Some of my friends have asked me why I even bought Rage 2, since I didn’t exactly enjoy the original and the sequel wasn’t looking like anything special from the previews. My answer to them was that I just wanted to blast things with a shotgun for a few hours, as that’s a genre that’s been somewhat underserved this year (so far), but the real reason is that I really, really wanted to open the review with a “You can’t spell average without Rage” joke.

Unfortunately this makes Rage 2 doubly disappointing, as it’s turned out to have fallen some considerable way short of even that rather dubious target.

When I think back on my time with the original Rage I can’t remember all that much. I remember that the driving was dull, and that there were no sidequests to speak of, and that using John Carmack’s last major contribution to id Software’s engine — megatextures — in a game with such uninspired visual design largely resulted in it having some very pretty rocks and not much else. The high point of the game was some distinctly above-average weapon variety that went very much against the prevailing trends of the time, and which livened up the otherwise subpar combat considerably — however, given that both Wolfenstein and Doom 2016 took that high point and leveraged it into a pair of excellent reboots it has to be said that Rage, on the whole, was not a concept or a franchise that was particularly crying out for a sequel.

Yet one now exists. And now, having played it all the way through, I have to wonder why on earth Bethesda bothered to resurrect the IP: it is exactly the game you would picture when considering what a sequel to Rage would look like. Rage 2 is set in a bland, samey open world that has all the depth of a puddle. It features a car that you can drive around said open world, but the vehicular combat is pointless and the driving physics are just out-and-out terrible. Its plot is virtually non-existent, it barely has any scripted missions, and most of the content is just your standard open-world fare of clearing enemies out of the little question mark symbols that pop up on the map every three-hundred metres or so. It does have a moderately satisfying combat loop, with most of the ingenuity the original Rage displayed around weapons being transferred to a set of magic powers that make individual fights against stock mooks flow quite nicely, and this is probably one of only two reasons I made it to the end of the game. The other is that if you cut out the driving and the question mark locations from the equation, Rage 2 is about two hours long.

Nearly all of this was true of the first Rage. Despite an eight-year gap and the primary development responsibilities being handed over to Just Cause developers Avalanche, Rage 2 has ended up being almost exactly the same goddamn game, replete with almost exactly the same mistakes. True, it’s been built from the ground-up to be open world this time instead of the weird halfway house of the first game, but that just means it’s lost the vast majority of its scripted missions. In their place are the set of standard open world “activities” that, in Rage 2, mostly consist of getting out of your car and shooting things. Most of the time it’s a small clump of buildings that must be cleared of bandits, which come in Basic and Armoured flavours but which otherwise lack any variety in how the player deals with them. Sure, there’s a bandit with a bat that whacks grenades at you, but he dies if you shoot him with a shotgun. There’s a bandit with a rocket launcher, but she also dies if you shoot her with a shotgun. The only reason I distinguish between Basic and Armoured bandits is that the Armoured ones take two shotgun blasts to kill. Occasionally a bigger enemy will show up that would actually take some time to kill with just the shotgun, which is why you’re also carrying around a rocket launcher. And that’s most of Rage 2’s encounters in a nutshell: you shoot everything with the shotgun until there’s nothing left to shoot. There’s the occasional robot sentry turret sitting out on its own that’s actually the most dangerous enemy in the game by several orders of magnitude, but all you really need to defeat one is a handy piece of cover and some decent reflexes; for everything else, the shotgun is king.

