Why Just Cause 4 is A Disappointment

I recently got the chance to sit down with a huge fan of the Just Cause series and let him explain why he was so disappointed in Just Cause 4. He loved Just Cause 3 and spent hundreds of hours in it, so I really wanted to see what was wrong with Just Cause 4.

The difficulty of Just Cause 4 is a major step back from previous games. Even on the highest difficulty setting, you are a bullet sponge. This is made even worse by how quickly your health respawns. For a demo, I was shown how easy it is to survive any sort of danger. You can sit inside of a swarm of enemies taking gunfire, wait until your health drops very low, then use your grappling hook to fly away. You can open your parachute to travel further, and by the time you've landed, your health is already recovering. There is very, very little sense of danger when playing Just Cause 4, and you did have that in Just Cause 3.

AI also suffers from some serious problems. Within the first few minutes of watching, I saw enemy guards get confused and just stand there, not doing anything. You have to run up to them and hit them to get them to respond. They almost felt like they were NPCs instead of enemies.

There's also a major lack of enemies. You can go on YouTube and look at gameplay clips of Just Cause 4, and it looks just as chaotic and intense as earlier games. But it's not, they are showing you the best parts of the game.

I was shown a mission, on the highest difficulty, where you had to blow up some objectives. There was no one guarding them. It was literally designed to just be a puzzle room with no conflict. And it wasn't even that difficult of a puzzle to solve. To add insult to injury, there was a rocket launcher sitting right next to the objective.

Just Cause 4 really shows what they expect of the average person who will play it, and it explains why fans are so disappointed in it. Like they think it's too much for the average gamer to fight people to get control of an objective, then solve a puzzle. Or to realize they are on a mission to blow something up, so they should keep explosives with them.

The graphical work is also extremely low quality. Surface deep, Just Cause 4 looks pretty good, but once you dig deeper you can see lots of problems.

I was shown an underwater tunnel with rocks. Except the rocks were completely missing the bottoms, and the bottoms were facing towards you. It was just so sloppy and lazy. I saw seawall corners that were missing faces and you could see through the map.

The whole thing feels so rushed, so disappointing. I can see why fans of the series have turned against Just Cause 4. There are some serious flaws that most people aren't covering when they talk about it. But the truth with sales comes out.

Just Cause fans deserve much better than what they got with Just Cause 4. It's clear they tried to dumb it down for a wider audience, and they rushed it out with a smaller budget.