I was curious on what the Just Cause games were like and after hearing so much about the positive reception that Just Cause 2 and 3 had I decided to skip JC1 and buy 2 and 3 and chose this as my starting point. And honestly? I can't say I understand just what the craze is about. First of all, while the first missions of the game seem somewhat decent, the fun seems to stop there as the rest of the stuff seems either boring, grindy, repetitive, frustrating, or a combination of all 4. First off, the open world is WAY too big for what they made here. I mean the grapple and slingshot mechanic can work, but this map is so large to the point where even using a car, bike, or even helicopter feels so sluggish. I kind of wondered how the devs expected you to tackle exploration when just getting to the bottom of the region you're on takes at least 2 straight minutes of driving, so its obvious you should just use the black market extraction option. On top of that, there is barely anything interesting about these locations outside of the story missions, because everywhere you go is just a military base with annoying enemies that spawn constantly and can spawn camp you if you teleport there, and copy and paste villages which are either run down huts, a few buildings with some ruined huts, or a combination of both, so this map for as big as it is, has little to no interesting locations, similar to GTA 5's, and this map is even BIGGER than that game. Also, the collectibles and discoverable locations are way too plentiful. For how many of these you have to grind for and how little they mean in the long run, it's just frustrating. I mean, did we need 368 locations? Seriously? AND without being able to tell what type of collectible we're missing when there's destructible and collectibles hidden around the map AND bases? That's just cruel. And then on top of that, the chaos mechanic is probably the worst open world mechanic i've heard of. while punishment meters have existed in gaming for years, even GTA 1 and 2 do a better job at making proper crime and punishment mechanics than this game does, because even from just taking one thing down, you can have the army on your tail in seconds, especially in bases, and helicopters and heavy gunners usually just mow you down instantly, especially on hard. And the weapon upgrades do just about as much as you can to these hordes of enemies. Not much. I purchased upgrades for both vehicles and weapons especially, and I saw just about no differences at all in any of these. They still feel like i'm using the same base weapon i started with, even my LV3 Assault Rifle feels like only a revolver to enemies. The best thing to use even is just at most an attack helicopter, since it has both infinite ammo and rockets, but every other vehicle just sucks. I could go on, but this game just fails in almost every way. This game makes almost feels like this series is one you buy Just Cause your bored. It's not fun, and i'm dreading Just Cause 3, because you know what they say, bigger isn't always better, and if it shows here, it DEFINITELY could be even worse in JC3. Maybe i'll consider changing my mind if I get farther into the game, but this to me just feels terrible.
