WB5: Grappling with Failure: How I got let down by a Just Cause

Once upon a time, there was a young adult who had come into some money. Nothing major, but enough to buy a new videogame. This story unfolded in the prime of the PS3 era, not long after the release of Heavy Rain, which, indeed, was the very game that that young boy initially intended to spend his money on. But, in the game shop, something unexpected happened. Heavy Rain was on a shelf next to another game, Just Cause 2, and, somehow, the boy ended up buying that instead. Perhaps it was something about the contrast between the former game’s serious, sombre persona and the latter’s complete lack thereof. Perhaps it was a gut reaction from someone who had been turned off by a recent Grand Theft Auto game that had had a lot of the cartoonish fun sucked out of it in favour of a misguided attempt to tell a serious story about the American Dream through the medium of unfunny caricatures and shit satire. Well, that's a whole other story; whatever the cause, I got Just Cause, and I loved it. It’s a series that I’ve been playing ever since, for a given value of ever since, given that there had only been one additional game since then until December 2018, when a chance alignment of spheres gifted me with the unprecedented revelation that a new Just Cause game, Just Cause 4, had just snuck out onto the shelves out of nowhere. This was quite a moment for me!

If you’re not familiar with this series, then permit me a brief introduction. The Just Cause series is made by Avalanche Studios, a Swedish developer, and follows a US government operative by the name of Rico Rodriguez, a man who never met a red and white structure he couldn’t blow up or a government he couldn’t destabilise. In each game, he is (sometimes quite literally) dropped into an unstable country run by a tyrant or dictator, and proceeds to cause chaos and inspire uprisings so as to topple this regime, ostensibly in the name of FREEDOM but mostly because the shadowy agency that he works for has some personal stake in the country, or, usually, its resources. Rico has a very specific methodology for his process, which usually involves countless explosions, a lot of questionable physics, and much exploitation of his inability to just die. The following screenshot illustrates this process in action:

A brief overview of this picture’s contents: the massive explosion of a crashing helicopter, a second helicopter
 lining up for the same fate, and someone with a rocket attached to their face being carried away on a balloon.

Living in Rico’s world is a joyfully ridiculous endeavour. At least, it is as long as you’re Rico; the infinite echelons of enemy mooks and innocent civilians who get caught in the crossfire of this insanity might have a different perspective. But such is the curse of the NPC, to be subjected to the whims of the player, and Rico has the ability to make a lot of whims come to fruition via the interchange of his arsenal and grapple hook mechanics. In Just Cause 3 in particular, my entire household got a lot of mileage out of such shenanigans, especially my stepson, who threw himself into the infinite potential of the game’s physics fuckery with the macabre gusto of every five year old who’s ever discovered that they can get away with a lot more in video games than they can in real life, as long as it’s hilarious (my parenting manual will be out this winter). It was a sad day when it finally came time to admit that, while we might not yet have accomplished everything that was possible, we had indeed run out of the motivation required to continue, and so it was time to play a different game already.

And then I heard we’d been blessed with a Just Cause 4, and I was like

In the time that it’s taken you, dear reader, to process the above image, I find myself now at the end of my Just Cause 4 experience; indeed, potentially at the very end of the Just Cause experience as a whole. Though I never played the first game beyond a casual acquaintance, from the time I picked up 2 outta nowhere I’ve been a big fan. 3 was great, too; the introduction of the wingsuit mechanic was so beautifully complementary to Rico’s existing grapple and parachute grooves that simply going places in Just Cause 3 was one of my absolute favourite activities (and also, given that game’s affinity for excruciating loading times, often faster than fast travelling). But where Just Cause 3 expanded on the series in some areas, it also oddly contracted some others, a strange give-and-take scheme that I certainly noted, and was a bit annoyed with, but never put too much thought into… until Just Cause 4 came along, and did exactly the same thing, only more so, and made everything worse. At this point, I did start putting some thought into it, because it was starting to seem like the developers had no idea what their game was supposed to be, to the point that their incoherence was starting to turn their gameplay loops on themselves like some sort of self-immolating ouroboros. I could kind of understand a contraction in features between 2 and 3, given that their releases jumped a console generation, but the through line from 3 to 4 is three years of refinement on existing engines and technology. The expectation, then, is that 4 should be like 3, except even more so.

Ouroboros, by the way, was forever ruined for me as a word and a concept by this clown.