Well, I suppose that reductive description is actually doing Rage 2’s combat encounters a little bit of a disservice. Taken as an isolated, atomic game element they’re not too bad as you have several abilities to play with as you shotgun your way through yet another bandit horde. There’s a Rush ability you can use to close the distance quickly; a double-jump that can be upgraded to clear any barrier less than two storeys high; a charge-up ground-pound that will suck in and then bowl over anyone in the radius of effect. I was using all of these regularly during combat, as well as abusing the health drops that spew out of every enemy on their demise — one of the few things Rage 2 does that I found genuinely quite interesting was to treat the player’s health pool as an alarmingly ephemeral thing, since enemy fire is actually quite damaging and if you’re trading shots at range you’re likely to quickly have your health whittled down unless you chug some of your limited supply of health potions. If you charge into the midst of an enemy group your health vanishes even more quickly, but when you’re up close you also have the chance to pick up these enemy health drops, which are a bunch of little blue vials that behave much like Doom’s Glory Kill health orbs. As long as you’re killing and getting the health drops, you can ensure that the rate at which you gain health exceeds the rate at which you lose it as a side-effect of being in the middle of a bunch of angry, tooled-up wasteland raiders — but the moment you stop, even if it’s to take cover or reload, your health starts dropping at a precipitous rate.

So Rage 2’s combat is built along the opposite lines to Bethesda stablemate Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. Unlike TNC, Rage 2 very definitely wants you to be in the thick of things, blasting away with your guns and using your powers with wild abandon. It’s structured its entire combat design around enabling that gameplay style, and it is the sole part of Rage 2’s design that actually lands properly. Rage 2’s up-close gunfights are about as good as anything on offer from Doom or Wolfenstein — at least to start with, before overfamiliarity has bred a healthy amount of contempt. Once you’ve invested in a few upgrades for your weapons and powers you can get into a zen-like combat flow: shoot, shoot, shoot, ground-slam to knock anyone nearby over, reload, shoot again. The shotgun is an excellent example of videogame shotguns, with a generously wide aiming reticule and a visceral sense of meaty force; because it’s a one-hit kill on most enemies if you can fill more than 50% of the reticule with their body (and because you can’t die if you keep on killing) the fights are very much like being in a shooting gallery, servicing targets one after another as quickly as possible. And despite the lack of real threat from the enemies, Rage 2 somehow avoids this experience becoming fully stale for, oh, a good five or six hours. It’s just that fun to shoot people.

Which is, incidentally, the last time you’ll hear me using the word “fun” to describe Rage 2. The rest of it is full of messy design that’s either incomplete or not joined up in the slightest, pasted over an open world that’s criminally underdetailed in both the narrative and literal sense of the word. I know that Ubisoft, for example, have roughly one trillion outsourced artists working on each of their games because that’s what it takes to get them looking as stunning pretty as they are, and Rage 2 is a great example of what happens when you don’t invest that effort: muddy textures, featureless locations and a lot of skyscrapers that are just big grey boxes that look like they’ve been slapped together in the level editor for the original Quake. It’s already struggling uphill because every game set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland ends up including a disproportionate amount of grey and brown, but after this and Mad Max it’s looking like Avalanche don’t have any more of an idea of how to make a wasteland look interesting than Bethesda themselves did with Fallout. Every set of buildings use the same corrugated iron shacks; every mutant hideout uses the same set dressing that looks like it’s been scooped directly out of a toilet. This lack of fine detail is a major contributory factor to none of these places feeling like places — they’re just geometry that’s been slapped together by an encounter designer for you to clamber over during a fight, and once the fight is over their value to the world’s sense of place is effectively zero. It takes a lot of work to stop an open world getting bland and samey, but Rage 2 feels like it’s barely even trying.

