O, the tale of wiley explosion-magnet Rico Rodriguez is indeed drawing to a close. Just Cause 4‘s third and final expansion Danger Rising brings an end to the series yarn about ludicrous chaos, secretly evil government agencies, and demons(?). And like the final chapter of any great work of cultural significance, the conclusion of Just Cause will feature the most important element of storytelling: Kick-flipping hoverboards.

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After seven months driving and diving and leaping and exploding around since Just Cause 4’s launch, Rico Rodriguez will soon be able to enjoy a slower pace of life. A future update will extend the weirdly short nights of the in-game day cycle, for starters. More importantly, Rico will get to change the time of day by parking his bum in a comfy chair and watching the world go by, attracting flocks of wild animals to hang out as he idles. Sit down and before you know it, it’ll be night and you’ll be surrounded by goats. A great many ill-advised nights out have been sparked by animal magnetism, I’m told.

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When they’re not being used as central plot beats in books that endorse rose-tinted megalomania while ignoring the root causes of staggering societal inequality, Easter eggs can be pretty cool. They’re at their best when you stumble across them yourself, of course, but after John’s Just Cause 4 review I’m not touching it with a ten foot long grappling hook.

I’m glad some people are playing though, because it meant I got to see Rico Rodriguez walk into his very own Take On Me music video.

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As I was reviewing the really broken and very disappointing Just Cause 4, I was recording key moments too. Moments like when every car at an intersection went crazy and tried to crash into something. Or when my car touched a tree so was catapulted across a mountain. Or how boats spawn by emerging from underwater like mad whales. Or that time an NPC decided to try to get into my car while wearing a radio tower.

And frankly, I’m glad I did, because it proves I’m not going mad. Have a look below to see a small collection of the non-stop festival of bugs I experienced as I tried to play.

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Let me try to capture the feeling of Just Cause 4 in an anecdote: I’m currently attaching tethers to the side of a giant warship to drag it from the hill on which it is perched. I’m aiming to get it back into the water where it would much prefer to be. And it’s working! Slowly but surely, with enough tethers, the boat is inching down the grass and rocks. Why am I doing this? Because this is where the ship landed after a helicopter fired on me, causing the 150m, 2000 ton vessel to impossibly flip up high into the air, spin around and around and around for a bit, and then like a big metal leaf, float down gently onto the hillside. This is Just Cause 4 at its best. Just Cause 4 is a colossal mess.

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You’ll have seen those Just Cause 4 trailers, yeah? Explosions, clips of dramatic dialogue, Inception bwamps, music building to a drop… video game trailer stuff, right? Turns out, Just Cause 4 has a wholly delightful strand of marketing too, for Japan. Chiitan, the energetic but accident-prone otter mascot of Tokyo’s Akihabara district, stars in a series of videos attempting to recreate the dramatic stunts of Rico Rodriguez and… they do not go well. It is good when they do not go well. I am glad when the otter’s hopes and dreams crash into the realities of swinging on grappling hooks, running through storms, and gliding with a wingsuit.

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I’ve seen you, sneaking scraps under the dinner table to feed your PC. A few bits and bytes when you thought no one was looking. But those add up, you know, megabits and gigabytes of bloat weighing your PC down. Will it be lean enough, fast enough, hungry enough to run Just Cause 4? Oh it was crushing frames all over once, I’m sure, but now… you just don’t know. Look, we can’t start to tackle a problem until we know the scale of it. Square Enix have now confirmed the system requirements for Avalanche Software’s upcoming open-world explode-o-rama so come check if your pet PC can run it.

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A new 19-minute gameplay video of Just Cause 4 shows the devs larking about flying, gliding, shooting, detonating, turning a tank into an airship using balloons, and somehow repurposing a radar tower as a car-launching catapult. Sure, our boy Brendy has told us about some of this foolishness before but now I’ve seen it for myself and… what a silly murderous sandbox this is. Wonderfully so. This here new video is also a recording of Avalanche’s presentation during Gamescom in August, so I suppose you can use it to pretend you’re a games journo too. For best effect, watch after waking up face-down in a pile of Monster cans and XL BMX XXX t-shirts.

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Just Cause has been described as Far Cry s brash, dumb and lovable cousin. At least, that s how John described it when he blew up all those statues in his Just Cause 3 review. Judging by what I saw at E3, the next outing isn t so much leaning in to that reputation as it is diving into it headfirst with a grenade launcher in both hands. It s got fighter jets, it s got drones, it s got jetskis, and it s got 1000 square kilometres of South American fictionland frequented by twisting tornadoes on which to grapple with all of the above. The chaos conjurers at Avalanche Studios may as well have subtitled it Just Cause 4: Dumber n Funner. (more…)

Alas, Just Cause 4 will not include an official multiplayer mode, developers Avalanche Studios have said following the drive-o-fly-a-shoot-o-explode sandbox’s announcement at E3 this week. None of the previous games in the series have officially featured multiplayer, so it’s perhaps not wholly a surprise. However, sanctioned-yet-unofficial mods did add multiplayer to the past two games – and in 2016 Avalanche hired the lead developer of Just Cause 2’s multiplayer mod. But no, it seems there’ll only be one Rico Rodriguez blowing things up in JC4, not hundreds of hooligans romping all over. (more…)