Just Cause 4 Catch All

I have never played the series but I am watching a Let's Play and it just seems like so much fun that I might have to pick it up. But it certainly isn't scoring very hight on Metacritic.

Anyone picked it up? Is it a buy, or wait for sale?

JUST CAUSE 4 Gameplay Walkthrough Part 1 - INTRO (Full Game)

I was hoping for a “Well, we know 4 is going to disappoint so here’s a 5 teaser trailer announcement right before 4 releases,” thread.

Why are there no console reviews of the game on Meta? Weird.

Updated thread title to the right number.

oops...

The IGN review gave it a 7.9 saying it was a lot of fun, but didn't really add anything that wasn't included in previous games. I had a lot of fun with 2, but never finished it. I tried 3, but felt like it was more of the same. If you're new to the series, I'd say go for it.

Yes for some reason all the others have flown under my radar...which seems oddly appropriate considering the heroes main method of travel .

As I have bought very few AAA titles this year, and have loved the last two entries in the series, I went ahead and preordered it.

I might start playing it Wednesday. It has been bumped by the need to farm resources in a F2P game event.

I often question my priorities...

I haven’t played JC4 yet. I’ll probably wait until a deep sale. JC3 was kind of a disappointment.

If you want to check out the series, I recommend playing JC2. You can get it on sale for a couple bucks. It’s fantastic.

I liked JC3 fine - it was not quite up there with JC2 but it was still quite fun.

Not sure if I will ever get JC4: RPS Review

Never played any of the JC games before but I do like a good game of blowing things up but after reading the review from RPS above it appears this game needs quite a bit of work and is not worth it unless DEEPLY discounted.

I've read some bad game reviews from RPS but that one is one of the worst. I can literally feel the frustration flowing through the text. I think I'm going to stay far away from this game.

Great easter egg
Skip to 56 seconds

Yeah I think I'll wait until it is patched up and deeply on sale. This looks pretty rough. And I say this as someone who was a big fan of the last two games.

tboon wrote:

I liked JC3 fine - it was not quite up there with JC2 but it was still quite fun.

Not sure if I will ever get JC4: RPS Review

That sounds horrible. I still haven't played JC3 because 2 was so perfect, but I may pick up 3 for relatively fresh destruction in exotic locales.

This though is a no-go.

MrDeVil909 wrote:
tboon wrote:

I liked JC3 fine - it was not quite up there with JC2 but it was still quite fun.

Not sure if I will ever get JC4: RPS Review

That sounds horrible. I still haven't played JC3 because 2 was so perfect, but I may pick up 3 for relatively fresh destruction in exotic locales.

This though is a no-go.

JC3 is really good if you like JC2. It is essentially MOTS but that is still fun. Just 'cause.

farley3k wrote:

Great easter egg
Skip to 56 seconds

That's incredible. I can't believe they paid for the rights to that song just for that!

The RPS review seemed very out of sync with the Eurogamer review. Both are sites I trust, though RPS lost its mojo when Kieron Gillen left. The scores for JC4 are all over the map. The particular RPS reviewer here is a person who .... doesn't seem to find the same sources of joy in games that I do.

I think the freeform combat in the JC series is kind of polarizing. Some people love it and others find it tedious.

I still haven't seen any really solid reviews of JC4 on the consoles and good console comparisons. I've seen a lot of complaints about graphical problems, though.

Here's the Digital Foundry console analysis video:

It sounds like some of the graphical complaints have to do with texture streaming and the image scaler.

*sigh*

I returned it today. I hope they can address the problems and I may try again down the line. In the meantime, I reinstalled JC3...

Well, having put several hours into the game, I will say, at least on the PS4, the game is fine. They made plenty of changes, which, unfortunately, hit many of things that were the most fun about the last two games. There are several changes people are complaining about that I think are getting overblown however as they are getting swept up in the idea that everything different in the game is terrible, like the capturing of territories and the grappling hook system.

Unfortunately, Just Cause's signature "blow sh*t up!" play style is mostly gone. There are still things to blow up, but it doesn't feel nearly as important as it did in previous games. Once you've destroyed enough to earn the soldiers to start capturing territories, it starts to snowball a bit, creating territories you can capture for zero soldiers, or less. Yes, you start to get territories that give you a soldier for capturing them. I haven't had to intentionally hunt down a destroy things for a while now.