Then there’s that design problem. Rage 2 has a dizzying array of currencies and upgrade points and reputation meters and none of them have had more than the most cursory amount of effort put into them to make them engaging to deal with. Take car upgrades, for example. The moment you get out of the tutorial you’re given a car which is pretty much a carbon copy of the one from Rage, complete with dual auto-tracking miniguns as the default weapon. You can upgrade it with some cursory additional bits: a bigger set of cannon, some missiles, a couple of health upgrades — nothing too flashy, but effective enough as an incentive to try and get the corresponding currency, which is Car Parts. You can buy Car Parts in shops and occasionally get them out of chests, but your main way of getting Car Parts is by doing the Convoy events that crop up on the map every so often, which involve you chasing down and destroying a heavily-armed collection of bandit vehicles. Convoy events always reward you with Car Parts, so you duly go off and do a Convoy or three and buy a few upgrades — and then quickly realise that you’ve bought every worthwhile upgrade the starting car has to offer. There are other vehicles in the game, but you cannot upgrade them; the only use for Car Parts is to upgrade the starting car and you’ve already maxed it out. Since Convoys don’t offer any other reward, and since they’ll just ignore you if you don’t shoot at them, you can in turn just ignore them from that point on. The problem with that, though, is that chasing the Convoys is the only time you will engage in vehicular combat in Rage 2. It isn’t tied into any other kind of event or any of the plot missions. So you’ve just wasted time upgrading your car to do an event type that you have no further use for once you’ve upgraded your car. And believe me, the vehicle combat is nowhere near fun enough to justify engaging in for its own sake. It’s completely segregated from the rest of the game, and an excellent example of why I think Rage 2’s design, on the whole, outright sucks.

It’s not an isolated example either, with the same bum note being hit again and again no matter where you turn in the game. Even the combat isn’t immune; a lot of time has been spent getting that close-range combat flow to feel right, but one thing I almost never did in Rage 2 was something I found myself doing all the time in the original Rage: switching weapons. Frequent weapon switching in an FPS is a fairly reliable indicator of good enemy design. Your weapons should be seen as tools to solve the problems posed by different types of enemies, and if you have a good variety of enemies you’ll be changing things up as you encounter each new type. It’s a satisfying thing for the player do; you’re thinking on the fly, picking the right tool for the right job when different enemy combinations mean the answer isn’t always obvious, and lending a more cerebral aspect to an experience that’s otherwise just entirely a matter of reflexes and hand-eye coordination.. As good as Rage 2’s shotgun is, my being able to get by with the shotgun and just the shotgun in every non-boss encounter belies some deep issues with its weapon and enemy design. Part of this problem is that the shotgun is arguably too good: it’s sickeningly powerful out to midrange and it has more than enough ammo to kill everyone in the average bandit camp several times over. But the major issue, as I see it, is that Rage 2 hands you a bunch of innate powers that you have to get right up into an enemy’s face to use and a health system that will sustain you when you’re nose-to-nose with some slavering wasteland mutants — and then gives you precisely one weapon that actually supports that playstyle. Oh, I suppose the assault rifle is also a decent weapon for running and gunning if you ever somehow ran out of shotgun shells, but everything else I used was either absurdly situational (the flame revolver) or else was designed to be used at range and thus rendered utterly redundant by the rest of Rage 2’s combat design (the rail gun).

I used these weapons a couple of times and almost died — and more importantly, had to spend a distressing amount of time standing in one place doing precision targeting for less damage than I would have inflicted with one shotgun blast — and then never used them again. Based on that experience I also stopped looking for new weapons to pick up in the wasteland; they’re scattered around in Arks that you have to hunt down, but since I didn’t see a literal chainsaw on the menu I didn’t see the point in wasting time acquiring guns that would ultimately just be worse than the one I already had. Again, it’s a lack of joined-up design, and one that’s arguably harder to understand than the car combat and upgrades being totally pointless: it feels like the weapon designers and the combat designers didn’t talk to each other at any point during Rage 2’s development and so it ended up having a set of weapons that only briefly overlaps with its combat encounters — but the weapon designers and the combat designers should have been the same people. It’s impossible to design one without designing the other, and there’s no excuse for the two of them feeling quite as disjointed as they do in Rage 2.

