I've now played JC3 for well over 400 hours, and 100% completed the vanilla game and all three main DLCs, as well as gotten every achievement (vanilla + DLC) and acquired quadruple the chaos score of every other friend who owns this.

I like me some 'splosions.



Just Cause 3 is a slightly half-arsed AAA game about moving ridiculously fast, blowing things up and messing around with a massive open world. You play as Rico Rodriguez, a former secret agent who has dropped into his mother's mediterranian island homeland of Medici to annihilate the regime of General Di Ravello.

Gameplay: Biggest selling point for JC3 is moving around in it. Movement is insane in this game. Your arm-mounted grappling hook can hoist you up a mountain in moments, your (infinite) parachute might as well be an airborne sniper tower because you can use any weapon with it, and your unrealistic wingsuit essentially makes you a fighter jet Transformer. You can combine these three to move ludicrously fast, such as grappling the ground and slingshotting yourself while using the wingsuit. It's not just efficient and satisfying, it's damn fun.

The gunplay is pretty basic. Shoot the dudes, grenade the dudes, shoot their heads and they die quicker. However, you can deal with enemies in many more ways than just bulletspam: You can grapple them to perform a turbocharged dropkick (PHYSICS!), or plant one of your limitless supply of C4 explosives on their face. The grappling hook also has a tether function that lets you connect two things via a wire and pull them towards each other; Soldier vs. car / soldier vs. concrete wall / soldier slingshot off a cliff / car vs. fuel tank / tank vs. fuel tank, etc. Your movement ensemble lets you attack from any angle, and grapple to any vehicle to hijack it, including airborne fighter jets and helicopters, so while there isn't much enemy variety, fighting them remains fun.

Your objective is to break things. There's a lot of things to break, and they all explode in extravagant and very pretty ways. Fuel tanks, football pitch-sized satellite dishes, excavators, bridges - the lot can be torn down, and all of them are subject to the physics engine. Very nice.

Helicopter and plane controls are very good. Boat and car controls are alright. Motorcycle controls are horrendous. They all take some getting used to, but once you do, you should have no problems. Apart from every vehicle you bail out of becoming a bomb. Remember Soldier vs. car?

Game cares not for the laws of physics. Drag a train car via one tiny rope up a cliff, it doesn't care. Creative license in the name of fun and entertainment. I approve.

Side challenges unlock gear upgrades, and they're pretty nice, but I wish you could unlock them by other means. Some of the challenges are a bit irrelevent to what the unlock, like the grappling hook upgrades being tied to a game about dragging ore into a big pit via a car-mounted magnet. Apart from that, there's destruction time trials, car bomb races, and wingsuit courses, so I give it a pass.

Difficulty: Eh. You're an unstoppable murder engine by the end, but the late-game bases can still be quite challenging.



Presentation: Medici's beautiful. The explosions are also beautiful. The game looks damn nice, just look at the pictures. They're not shopped, that's pretty much in-game footage.

The devs cut a lot of corners to get this out on launch date. Missing textures on certain out-of-the-way things, slightly shaky LODs, debris disappearing in front of you, that sort of thing. Nothing major.

The soundtrack's pretty good throughout, the heat level music's one of my favourites. The dynamic battle themes in military bases sometimes feel a bit... "un-dynamic" if you know what I mean.

Sound effects mostly alright. A lot of good explosion sounds. A lot of recycled car noises, though.

Cutscene quality top notch. Voice acting and comedic timing is brillaint. Dimah, Mario, Sheldon and the others are nice to watch and listen to.

Rico delivers one-liners a lot. They get a bit grating after 429 hours, and a patch added some new ones which were slightly ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. NPC dialogue's good voice acting, but somewhat limited number of lines - you'll hear the same ones a lot.



Story: Surprisingly rich. Not *RICH*, but a nice backstory.. A series of collectible audio diaries let you find out exactly how Di Ravello came to power, and conversation snippets around towns and in cutscenes reveal just a hint of explanation about the mayhem going on around you.

As for the plot: There's this thing called Bavarium in Medici that everyone wants, because you can make forcefields and nukes with it. You get to pilot forcefield tanks and use handheld warheads that can level bases in moments. GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME



Performance: Overall, bad.

JC3 can lag immensely if you don't have a high-end graphics card (I have a £115 AMD one, runs at max settings no problem). Game has a confirmed and chronically unpatched memory leak, perhaps for all eternity. More than 8GB of RAM is strongly reccomended.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of bugs. No game-breaking ones, but minor annoyances sprinkled throughout. Cars flipping out into the sky, corpses calling for backup, Rico's animations going a bit weird, cutscene audio/video desync, towers fizzing out of existence mid-collapse. I can bear it, but you might not, so be warned.

No save slots? Really? I have to perform a surgical file transplant every time I want to start a new game so I don't erase my 100% save.

SQUARE ENIX SERVERS. Online leaderboard for little challenges. It has an offline mode, but it will try to exit it the moment it gets internet. Minor annoyance.



TL;DR: The ultimate open-world chaos playground. Looks nice, plays nice, sometimes handles not nice. I love it.

