improved by obtaining "gears" from "challenges" -- minigames that have you competing against ghost times of other players. Instead of exploring the environment they've created, you're encouraged to ignore it in favor of self-contained exercises until you're allowed to use the fun stuff.

Unlike JC2, there isn't much design variety -- there aren't any deserts in Medici and only a small portion of it is snowy and distinct from the perpetually-spring environs of the rest of the game world. The landscape itself only looks slightly better than the previous game's offering and gave me some weird frame drops during explosions, which also don't look particularly memorable here. There is an insane amount of pop-in and on a whole the whole package just looks... cheap. The skybox is less interesting (especially after the brilliant one in Mad Max) and the world is less varies on the whole. The core gameplay loop of blowing stuff up is repeated here ad nauseum. Just Cause 3, despite it's lengthy development time, manages to cut out the emergent excellence of it's predecessor in favor of an ample supply of side-quests to fuel your character's progression. It's unfortunate that they opted for such a disposable type of "content" (though it is totally understandable).