I haven’t spent any time yet talking about Rage 2’s plot, and for good reason: if I spent much more than a couple of lines laying into it I’d have expended more effort on Rage 2’s plot than Rage 2’s writers did. I’ll just say that after you get out of the tutorial there are a grand total of seven plot missions in the game, none of which take more than fifteen minutes to finish once you subtract the excessive amount of driving from one place to another that Rage 2 makes you do as part of any activity. The driving itself is curiously joyless for an Avalanche game; the car handles like a brick and nearly every single thing in Rage 2’s world — from rocks to fences to tiny plants that your heavily-armoured gunwagon should crush into the dirt — is a collision object that’ll stop you dead in your tracks. Any time you try to go offroad you’ll run into dozens of these collision objects and it makes taking a shortcut an absolutely miserable experience, and one that’s somehow slower than following Rage 2’s ridiculously windy roads. Since there’s no actual vehicle combat in the game (unless you’ve suffered a blow to the head and suddenly find yourself in the mood for taking on a Convoy) this means you spend a distressing amount of your time in Rage 2 slavishly following the stupid purple navigation chevrons the game helpfully overlays onto the road whenever you mark an objective on the map. It’s somewhat staggering, but Rage 2 is an open world game with fuck all to do in terms of actual exploration — the driving is too painful to do anything other than follow the road to your next destination, and the world is so bland that there’s nothing interesting to find in the wasteland even if you did.

Which brings me back to the question I got halfway to asking in my opening paragraph: why on earth does Rage 2 exist? It’s a sequel that falls far short of the standard set by its decidedly mediocre predecessor, let alone the (relatively) polished modern open world experiences from other AAA developers that it’s supposed to be competing against; it’s a sequel that, rather than learning from the original’s mistakes, instead repeats every single one of them while doubling down on the mediocrity as hard as it can. Nearly everything about the game outside of its combat feels like it was phoned in, like Avalanche got handed the IP by Bethesda and told to make a game out of it, but their hearts weren’t really in it. I don’t pretend to understand the inner workings of Avalanche, and I don’t want to accuse them of not having any investment in the game they were making because I have no doubt there were more than a few late nights involved in getting Rage 2 out of the door, but that is what it feels like. My personal suspicion is that somebody at Bethesda noticed that Gearbox had spent several years chasing their own tails instead of continuing the massively-yet-inexplicably popular Borderlands series, and so decided to dust off the closest thing to it that they had lying around — the Rage IP — and gave it to somebody who might be able to do a decent job with it, but for whatever reason the drive wasn’t there from either the developer or the publisher to actually make it happen. And while I would have laughed in your face if you’d told me this would happen immediately after I wrote my Rage review back in 2013, it would at least explain why I’m reviewing — and largely hating — Rage 2 in 2019. That and my proclivity for bad jokes involving worse puns.

The post Thoughts: Rage 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I wanted to see 2015 out with a bang. Just Cause 3 more than delivered.

JC 3 isn’t a perfect game. It isn’t anywhere near being a perfect game. It has a whole host of problems, from technical to mechanical to structural to the simple matter of pacing. I can understand why some reviews of it have been quite lukewarm, and I can also understand why a lot of this review is going to be bitching. It would be all too easy to lose sight of the fact that when Just Cause 3 is firing on all cylinders, when everything that is good in the game is working together to provide you with a veritable smorgasbord of destruction, there’s nothing released in the last decade that even comes close to the sheer, exhilarating expression of mayhem that Just Cause enables.

The Just Cause series takes place in a cartoon world of sunny resort islands that are trapped under the heel of each game’s dictator du jour. Just Cause 3’s particular island chain is a sprawling open world of three islands – two small, one large – collectively called Medici, and the dictator in question is Di Ravello, a painfully generic Generalissimo stereotype who has nevertheless dotted Medici with military bases, outposts and various propaganda outlets. It’s a good thing that series protagonist Rico Rodriguez is a ridiculously durable action hero who makes a business out of tearing down everything dictators build up, slaughtering their soldiers, demolishing their installations, and catching a not inconsiderable number of innocent bystanders in the crossfire.  But Just Cause 3 doesn’t want you to think about that, and aside from the visuals its world is so paper-thin that you don’t really care about it anyway. You’re just focused on causing as many pretty explosions as possible, preferably all at the same time for maximum entertainment value.