Sometimes, it is. One area in which this series has been continually expanding and delivering the goods is its environments. Panau in Just Cause 2 was a delightful, massive landscape with lots of different types of biomes to goof around in. Just Cause 3’s Medici was more limited, but looked fantastic. Just Cause 4 reintroduces a greater variance in landscape, its gargantuan map being divided fairly evenly between rainforest, plains, desert and mountains, with the added twist that it’s all very realistically presented; vast mountains rise and fall before the player as they fling Rico across the map in casual defiance of physics, and their ebb and flow is brutal, beautiful, and expansively… empty. Just Cause 2 had fancy desert towns and full temple settlements in its deserts and mountains, respectively; Just Cause 4 has cookie-cutter shanty Badlands towns and hardly any signs of civilisation at all among its mountain peaks. That makes sense, because that’s what it’s like in the real world, and, for me, this really helped with the immersion. But it’s a brave or foolish developer who deliberately makes a world like this, because not everybody likes empty space in videogames, especially when it’s in their way. It invites criticisms of lazy development, and fake longevity achieved through padding (hello there Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and your endless plains of brown populated with the exact same god damn copy pasted military fort on every fucking junction). But I don’t think that’s a fair criticism that can be levelled, because Just Cause 4’s world doesn’t feel empty. Its urban environments are pretty weak, but the landscapes are fantastic; even somewhere like a road that winds through a vast valley up into the mountains, a place that the game never forces you to go, feels like it has been intricately designed.

A criticism I can and will level at the environments, however, is that they look a bit shit. The plains and desert are alright, and the mountains are spectacular, but the rainforest looks shockingly like it was ported over from a PS2 game. It’s all the exact same shade of green and the trees pop up and spin to face you, hoping that you won’t notice that they load as sprites from afar and don’t always remember to be tangible by the time you fly into them. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever seen, but it ain’t great, and the fact that you start the game here, and are stuck here for some time unless you travel far away from the early missions, sure helps dent one’s opinion of the game in its opening hours. Things improve later on (i.e. once you leave the fucking rainforest), but even at its zenith (the mountains again; maybe I just really like mountains), Just Cause 4’s graphical presentation is blown out of the water by, of all things, its predecessor, which had some of the most beautiful water I’ve ever seen, uniquely designed, memorable urban environments, and that same sense of vast desolation that I’m clearly inclined towards (I just love exploring, and these games reward that, not always in actual gameplay related ways but with things like a beautiful view, or finding myself in a quiet grove of trees that someone clearly put some time into designing, taking a walk through it and finding a hidden cave at the back where a developer has left a shrine to their dearly departed pet).

Sometimes, dogs die

That, then, is the first area where Just Cause 4 fails to build on that which has come before. There are a lot more. This is that strange characteristic reductiveness of this franchise; every game is both a little more and a little less. Look at combat, for example. In Just Cause 2, Rico’s loadout had space for two one-handed weapons, which he could optionally dual wield, a larger two-handed weapon, and some grenades and plastic explosives. He also had sprint, dodge and crouch moves that provided a bit of battlefield dexterity. In Just Cause 3, though, Rico had only two weapon slots, one for a dual-wielded smaller weapon pair and one for a larger weapon. He did have infinite plastic explosives, which was a very nice touch that fed into the series’ standard gameplay loop of find stuff > blow stuff up > repeat. But all of the extra combat moves were gone, and they weren’t replaced by anything. Instead, Rico was buffed to the point where he could take ten million bullets without flinching, and upon receipt of the ten million and first, he could simply duck into cover for a second and let his massively improved auto-regen kick in before strolling out and carrying on. And this is still the same in 4 – in fact, it’s worse. I can and often did stand in the open for quite a few seconds, taking fire, turning around trying to figure out which direction it was coming from because for some reason that may have been my fault or may have been the games’s, I simply could not grok with the interface that told me which direction I was being hit from. So I’d stand there, spinning, taking lots of bullets, eventually locate the enemy, shoot them, and then regen my health. Now, I may not be savvy enough to fully understand the complexities of deep gameplay, but I know when I’m swimming in it and this game’s a fucking paddling pool.

Just Cause 4 also took away the infinite explosives, which is another symptom of the massive existential crisis that unfolds across the breath of the game as the unwary consumer plays it. Since time immemorial, Rico’s whole thing has been that he infiltrates a region and makes things explode, acquiring levels of ‘chaos’, which is basically the exact same type of videogame points that Mario and Pac Man have been chasing since the first sucker loaded a 10p into their arcade box. Chaos leads to progress, and therefore explosions are a vital part of the gameplay loop. But as of Just Cause 4, that isn’t really the case anymore. Things do still bear the signature red-and-white insert-explosion-here colour pallet, but the reductions to Rico’s arsenal mean that it’s rarely worth the time it now takes to do so. Rico can now bear two weapons of any type (although pistols seem to have gone extinct, so in actuality he gets to choose between two interchangeably bland assault rifles), but his explosive output is limited to their ammo-exclusive secondary fire, a restriction that leaves the player constantly endeavouring to restock, rarely in possession of enough explosive rounds that using them is worth the trouble. Combat doesn’t suffer this loss too much, because additional mods to Rico’s grapple ability make it easy to set up an output so overpowered that even guns become redundant, but it seems so, so strange to twist so far away from a fundamental dynamic of the series, and even weirder when considered atop the complimentary backslide of Rico becoming somehow more powerful yet less capable with every passing game.