The challenges aren't nearly as interesting or fun. They are either ridiculously easy or tedious.

I haven't gotten for enough yet to deal with the weather systems that are the super-weapon/macguffin of the game, other than having a helicopter hit by lightning once.

The game doesn't feel as pretty as the last one either. I think they tried to up the graphic realism, but ended up sacrificing the smoothness. The cut scenes sometimes seem chunky and objects drawing in the distance are sometimes distracting, a glaring problem for a game that prides itself on its large open world.

I don't know if destroying things becomes important again later in the game or if challenges become more interesting later (right now the latter, at lest, doesn't seem likely). It's an "alright" game, but certainly my least favorite of the three JC games I've played (never played JC1).

Is anyone else playing this? My son asked for Just Cause 4 for Christmas and I'm trying to decide which platform to purchase on, if we get it at all. I'm hearing the PC version is pretty buggy and I heard that the console versions for Just Cause 3 ran poorly. He loved Just Cause 3, on my PC but he'd prefer a console version he can play in the basement.

Xbox, PS4, and PC are all in play here, assuming any of them are worth getting. Mantid, currently PS4 is in the lead.

So far the PS4 version has run smoothly. Some weird lighting in cut scenes, a few wonky texture issues, and there are motion blur problems that can be pretty distracting. Avalanche has of course said they are working on a patch for those.

Edit: Not ten minutes later, the game completely crashes. First time so far. All I was doing was grappling to a car while using the VR lens.

Mantid wrote:

Edit: Not ten minutes later, the game completely crashes. First time so far. All I was doing was grappling to a car while using the VR lens. :(

I cursed you!

A few first impressions now that it is on Gamepass:

I'm a fan of the series, but I was scared off of purchasing the game by the bad reviews.

The graphics are weirdly wonky. Like, it reminds me of the look of some PC games with the graphics options set to extra low or forced into super low settings via config file edits. It's at its worst in cut scenes and close range stuff. The dynamic resolution seems to be forcing a lot of the cut scenes into 640p range.
On the other hand, the frame rate seems pretty stable, and the mid and longer range vistas look pretty good.

The gameplay seemed pretty good though, with some goofy chaotic battles - especially with the balloon tether. The open world also seemed a bit more rich and alive than in a lot of other open world games. There was lots of stuff moving around the background and some intense battles taking place along the front lines of conquered territory.

There was a big patch a couple of days ago that revised a lot of the graphical issues. It looks generally better and less obviously janky.

At the mid to long ranges though, the game is absolutely gorgeous. It delivers best in class visual presentation at distances greater than about 150 feet. Only the RDR2 engine may be better. With megastructures moving and tornadoes taking out bridges, the open world feels a lot less static than in most other games.

Gameplay-wise, it feels like they fixed a bunch of problems with Just Cause 3 and also fixed a bunch of things that weren't problems. I miss the gentle, chill-out progression loop of liberating towns by blowing up all the enemy structures. As it is, the mission structure feels kind of unfocused and not satisfying.

I can kind of see that this game will really come into its own when it is running on next gen hardware and is less resource constrained. It reminds me a bit of playing GTA5 on the 360 in that respect.

I also played this for a bit last night thanks to Game Pass. Even on the X1X, it looks a little weird. It honestly looks like a remaster of a 360 game than a new release, but I stopped noticing it after awhile.

I agree that the gameplay loop is also a little weird. I couldn't quite tell what I was supposed to do after I brought the gun factory back online aside from a vague directive to blow sh*t up. Which, to be clear, is totally fine. There were just a lot of other parts and pieces with squads and territories that somehow loops back into blowing sh*t up that I didn't quite get. But this is my introduction to the series, so maybe there's some assumed knowledge I don't have.

I do appreciate just how quickly it empowers you to wreck it. I hijacked a boat and was surprised by how it let me just level an enemy base and all the defenders sent my way. It reminded me of Crackdown 3. And then I crashed the boat and died, which was hilarious but also a bit jarring.

I can tell that I'll have a lot of fun once I get the hang of zipping around, blowing things up, then getting away. So far, the getting away part seems to be the hardest.

Just Cause games have always had a too long time to losing heat. And they bring the heat too soon. It's weird and something I've learned to accept with the series.