Just Cause is very loosely modelled on GTA. It’s got the familiar array of cars, boats, planes and helicopters to get about in, and starting a fight will incrementally increase a Heat level that summons progressively a progressively stronger collection of enemy goons to your location, ranging from unarmoured soldiers in jeeps to armoured cars, helicopters, and even jet fighters and tanks. Aside from that common root, though, the two games are very different. GTA has its fair share of dicking around these days, but it doesn’t take anywhere near the same amount of pride in providing the player with elaborate methods of blowing shit up straight off the bat. Rico has the standard selection of weapons, but he also has a grappling hook he can use to reach high places (or just somewhere on the ground he wants to get to quickly, as the grapple effectively functions as his sprint), an infinite parachute that can be deployed at will, and – a new addition for JC 3 – a wingsuit that quickly becomes his primary method of getting around Medici.

This all gives him an insane level of mobility that lets him run rings around the forces trying to apprehend him, all the while planting charges from his infinite supply of C4. He can hijack any vehicle in the game by grappling onto it if you feel he needs a little more firepower, making the Heat system more like a Helicopter Delivery Service. He can even attach the other end of his grapple line to something solid and immovable (such as the ground) before reeling it in, which will effectively pull down anything it is attached to. Enemy soldiers will be shooting at him while he’s doing this, but this is more of an annoyance than anything else; unless there are five or more soldiers hitting him at the same time, or unless there’s a tank involved, he can pretty much just shrug it off and get on with his demolition work. Even if he gets into trouble his grapple and wingsuit make it a simple matter for him to get out of it for the few seconds required for his health to regenerate back to full. And on the rare occasions that he does die you won’t lose anything – he’ll simply respawn nearby ready to carry on with his demolition frenzy.

Rico is effectively a power fantasy. He sounds ludicrously overpowered, yes, but he’s precisely the sort of protagonist you want in a game like like Just Cause 3; a near-indestructible, hyper-mobile juggernaut who can go anywhere and blow up anything from about 10 minutes into the game. Everything about his abilities is well-judged and competently executed. Some abilities such as the wingsuit require some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it zipping around the islands becomes almost second nature – and a good thing too, because there’s something like 150 towns and military outposts scattered across Medici for him to “liberate” from Di Ravello’s forces. This forms the bulk of JC 3’s gameplay, and it’s a goal achieved by blowing up all of the red Chaos structures in each settlement. These range from statues and propaganda speakers in the towns to fuel tanks, satellite and radar systems and electrical stations in the military bases, but nearly all of them will explode in a highly satisfying fashion when introduced to your rocket launcher. The smaller settlements and outposts can be cleared in matter of seconds; however the large military bases require some time and planning to completely destroy, which invariably means getting into a fifteen minute running battle with Di Ravello’s forces while you race from Chaos object to Chaos object.

It’s during these large set-piece battles that Just Cause 3 really shines. Clearing the small outposts and the villages began to acquire a distinct janitorial whiff after a few hours, but I always had a silly grin on my face whenever I was inside a military base. The level of resistance is much higher than you’ll encounter elsewhere as Di Ravello throws everything he has at you, from helicopters to gunboats to multiple armoured cars and tanks, not to mention dozens and sometimes even hundreds of foot soldiers. There’s usually some rare Chaos objects present – gigantic communications dishes, large spherical fuel tanks, belching smoke stacks — that explode in a particularly elaborate fashion. There’s nothing quite like roaring through a base in a light tank servicing targets as quickly as you can identify them accompanied by the scream of tortured metal as the two radar towers you just punted shells into give way and collapse onto the enemy troops. You can get really complicated with it if you want thanks to the grapple lines and the C4, but it was enough for me just to fight things in a tank or a helicopter while everything exploded around me. It’s the most fun I’ve had in the GTA style of open world game since Mercenaries.