He's going to be just fine, only lamp posts can slay him.

This progression problem extends beyond combat and into other mechanics. In a weird contrast to the chopping and changing of Rico’s capability in other areas between games, the wingsuit mechanics have been consistently developing since the original Just Cause. It was great to be able to start 4 and still have all of the quality of life boosts that I’d unlocked in 3, but ultimately that meant that my wingsuiting experience remained unchanged throughout the entire game - not much of a problem when it’s so well done anyway, but still noticeable, and a strange design choice. What development is available in 4 goes towards the unlocking of mods for Rico’s three special grapple abilities, two are which aren’t even new mechanics, and none of which are at all relevant to actually progressing through the game. The old mechanics, the grapple-pull and a new type of remote bomb - the reason why Rico no longer has his old, infinite supply - are so heavily nerfed that they’re barely worth using; taking thirty seconds to attach the maximum amount of tethers to a big oil tank, only for the resulting explosion to not even destroy the damn thing, is hardly my idea of fun, and further removes any incentive towards causing the chaos that was once this franchise’s trademark and which Rico’s army in this game is literally fucking named after.

Everywhere I look, I find missing bits. There seems to have been a recession in the side mission economy, as Just Cause 3’s expansive and often challenging quests, which were intricately tied to the acquisition of new abilities and rewarded progress towards the next unlock with respect to how well you did, have been downgraded to ‘drive through this ring fast’ challenges that rewards a preset, tiny amount of points and have been scattered around the map in their literal hundreds. You only have to complete a fraction of them to unlock all of the grapple mods, and the mods themselves add so little to the game anyway that a strong case can be made for ignoring these missions altogether. Then there’s the supply drop mechanic, which slinks in after a few storyline missions as if it’s ashamed to be here, and well it should be, because it’s been dramatically simplified in a way that somehow manages to make it unnecessarily complicated. Rico now has multiple pilots that he can call on, with more unlocked with the increase of his chaos level, which is, as previously noted, a grind of the type that developers seem irritatingly keen on putting into videogames of late (looking at you again and your 99 levels, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey). Unfortunately all these pilots must all be flying fucking microlights or something because they only ever have the space to drop one thing, whether it’s a single assault rifle or a gigantic stone head. So, if you want to grab a vehicle and also replenish your poor, depleted reserves of explosives, you get to spend twice as much time in the menu, fighting with an unintuitive interface that hates you so much that it maliciously switches up what each button does on every damn screen. I’m not sure what sassy developer thought more menu time was what this fun-packed thrill-ride of an action game needed, but whoever they are, they’re an idiot. I gave up on the idea of resupplying from the skies early on, which meant I had less resources with which to blow stuff up, and therefore struggled to grind up dat chaos and unlock more supply drop pilots. I’m pretty sure that’s the exact opposite of how gameplay loops are supposed to work.

Me, myself, and the question of whether the Triangle button is going to take me forwards or backwards on the next screen

Another thing that saw me spending a lot of time in menus in Just Cause 4 is the territory expansion system, another questionable addition that took up valuable development time that could otherwise have been spent adding pistols, a third dimension to rainforest trees, and supply helicopters with room to carry supplies. In basic, as that chaos bar grinds incrementally upwards, and also through the completion of missions and sometimes seemingly out of absolutely nowhere, Rico acquires troop units. These troops can then be used to push the war-scorched, constantly embattled frontline of the rebellion’s territory forwards, a mechanic that is necessary for progressing through the game because main story missions are only unlocked when Rico owns all of the territory that they take place in. It sounds interesting, but all of the fun parts of this actually happen offscreen. That endless battle on the frontlines is something that Rico swoops right on over; his contribution is to go do his own thing at a nearby base and them move a line on the map, sweeping all those warring and dying NPCs along with him like Yossarian trying to avoid Bologna.

It pains me to keep saying this, but I have to because it keeps continuing to be true: Just Cause 3 did it better. In its climactic missions for each region, Rico would swoop around supporting the attacking troops in various skirmishes before making for the main base to put it out of commission. Given how many small territories 4 has, I probably wouldn’t want to have to do something like that every time, but I do want to do something. But unless you choose without provocation to hang out on the frontlines yourself, Rico never directly interacts with the rebellion that he’s spearheading. Instead, the net sum of this entire mechanic is yet more time spent doing stuff in menus rather than playing the game.

