Conclusion

If you liked previous Just Cause titles, then you'll feel right at home in Just Cause 4—at first. Once you dive deeper into the game, you'll encounter several new features, like a more complex grappling hook system that can be configured with various addons to better suit your playstyle. The amount of weapons and vehicles has also been increased substantially. Previously, you just had to cause a certain amount of destruction in a given region; now, you have to complete specific missions, too. Once those are completed and you have enough mercenary units available (through points from destruction), you can request they invade that region to seize control. While that suggests there is a more tactical approach to gameplay, it's really not completely thought through. In reality, you'll just head to the closest mission and complete it to advance. Your rebels can't gain any ground on their own, nor can they be pushed back to lose a previously conquered region.

As mentioned before, the grappling hook has been beefed up with three user-customizable loadouts. It now lets you attach a balloon to objects to lift them into the sky, or attach boosters that propel things forward when activated. Of course, that opens up new possibilities for how to destroy things, and the sandbox design, coupled with the physical simulation of Just Cause 4, will let your imagination run wild. The wingsuit has been upgraded, too, with boosters that propel you forward, which helps save travel time.

Gameplay is alright, but seems a bit repetitive. Most missions consist of "find switch x", kill a bunch of enemies (which are mostly dumb bullet sponges), and then move on to the next switch, or destroy some specific equipment. What's especially annoying is that some of those missions happen in smaller spaces, which isn't exactly the best environment for the mechanics of Just Cause 4. The main story missions are a bit better, but so far, nothing to write home about and in no way able to compete with games like Far Cry.

Graphics can only be described as "outdated." Most of the time, the game looks like a title from several years ago; didn't the developer promise a graphics update? To me, it looks very similar to Just Cause 3. While moving over terrain quickly, the LOD object pop-in is very apparent and highly distracting, even at the highest settings. Textures are ultra-low resolution and look like they were taken 1:1 from the console version. Mouse and keyboard controls are little bit laggy, especially vehicles are a bit difficult to drive. The wingsuit, on the other hand, is much easier to steer than before. Keyboard remapping options are quite limited—no idea why. The game definitely seems to have been designed for playing with a gamepad, where everything works so much better, which kinda sucks for us mouse+keyboard PC gamers. The menus clearly haven't been designed with PC controls in mind, but are still fully usable with a mouse.

In terms of performance, cards from both AMD and NVIDIA do well and reach their usual performance levels pretty much spot on. A Radeon RX 580 or GTX 1060 6 GB is sufficient for 1080p gaming with highest details. For 1440p, an RX Vega 56 card or GTX 1070 Ti will deliver 60 FPS, and only the RTX 2080 Ti can drive 4K at a fluid 60 Hz. Overall, no surprises here. VRAM usage is very reasonable, too, as even a 3 GB GTX 1060 will do fine and isn't far behind the GTX 1060 6 GB. It would be great if the developer could release a high-res texture pack to address the muddy textures as VRAM isn't an issue at all.

Is the game a recommended buy? I'm not sure. Right now there are a lot of little issues and a general lack of polish. If you're a big fan of the Just Cause series, you should definitely consider it, but everybody else can probably wait a bit for sales, which gives the developer some extra time to apply patches.