Just Cause 4 Review

This was not something I was expecting at all. I always heard this game was worse than JC3, and to my surprise, I actually prefer this game. I will admit, at first the squad and territory takeover system was awkwardly explained and as a result, I didn't like it much, but once I figured out how it all functioned, I began to enjoy the game much more. The new mission system can sound a bit confusing and now, there are only a few main story missions and a lot of the missions you will be partaking in are "region strikes" and you need to have a squad on reserve after the region strike in order to take it over, I always had a squad to take over land and I never ran out, I also took over adjecent regions to help lower the cost.

This is going to sound contreversial, but I actually prefer the region strikes over the previous game's mission structure. I always found that in JC3, going around in various strongholds and destroying stuff painted in red started to get old after a few hours, and it started to wear thin, but these region strikes, I found had much more variety in the objectives to help keep gameplay fresh. Some of the missions do repeat themselves but they did have more going on than just, "go here destroy red colored property" and rinse repeat. Some of the objectives even make good use of the wingset like timed objectives or the objectives being so far apart that you need to use the wingsuit to gain more ground and get to them faster. Some of these missions are better than others, but I like the attempt at more variety.

Other improvements over JC3 is that Rico's health regens a lot faster, and while I make it clear I am not a big fan of regen health, this is the next best thing if the devs aren't going to overhaul the health system. It keeps me in the power fantasy that the game wants me to feel where in JC3, I was getting sapped out of it constantly due to getting overwhelmed by enemies and the health taking an awful long while to regen. There will be some cheap deaths here and there and it will more often than not be by explosive weapons but I still take this over JC3's regen health.

A big improvement I found over JC3 is the story missions, while there are few now, what is here is much more memorable compared to JC3's main story missions. In JC4, you will be fighting enemies while torandos are happening while wingsuiting across buildings, going on a boat through enemy waters to destroy a lighting powered reactor, and going through a sandstorm to destroy a bunch of generators. Compare this to JC3's rather dull story missions and JC4 is much more interesting by comparison despite only a few story missions.

The guns also have great feedback to them and headshots can be pretty satisfying, I also like the music too.

Some issues I have is that the game can be pretty glitchy at times all though not as glitchy and buggy as JC3, and the early hours like I mentioned before poorly explains the terroritory takeover system which can make the game offputting at first, that and I also found the open world a bit too big to the point where I actually did use fast travel. The story also isn't good but I didn't find it to be too bothersome. Alt fired I mostly found to be useless and kind of forgot they existed until late game.

Overall, Just Cause 4 was a surprise for me, I was expecting to drop the game right away and expecting it to be worse than JC3 but I actually prefer this game.