I think I'm gonna get a lot of mileage out of this one

The sad thing is that this absence of action is part of a greater sense of diminishing returns that the franchise has been suffering from for some time. Just Cause 2 had some moments of pure spectacle, not the least of which was its final missions, which began as an assault on the enemy dictator’s main stronghold, progressed to a showdown on a nuclear submarine, and ended with Rico and the antagonist surfing on nuclear missiles. It was ridiculous but thoroughly entertaining. Just Cause 3 started similarly strong, throwing the player into the action and featuring an exciting scene where Rico attaches himself to a rocket in order to blow it up before it can leave the atmosphere, but then failed to match that spectacle for the rest of its runtime. Just Cause 4, meanwhile, has plenty of things that sound like spectacle, given that a significant amount of the plot is centred around crazy sci-fi weather control contraptions, but there’s a slight barricade to the player’s enjoyment of this spectacle in that they don’t get to actually play it. When I heard that Rico planned to dive down through the eye of a tornado in order to reach and dismantle the weather control device at its core, I was hyped to get through the setup missions and pull that off. But what I actually ended up doing was shooting a bunch of dudes on the tops of skyscrapers, and then Rico did the dive in a cutscene. The final ‘boss’ was just a roomful of the same mooks I’d been tethering to fulton balloons for the game’s entire runtime thus far, plus a few helicopters thrown in; the actual showdown with the antagonist, a wacky scene that involved Rico repurposing one of those weather control UFOs into a missile and surfing it into the fleeing adversary’s private jet, happened without any input from me, and that honestly made me care a hell of a lot less. Why is a series that seemingly prides itself on the infinite possibilities of its engine and mechanics so intent on not letting me actually play it? What, in the end, even is this series any more?

No-one comes to these games for the plot, even though the cutscenes are generally fun when they aren’t happening at the expense of player agency. Funnily enough, the narratives do often have a surprisingly large amount of backstory and lore, and occasionally excel in environmental storytelling (largely due to the strengths of said environments). Given that Just Cause 3 was presented as Rico’s homecoming, as the nation he was liberating was his own, 4 has to go to some lengths to justify him coming out of retirement, throwing out some new backstory about Rico’s father and endeavouring to position the new antagonist, Oscar Espinosa, as Rico’s ultimate foe in a way that is very reminiscent of the way that S.P.E.C.T.R.E. tried to retroactively justify Blofeld as the big bad for Daniel Craig’s entire run as James Bond (i.e. it’s terrible). But nobody really cares, and the game seems to know it, given that Espinosa disappears almost entirely in the long stretch between the game’s opening and the final mission, wherein he is, again, dispatched without player input. It’s almost as if the developers suddenly realised that they’d hit the requisite 20 hours of plot content, decided to take an early lunch, and never came back, leaving some poor intern to wildly pull a conclusion from the sky and mail it over to the design department to animate. GG everyone.

No, the reason people come to these games is because it’s ridiculous arcade fun, powered by how Rico’s grapple laughs in the face of physics. Some, like me, stay for the world, and for the joy of traversing it via the top-notch wingsuit mechanics. But people play these games because they want to quote Yahtzee, tethering a bunch of dudes to helicopter blades so that when asked why they can say juuuuuuust ‘cause! And you know what, that’s fine, but you have to build a decent baseline into your worlds for that to work out, and it feels like Just Cause 4 is the result of what happens when the series’s developers mine away so much of the basic platform on which the game runs in favour of adding instead more foolishly exploitable mechanics that are fun but essentially meaningless; by tilting towards that demographic at the expense of core gameplay, you end up with a world of possibility where it’s too much trouble to do anything, a world where the absence of depth is barely concealed behind too many menus, inconsistently incomplete mechanics and baby’s first combat system. All that’s left is a man, flying wildly in defiance of physics over a beautiful, intricately crafted world, landing occasionally to hold R2 until everything is dead. The journeying is fantastic, and crafted with care, but somebody forgot to implement the destination, and that’s a damn shame.

And yet, even despite all this, I had a really good time with Just Cause 4. These games have always had their flaws, which they’ve bashfully asked the player to excuse in favour of the parts that they do do so well. The ask has never been quite as big as it was here, but to me, an old fan and a forgiving individual, we just about got there. But for anyone else, anyone piqued by this piece into considering having a dabble with this franchise, you’d be much better served by the purchase of Just Cause 3 instead, which ultimately does everything that 4 does, usually significantly better. That’s not the direction that time's supposed to work, but here in the Wayback Machine, it seems it is our fate to travel back in time and help others avoid wasting their time on misguided sequels. Let my tale be a warning of what happens when you believe in a Just Cause.

Ah, we were doing so well...