(Only since Mercenaries, though. JC 3 doesn’t have a core conceit anywhere near as compelling as Mercenaries’ Deck Of 52, and while its call-ins have improved somewhat since Just Cause 2 it’s still adamantly against letting you call in off-map ordnance.)

The military bases and the destruction in general are great. Rico is the perfect character for blowing them up. On their own they just about managed to justify Just Cause 3’s purchase price, which is a good thing for JC 3 as the game started to wobble alarmingly any time I wasn’t blowing stuff up. Whenever you liberate a region you unlock a number of non-combat challenges, and you’re supposed to – indeed, are practically forced to – alternate between doing these, blowing up outposts and engaging with the “plot” missions. The challenges fall into several basic types:

• Wingsuit challenges, where you launch from high up and have to fly through a series of rings as close to the centre as possible. These are by far the best challenges thanks to the wingsuit mechanics where you bleed off height in exchange for speed and vice versa, but bleeding off too much speed means you won’t reach the next ring, which makes it suitably tricky to nail a perfect run. I never had a problem with these, largely because they very much put me in mind of Pilotwings on the N64.

• Frenzy challenges, where you get set loose in a reconstructed military base with a specific weapon (or vehicle) and have to blow up as many Chaos objects as possible before the timer runs out. These varied in quality depending on the weapon; some were great (helicopter, tank, rocket launcher) and some were unutterable shit (mortar, sniper rifle).

• Tether challenges, which were by far the most oddball minigame in there. You tether a magnet behind a car and drive around scooping up chunks of valuable ore that you then drop off for points – the challenge is that if you drive too fast or if the huge blob of ore you’re towing behind your vehicle hits anything, all of the ore tends to fall off. These weren’t bad, they were just very easy to five-star by driving around very very slowly so that I didn’t drop any ore.

• Race challenges. These were terrible almost without exception simply because they’re so dull compared to the rest of the game. Car, boat, plane, helicopter – no matter what you’re driving, spending three minutes mindlessly going through a series of rings without the interesting wingsuit physics to soup things up is just an awful contrast to the freedom the rest of the game gives you. It doesn’t help that JC’s vehicle physics are…. a little quirky, shall we say, happily flipping your car into a somersault the moment you hit a tiny pebble while travelling at anything more than ten miles per hour.

So the challenges are a contrasting mix of the duff and the great. However, it wouldn’t matter if some or even all of them were duff if the game didn’t link your character progression to participation in these challenges. Just Cause 3 has the standard skill trees split out into categories – better grenades, better C4, better tethers, better wingsuit etc. – but in order to buy your skills you have to earn an appropriate number of “gears” (stars) in the challenges. A lot of the really interesting stuff – more and stronger tethers, rocket booster C4, double grapple — are therefore locked until your grind through the challenges. This is made even worse by the baffling decision to not make gears universal; each skill tree is associated with a certain type of challenge, and you can only spend gears earned in those challenges on that particular skill tree. Which means you can’t just do the wingsuit challenges to get those tether upgrades, you have to instead wait to both unlock and then grind through enough tether challenges to get the more interesting skills.

For a game that is otherwise about placing as much power in the hands of the player as possible, locking off a lot of the most interesting stuff behind the challenge grind is a really, really stupid idea. I ended up despising everything that wasn’t a wingsuit challenge when otherwise I would probably have seen it as fairly inoffensive. It’s not too bad to begin with when everything is still new and fresh, but by the time you get to the second and especially third islands you start to despair when you see challenge after challenge after challenge pop up on the map. Eventually I just ignored them altogether, for all that this meant I never got (for example) quadruple tethers capable of bringing down buildings and pulling tanks into the sky. It’s just better that way, even though it means jettisoning nearly half of the game. It’s just filler content.

