When Just Cause 3 came out back in late 2015, I thought “oh that looks like a lot of fun”. I grabbed it on PS4, and started playing. But, well, I sucked. The controls felt unnatural, and that damn wingsuit was just not fun – it made for a frustrating experience.
Given I was dying (and failing challenges) so frequently, load times were just a massive drag.
I was not enjoying my time in Medici. I never made it past the first few missions.
Flick forward twelve months to November 2016. I started playing again, from the beginning. Yeah, no, still not happy.
I really felt like I was missing something.
Flick forward two year, October 2018. I had just finished Spider-Man on PS4, Just Cause 3 was patched as much as it could be (or as much as they wanted to), I had a PS4 Pro, and Just Cause 4 was due for release soon and it looked so much fun.
Third time lucky.
I got my head around the controls – especially the fixed aiming – and started having a blast with the wingsuit. That moment I got my first five gear Wingsuit Challenge I though “maybe I can actually do this”.
On PS4 Pro, performance was decent – load times still lengthy, but for the most part, framerate kept steady. But the most important part, I was having a blast. Taking over settlements, blowing my way through Medici, and starting to nail not just Wingsuit Challenges, but all different kinds of challenges.
Then I zoomed out and saw the actual size of the map. Yikes. This could take a while.
But the key part – I was having fun. And isn’t that the point of a game?
I found the story to be, well, it was there, but didn’t drag me in – I had much more fun taking over settlements and bases, and clearing regions.
When I unlocked new Challenges, I tried them. Some were simple and straight forward. Others took a few tries. And a couple took countless tries. “Mountain Marathon Tour”, the one at the head of this article, took about 4 hours to nail. It’s the combination of high speed descents, last minute direction changes and sharp corners. There’s a lot to master there, and with very little room for error, it took time to master this course.
While some online have claimed Just Cause 3’s challenges to be impossible, I found them to be incredibly challenging – but also predictable. OK, maybe the boat races had some truly stupid water physics (especially in the surf), but the Wingsuit Challenges in particular were hard – don’t get me wrong, some were incredibly hard – but the same layout, same conditions, each time. Sure, clouds changed in some of the alpine courses, but overall, the conditions were consistent. It was definitely a challenge to be good enough to earn 5 gears. Could they have been a smidge more forgiving – yeah, but also, did pose a fair and achievable challenge. Hey, I’m just a casual for-fun gamer, and I was able to earn the Platinum Trophy for Just Cause 3.
Yes, it took three attempts to get in to the game, but when I started, I really found so much enjoyment in the gameplay, objectives and total chaos the game provided. Especially when I started to get 5 gears for challenges – that gave me that boost to know “OK, yeah, I can do this”.
Today, December 3rd 2018, my Gold Edition of Just Cause 4 is out for delivery today. And I’m so excited to enter Solis for another experiment in chaos (and hopefully a heck of a lot more fun).
