Recent reviews by anfuerudo

Sayonara! You won't be missed.

Uhhhh. I guess this is an update. Again. And again. Still fun to play from time to time tho. And the game somewhat recovered from that Odyssey SNAFU from a few years back, thanks to the new ships, materials rebalance and Powerplay 2.0. Good job, FDev!
Also, here, have a cat(thanks, Titancheg):
　　　 　　／＞　　フ
　　　 　　| 　_　 _ l
　 　　 　／` ミ＿xノ
　　 　 /　　　 　 |
　　　 /　 ヽ　　 ﾉ
　 　 │　　|　|　|
　／￣|　　 |　|　|
　| (￣ヽ＿_ヽ_)__)
　＼二つ

I knew this will be good before I even downloaded the game itself - it was all over my my Twitter feed.
I knew this will be good before I even launched the game itseld - my friend played it before me and wrote a huge positive review.
But daym! I have the biggest smile on my face right now! I absolutely love it!

3680 hours on the record and still going strong... Warframe grabs you and never lets you go. Do I recommend this game? Well, if you're into looter shooters where you can spend quite literary thousands of hours - sure.
Upd
4778 hours on the record and counting. Boy, what am I doing with my life?

Sooooo... it took me quite some time to actually complete the main story and... well... Let's start from the beginning, shall we?

I bought this game as a pre-order on November 30th, 2015, a day before the game was released. Yeah, I know, "pre-orders are evil, never pre-order a game, yadda-yadda-yadda." But I was a fan of a Just Cause franchise, and after glorious Just Cause 2 I was going to buy it regardless. The "pre-order bonus content" was a welcome addition, of course. But, sadly, at that time I wasn't able to play it, so I shelved it for the time being. As a side note: little did i know about "bonus pre-order content" - soon after the release it was added as a free to buy DLC, so, looking from financial standpoint, I should've just waited and bought the game on a sale. Especially since the opportunity to actually play it only came this (2017) summer, when I fixed my PC and upgraded my GPU in the process.

So, after a long time of waiting I was more than hyped to finally play Just Cause 3. What happened next was a clear example what happens when expectations meet reality.

The game is gorgeous in graphical aspect. Lush vegetation, bright explosions, sparkling water, flying bits and pieces of whatever you blown up... Whatever you do, wherever you go it's beautiful. But behind that beautifulness lies first critical flaw of the game - it hogs resources like crazy. What's worse - it has memory leak problem, so prolonged game sessions will lead to stuttering, framedrops, freezes and all that bad stuff we hate.

So the game is beautiful, and the game world is huge (if memory serves me well, it's one of the biggest free-roam worlds to date)... huge and empty. Remember great Panau City from Just Cause 2? Well, there's nothing, and I mean nothing, like that here. The biggest city in the game (Citate Di Ravello) is actually smaller than single district of Panau City. Other towns and villages are even smaller than that, some cannot be named other than a token - a few buildings, a statue or a propaganda van and that's it. Worse yet, none of them are marked on the map, so you have to find them. And you have to find them, because you need to "liberate" them in order to meet requirements to unlock next story mission. The same goes for the military bases, there're only a handful of large military bases (which are marked on map) and a lot of small unmarked(until you discover them) outposts spread all over one of the biggest maps. So there're a lot of small locations and a lot of unoccupied empty space between them. Good luck finding them all.

And that brings us to yet another matter of the game - transportation. In Just Cause 3 devs introduced new mechanics - wingsuit gliding, which complements grappling hook and parachute. It's a nice mechanics... would've been if it wasn't upgradable through challenges (about this in a bit), some of which are pretty hard to do. But it's still better than driving a car or a bike. That's because driving in Just Cause 3 is a huge pain. Driving physics for cars are terrible, cars either unresponsive or overresponsive and go from one state to another in a snap. But it's terribleness is pale in comparison to bikes driving physics. It's mind boggling horrible and horrendous beyond any reason. I really don't know where to start and, quite frankly, I don't want to start anywhere at all because it'll mean that I'll have to relive that horror once again. You'll have to take y word for it, it's that bad. Also, the camera situation doesn't help at all. And with that being said, the only viable ways of transportation, aside from fast travel to previously unlocked location, are either helicopters or planes. And, of course, there's a bug tied to them. The bug is simple - when you have auto-aim mod activated for your ground (I mean on-foot) weapons, locking-on capabilities of some weapons, both vehicular and handheld, just don't work. And in some cases this is a game breaking bug - there's at least one mission that require you to use lock-on missiles from a plane to shoot down enemy planes. If you have that mod active before you've started that mission, started the mission and encountered that bug, you'll have to start the mission over, previously, if memory serves me well, restarting the game. One simple bug, but it's that bad. Oh, and by the way, devs abandoned the game soon after release, so there will be no bugfixes. Some bugs, like the one mentioned before, existed since the release of the game.

Now to modifications. Yes, there're challenges that unlock mod for everything. Grenades, rifles, parachutes, cars, planes... literary everything can be upgraded through completing challenges. Some of them are fun, some - nothing more than annoying. And the things they unlock are actually good, like homing grenades or nitrous for vehicles. The not so good thing is that in order to unlock some specific mods you need to unlock any and every mod that comes before wanted one. And there're only limited amount of points given for every challenge, but each consecutive mod costs more points to unlock, so there's lot of grinding. Some mods really worth grinding, though.

With that being said, there're a lot of grinding in this game. Way more than in Just Cause 2. And, what's worse, the grind is really repetitive. One can argue, that in such huge sandbox, as Just Cause 3 tries to look like, there ought to be different ways to do things? Here's the downside - there's none. You sure can try, but in the end there's only one way that works every time, and having to repeat the same sequence for who knows how many times leaves no place for creativity.

And that leaves us with storyline missions. There're 25 original storyline missions in game, although, it would be safe to say, that there're 21 missions. That's because of those 25 mentioned before 6, 3 and 3, are carbon copies each other - three absolutely identical missions to shut down superweapons and three almost identical missions with battles for each of the three provinces. That leaves us with 19 storyline missions, first of which is an introduction, second and third - tutorials for new mechanics and acquiring cars, and last - final battle. That leaves us with even less storyline missions which range from good to mediocre, and from mediocre to annoyingly bad. It really looks like devs weren't that interested in consistency of the storyline. Or in characters. Or in storyline itself, for it looks like a token, a blank button to cover the gaping hole in all the action that unfolds on the screen, cover and give it some semblance of sense. And it fails at it. And I really mean that. The main intrigue? It was killed in a two consecutive missions. The secondary intrigue? Died in a mission where it was born. Final fight with a boss and final cutscene? That was one hell of an anticlimatic ending. All that topped with some nine (9!) minutes of unskippable credits. And yes, I'm talking about storyline missions in the game which should be all about wreaking chaos, making biggest, loudest explosions and giving zero f**ks in the process. Why am I doing that? That's because, as I said, the game is very repetitive, the game is very empty, the game is very flawed in technical sense, so there should be at least a single redeeming feature to cover up all that flaws, to make this game worthwhile. "Should" is a keyword, for there's none.
So, there you have it, this is my take on what Just Cause 3 really is. Does it cost the money asked for? Not at all. Should you buy a DLC? No, unless you played the original game and liked it. Should you pre-order Just Cause 4 whenever that will be? No.

TL;DR The game is bad. Don't buy it for full price, don't buy season pass unless you actually liked the main game. Better yet, don't buy it at all, spend your money and time elsewhere.