What I couldn’t avoid, however, were the serious pacing problems on JC 3’s third island.  The first two islands are small, tight environments where everything’s pretty densely packed together; you don’t spend long enough getting to your next target to resent it. Unfortunately the third island is bigger than the first two put together while having approximately the same amount of stuff. This means that no longer does it take forever to get to your next target, but you have a hard fucking time even finding your next target because everything is spread out so much and they’re not marked on the map at all until you “discover” them. I did multiple overflights of one province in a jet for fifteen minutes looking for the last settlement required to liberate with no success; I eventually resorted to looking it up on the internet.

This is no fun, and it’s all the worse for coming at the point where even the mayhem is starting to get more than a little bit repetitive. I applaud Just Cause 3 for handing me all the abilities I needed to have fun within the first fifteen minutes, but it also showed its full hand when it came to the settlement liberation and this was not anywhere near as well thought-out. Liberating your 100th outpost is an identical process to liberating the first one, and by that point it’s gotten more than a little bit old. It’s pretty telling that I started getting them done as quickly and as clinically as possible, often by saturating them with missiles fired from a helicopter hovering beyond the range of any defending SAM installations. When I had to go in on foot I ignored enemies completely in favour of trying to blow up all the Chaos objects inside of 30 seconds; the game itself enabled me a bit here since the enemy soldiers all disappear once you liberate a settlement. The military bases at least remained interesting till the end of the game, and there were some big mining settlements on the last island that were somewhat new, but ultimately I think I would have been better off beelining for the ending and saving myself the hassle. It’s not even like I was gaining anything out of it – all you get from province liberation are more challenges unlocked, and we’ve already established how I feel about those.

Finally we come to the not-inconsiderable technical challenges you’ll experience when trying to run Just Cause 3. Other people seem to have had a much rougher time with it than I had, but even I had a few problems to deal with. Initially I experienced stutter that all but made the game unplayable for the first few hours, even with the latest Nvidia drivers. After some googling I established that running the game directly via the executable in administrator mode made this stuttering go away, but it’s still awkward and disappointing considering a) this is how I have to run an AAA release in the year 2015 and b) the PC version of Just Cause 2 was solid as a rock. At least I have confidence that this and other performance issues will eventually be fixed (unlike certain other AAA releases this year that I could mention); more insidious is the matter of the online integration and the leaderboards woven into the very fabric of the game. Their mere presence is obnoxious enough – no, I don’t particularly need or want to know that BonerLord777 just beat my score for Most Enemies Killed In Precision Aim Mode — but the need to constantly communicate with the servers appears to have an impact on how the game runs. I certainly noticed that when I was playing in “offline” mode – which was often, since the Square Enix servers are about as reliable as you’d expect — it was much easier to drive around, as there was noticeably less input lag. Oh, and if you ever lose connection to the servers it’ll stop you in the middle of whatever you’re doing (which given this is JC 3 is usually an intense gun battle of some kind) so it can tell you you’ve lost connection and you’re trying to reconnect. It’s not cool for something so peripheral to the game to suddenly interrupt your play to shove itself in your face like this.

Ah well. I spent 20-odd hours playing Just Cause 3 through to the end, and despite the various unpleasant elements present I can’t honestly say that I wasn’t enjoying myself for the majority of it. It’s no true successor to Mercenaries - not even a spiritual one given some of the limitations placed on you — but since Pandemic went out of business I’ll take what I can get; Just Cause 3 at least provides an adequate playground of destruction with its own unique spin of the grapple/parachute/wingsuit combo, even if that’s ultimately not enough variety to sustain it throughout. Should you buy it? Well, if you’ve been on the fence this long then I don’t think it’s good enough to rush out and purchase right this minute. Like Just Cause 2, though, it’s pretty much the ideal £5/£10 purchase during a sale, as it’s a lightweight, disposable one-man army simulator that I can pretty much guarantee you’ll derive at least a few hours of fun from. There’s worse things I could call a game these days.