I've now played JC3 for well over 400 hours, and 100% completed the vanilla game and all three main DLCs, as well as gotten every achievement (vanilla + DLC) and acquired quadruple the chaos score of every other friend who owns this. I like me some 'splosions. Just Cause 3 is a slightly half-arsed AAA game about moving ridiculously fast, blowing things up and messing around with a massive open world. You play as Rico Rodriguez, a former secret agent who has dropped into his mother's mediterranian island homeland of Medici to annihilate the regime of General Di Ravello. [b]Gameplay:[/b] Biggest selling point for JC3 is moving around in it. Movement is insane in this game. Your arm-mounted grappling hook can hoist you up a mountain in moments, your (infinite) parachute might as well be an airborne sniper tower because you can use any weapon with it, and your unrealistic wingsuit essentially makes you a fighter jet Transformer. You can combine these three to move ludicrously fast, such as grappling the ground and slingshotting yourself while using the wingsuit. It's not just efficient and satisfying, it's damn fun. The gunplay is pretty basic. Shoot the dudes, grenade the dudes, shoot their heads and they die quicker. However, you can deal with enemies in many more ways than just bulletspam: You can grapple them to perform a turbocharged dropkick (PHYSICS!), or plant one of your limitless supply of C4 explosives on their face. The grappling hook also has a tether function that lets you connect two things via a wire and pull them towards each other; Soldier vs. car / soldier vs. concrete wall / soldier slingshot off a cliff / car vs. fuel tank / tank vs. fuel tank, etc. Your movement ensemble lets you attack from any angle, and grapple to any vehicle to hijack it, including airborne fighter jets and helicopters, so while there isn't much enemy variety, fighting them remains fun. Your objective is to break things. There's a lot of things to break, and they all explode in extravagant and very pretty ways. Fuel tanks, football pitch-sized satellite dishes, excavators, bridges - the lot can be torn down, and all of them are subject to the physics engine. Very nice. Helicopter and plane controls are very good. Boat and car controls are alright. Motorcycle controls are horrendous. They all take some getting used to, but once you do, you should have no problems. Apart from every vehicle you bail out of becoming a bomb. Remember Soldier vs. car? Game cares not for the laws of physics. Drag a train car via one tiny rope up a cliff, it doesn't care. Creative license in the name of fun and entertainment. I approve. Side challenges unlock gear upgrades, and they're pretty nice, but I wish you could unlock them by other means. Some of the challenges are a bit irrelevent to what the unlock, like the grappling hook upgrades being tied to a game about dragging ore into a big pit via a car-mounted magnet. Apart from that, there's destruction time trials, car bomb races, and wingsuit courses, so I give it a pass. Difficulty: Eh. You're an unstoppable murder engine by the end, but the late-game bases can still be quite challenging. [b]Presentation:[/b] Medici's beautiful. The explosions are also beautiful. The game looks damn nice, just look at the pictures. They're not shopped, that's pretty much in-game footage. The devs cut a lot of corners to get this out on launch date. Missing textures on certain out-of-the-way things, slightly shaky LODs, debris disappearing in front of you, that sort of thing. Nothing major. The soundtrack's pretty good throughout, the heat level music's one of my favourites. The dynamic battle themes in military bases sometimes feel a bit... "un-dynamic" if you know what I mean. Sound effects mostly alright. A lot of good explosion sounds. A lot of recycled car noises, though. Cutscene quality top notch. Voice acting and comedic timing is brillaint. Dimah, Mario, Sheldon and the others are nice to watch and listen to. Rico delivers one-liners a lot. They get a bit grating after 429 hours, and a patch added some new ones which were slightly shittier. NPC dialogue's good voice acting, but somewhat limited number of lines - you'll hear the same ones a lot. [b]Story:[/b] Surprisingly rich. Not *RICH*, but a nice backstory.. A series of collectible audio diaries let you find out exactly how Di Ravello came to power, and conversation snippets around towns and in cutscenes reveal just a hint of explanation about the mayhem going on around you. As for the plot: There's this thing called Bavarium in Medici that everyone wants, because you can make forcefields and nukes with it. You get to pilot forcefield tanks and use handheld warheads that can level bases in moments. GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME [b]Performance: Overall, bad.[/b] JC3 can lag immensely if you don't have a high-end graphics card (I have a £115 AMD one, runs at max settings no problem). Game has a confirmed and chronically unpatched memory leak, perhaps for all eternity. More than 8GB of RAM is [b]strongly[/b] reccomended. Shitton of bugs. No game-breaking ones, but minor annoyances sprinkled throughout. Cars flipping out into the sky, corpses calling for backup, Rico's animations going a bit weird, cutscene audio/video desync, towers fizzing out of existence mid-collapse. I can bear it, but you might not, so be warned. No save slots? Really? I have to perform a surgical file transplant every time I want to start a new game so I don't erase my 100% save. SQUARE ENIX SERVERS. Online leaderboard for little challenges. It has an offline mode, but it will try to exit it the moment it gets internet. Minor annoyance. [b]TL;DR:[/b] The ultimate open-world chaos playground. Looks nice, plays nice, sometimes handles not nice. I love it.