Just Cause 3 hands you a grappling hook, a parachute, a wingsuit and 400 square miles of fictional Mediterranean island, then mostly gets out of the way. Avalanche Studios built the 2015 action-adventure game around that handoff, and the handoff still works. The destruction is loud, the movement is fast, and the story wrapped around it is the weakest thing on the disc.
Square Enix published Just Cause 3 in December 2015 for PlayStation 4, PC and Xbox One. It is the third entry in the Just Cause series and the sequel to 2010’s Just Cause 2. It later became playable on Xbox Series and PlayStation 5 through the digital stores. A sequel, Just Cause 4, followed in 2018.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
Rico Rodriguez comes home to Medici
The setup is simple. Six years after Just Cause 2, mercenary Rico Rodriguez returns to Medici, a Mediterranean island country now under the control of General Sebastiano Di Ravello. Rico wants his people free. He joins an underground resistance led by his oldest friend, Mario Frigo, and reconnects with allies from his past.
That premise is serviceable, and the game does almost nothing surprising with it. Di Ravello is a dictator with a mineral. Rico is a mercenary with a conscience and a lot of tethers. The rebellion is on the verge of collapse when Rico arrives, which is the one plot detail that gives the campaign any momentum.
Bavarium is the only idea the story has
Di Ravello is mining Bavarium, a rare mineral found only on Medici, and he intends to use it to build the most powerful arsenal the world has ever seen. That is the engine of the whole campaign. It is also the only idea the narrative develops with any consistency.
The beats around it are thin. Rico and the rebels take the former capital of Manaea and destroy the Vis Electra power plant, a symbol of Di Ravello’s power. Di Ravello answers by sending troops to destroy the coastal town of Costa del Porto. Later, a Bavarium missile is fired into rebel territory in the province of Baia, and Rico manually steers it off course into Di Ravello’s command base at Cima Leon.
Those are big swings. They land as set dressing. The game is not interested in what any of it costs anyone.
The wingsuit changes how the map works
Where Just Cause 3 earns its keep is traversal. The world is 400 square miles, roughly the size of Just Cause 2’s map, but its volumetric terrain has more verticality. You can drop into caverns and climb buildings in ways the older map never allowed.
The grappling hook and parachute return with better mechanics. The wingsuit is new and permanently equipped, and it lets Rico glide across the map far faster than the old tools managed. Hit the ground and you can fire the hook and pop the chute to pull yourself back up. You can switch between parachute and wingsuit freely.
Parachuting is more stable now, and you can shoot enemies from the air. The hook can tether multiple objects together, and in-game mods, earned by completing challenges, raise the number of tethers you have available. Five major biomes sit inside the map, each with its own landmarks.
Chaos is the point, and it mostly holds
The focus on chaos and exaggerated physics from Just Cause 2 remains intact. Weapons include assault rifles, missile launchers, shotguns and RPGs. Vehicles include fighter aircraft, planes, ships and exotic cars, and you can use them as weapons. Enemy installations come apart. Towns and bases get liberated.
The loop is dismantling things and watching the physics misbehave, and Just Cause 3 is very good at that loop. The verticality is what makes it more than a bigger Just Cause 2. More height means more ways to start a fight and more ways to escape one.
That is the game’s real argument: that freedom of movement is worth more than any single mission. It is a persuasive argument.
The frame rate slips when the action peaks
The console versions have performance issues, particularly on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and they are not cosmetic. Frame rates drop when the destruction gets dense, which is exactly when you need the game to hold steady. The PC version fares better, but the game’s best trick, chaining a wingsuit glide into a hook into a parachute over a burning base, is the trick most likely to stutter.
This matters more here than it would in a slower game. Just Cause 3 asks you to move fast and trust the frame. When the frame slips, the trust goes with it.
Sheldon and the scanner go nowhere
The narrative drew criticism for being clichéd and uninspired, and that criticism is correct. Rico has no arc worth the name. Mario Frigo exists to be rescued. Dimah al-Masri exists to explain Bavarium. Tom Sheldon, Rico’s former Agency contact, turns up working with the rebellion, and the game gestures at distrust without ever building it into anything.
The scanner sequence is the clearest example. Rico retrieves an experimental scanner for Dimah, damages it badly, and hands it to Sheldon while not trusting him to have the rebels’ interests at heart. That is a real dramatic question. The game raises it and moves on.
None of this ruins Just Cause 3. It just means the campaign is the toll you pay for the sandbox, and the toll is higher than it should be.
A 7.6 out of 10
Just Cause 3 is a 7.6 out of 10. It is a game built on one excellent idea, movement as power, and it executes that idea with more confidence than most open-world games of its era. The grappling hook, the wingsuit and the 400 square miles of Medici are the reason to play it, and they hold up.
The rest is noise. The story is a stack of clichés about a dictator, a mineral and a rebellion, and it never finds a reason to care about any of them. The console performance issues are a genuine defect, not a nitpick, because they undercut the exact thing the game does best.
What matters here is that Avalanche understood something its competitors did not: that a big map is not a feature, it is a promise, and the promise is only kept if getting across it feels good. Just Cause 3 keeps that promise. It just never keeps the other one, the one about why Rico came home.
Key facts
- Release: December 2015
- Developer: Avalanche Studios
- Publisher: Square Enix
- Platforms: PlayStation 4, PC (Microsoft Windows), Xbox One
- Later playable on: Xbox Series, PlayStation 5 via digital stores
- Genre: Action-adventure, open world, third person
- Modes: Single player
- Map size: 400 square miles (1,000 km2)
- Score: 7.6/10 (critic aggregate across 19 outlets)
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