Rico Rodriguez is back for his fourth jaunt into making everything absolutely ridiculous – and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Despite being a game where most players just want to blow sh*t up, Just Cause 4 does have a proper story behind it. Rico’s fourth adventure sees the mercenary with a penchant for parachutes take the fight to the fictional South American nation of Solis. This time he’s there to aid those fighting against the Black Hand: the world’s most powerful private military company.
Expect your boy to tackle the local menace, bring peace and stability to the locals, and crack wise a fair few times in the process. All that being said, it’s never really been the story that anyone’s cared about in this series, and it looks like that will be the case once more in Just Cause 4.
Yes, this is a game where the art of messing around is rewarded with a great time for everyone. The core is about completing missions, usually involving hijacking a few vehicles and shooting a few people. But series veterans know Just Cause is more about the art of trying to ruin things for regular people as much as possible using a combination of your parachute, wingsuit, and grappling hook.
All of this wonderful silliness takes place in a selection of different biomes – Solis features environments such as a rainforests, deserts, grasslandss, and even an alpine region. As well as a change of scenery, each different region sees its own very specific form of extreme weather for the player to contend with. In the rainforest it might be a sudden, massive lightning event – while the desert is likely to see the odd sandstorm trying to ruin your day.
This focus on the weather stretches to what appears to be Just Cause 4’s motif this time around: a giant, all-consuming tornado. While other weather types are confined to their environment type, this tornado is ever-present and always roaming around the map, finding new places to destroy – as well as new opportunities for fantastic, chaotic fun.
One mission we were shown tasked Rico with destroying a bunch of anti-tornado cannons the Black Hand had built and was using to redirect the tornado towards a friendly town. Don’t… overthink the science behind this. So it was a simple mission of taking out the cannons and saving the village by allowing the tornado to keep going on its current path.
Except this is Just Cause, so of course things immediately took a turn for the chaotic. The biggest change to help this happen came from the newly upgradeable grappling hook, which allows players to tweak and tinker with one of the series’ iconic tools in order to make it a bit more personalised and useful in ways you might not expect.
Maybe you want to put a pulse effect on it, meaning when two ends of the hook retract into each other there’s a small explosion, pushing them apart again. Hint: do this to people, it’ll likely be hilarious. There’s also the ability to fire small boosters at items from a distance, which will blast the object – if there’s sufficient thrust created – into the sky. Hint: do this to people, it’ll also be hilarious.
Basically, developer Avalance is giving players a few more tools in the sandbox of chaos and letting them at it. While there will be tutorial elements explaining what to do and how to do it, generally speaking you won’t be forced to have your grappling hook one way or another – it’s open to personal preference, and you can learn to use the magical improved tool how you see fit. That’s ridiculously tempting, frankly.
There have been improvements to the physics engine in Just Cause 4, too – a necessity thanks to the weather systems and general increase in complexity required under the hood. One nice, obvious way the physics have improved is through the use of wind currents – you can see these thanks to dust and pollen in the air, and using them players are able to guide Rico through regions using his parachute or wingsuit with much more speed and control than in previous games.
As you’re flying around Soilis you might bump into a frontline of the ongoing war in the area – the Black Hand versus the good guys. This is more than just a battle you happen to see, with the visualisation of the frontline offering a more organic way of seeing the progress of each side in the war. With the player able to influence who controls different regions on the map, it’s great to see things in a way that isn’t just colours on a map, and you can still get involved with the fight if you want.
You’ve got a few new tools to help you if you do choose to get involved in a rumble, too. There’s been one weapon shown off so far new to Just Cause 4 – a rail gun, because sci-fi isn’t far out of the realms of the series – and the addition of aim-down-sights (get a bit more accuracy) and secondary fire to all weapons (e.g. deploying a drone or dropping a shield to duck behind) shows that even the basics of the game are being worked on to offer more for the player.
We were a bit worried Avalanche might be taking on a bit much – the studio showed off three games recently, meaning it could be stretching things a bit to get them all made. But from seeing Just Cause 4, it’s clear there’s little to be concerned about – at least as far as can be seen in a hands-off demo. There’s always the risk you’re just being shown the ‘correct’ bit of the game to show off, but it’s a series with a pedigree, and a series that has been fun since day one – so confidence in the quality of the game is fair in this particular situation.
It will take having a good go at causing massive chaos to know for sure how much of a success Just Cause 4 and Avalanche’s move to making All Of The Games is. But from watching the pursuit of a tornado, seeing cannons developed to push one of nature’s most destructive forces used against people, watching vast amounts of debris ripped up and thrown into the sky – all of this from a single tornado – it’s clear there’s going to be at least one thing worth caring about in Just Cause 4. And hopefully – possibly, probably – there’ll be more than just one thing to love.