The post Thoughts: Just Cause 3 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

It’s puzzled me for a while that these days, if you want to play a GTA game, the last thing you actually want to do is play a GTA game. The GTA franchise has become bloated with its own self-importance, with the developers preferring to tell tedious gangland stories in the not-so-charming delusion that they are auteur filmmakers while the vehicle-based mayhem the series made such an impact with all those years ago has been firmly relegated to the back seat. It’s telling that this gap in the market is now being filled by a whole raft of pretenders to the GTA throne, which try to sell themselves on the open-world sandbox gameplay rather than plot. Mercenaries was the most effective one (with the apt subtitle Playground of Destruction), and then Saints Row 2 (never played it), and now there is Just Cause 2.

Lets get a few things out of the way first. Just Cause 2 has the following:

• The best scenery in videogames.
• The best clouds in videogames¹.
• The best car chases in videogames.
• The best car crashes in videogames.
• The best explosions in videogames.

That last one is particularly important, since every other object in the game  - and this includes buildings that wouldn’t initially strike you as particularly flammable, such as water towers – will explode in a huge ball of fire if shot with bullets. It’s something that’s emblematic of the game’s ludicrously over-the-top nature; the protagonist is super-tough, heavily armed, has a grapple hook with unlimited uses, a parachute with unlimited uses, and can hijack every single vehicle in the game while on foot if the driver is unwise enough  to venture to within a couple of hundred metres. This is a design philosophy that I broadly endorse; the developers have grasped the fact that when I play this sort of game I want to blow stuff up in a very cool way rather than, say, spending half my time fending off texts from my “friends” because they want me to come hang out with them, and so they’ve made it as easy as possible for me to do that without actually making the protagonist invincible and giving him the ability to fly.

(Note: I have no idea what the protagonist’s real name is because I don’t think it was ever mentioned. All the other characters in the game call him Scorpion, so we’ll go with that.)

As a result Just Cause 2 is the best GTA-alike I’ve played since, oooh, Mercenaries. It may even be slightly better in certain areas, which is really saying something since I have huge rose-tinted glasses for Mercenaries. That being said, there’s a big list of stuff it doesn’t do quite so well as Mercenaries. Characters, for one. Everyone who played Mercenaries picked the insane Swede as their character (why would you ever pick bland-o-man or token woman) and so they were treated to Peter Stormare’s wry commentary throughout the game. By contrast Scorpion is an unlikeable dick, and not in a good way. Just Cause 2 also falls down on factions and the black market feature; with the former, it’s a case of all three factions being EXACTLY THE SAME – the only difference is that one has yellow cars, one has red cars, and one has blue cars – while the latter suffers from being far too limited. You get a choice of about seven vehicles, most of which are locked until the endgame. It’s far easier to just steal an attack helicopter from the nearest military base.

There are also times when I wonder if the developers haven’t been a little too accommodating to the player. The character of a sandbox game suffers by necessity since everything has to be rather generic, but Just Cause sidesteps this problem to a degree with the wide variety of biomes present on the island. In particular it’s got some very detailed cityscapes for the player to clamber around, but Scorpion’s hyper-mobility means that they lose a lot of this detail in the eye of the player; the grapple hook means that a painstakingly modelled skyscraper becomes just an annoyingly tall piece of level geometry.

Last but not least, there’s the usual bugbear with PC ports of GTA-style games: the controls. To Avalanche’s credit the basic control schemes actually work, although they take a little bit of time to get used to². Flying helicopters in particular is very easy and can be done with enough finesse that urban combat in them eventually becomes a thing of beauty, which is more than a certain triple-A title managed last year. Planes carry the only significant question mark; they’re fine to use in missions but the mouse/keyboard controls are lacking in the sort of precision required to do the race challenges.

So, let’s apply a final litmus test to Just Cause 2: would I have been happy to pay £30 for it on release? Perhaps not. It’s a fine sandbox but I like my full-price experiences to be a little more meaty in substance. Fortunate, then, that it makes a regular appearance during Steam weekend/holiday sales at £5. For that much money you could do a lot, lot worse.

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