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The Sandbox of Just Cause 4 Requires Cleaning

Square Enix’s Just Cause series has always come across as a bit of an odd duck to me. When the series initially started back in 2006 it wasn’t particularly ground-breaking but it did offer a new spin on the open world sandbox.

Whilst GTA had you driving around doing fairly mundane (at times) missions in cityscape #36-B, Just Cause instead gave you complete carte blanche over a massive landscape with a rainbow of weaponry, vehicles and locales that you could blow up, drive off or generally mess about in. For the time it was a breath of fresh air for the sandbox genre and released only a month after the first Saints Row game it helped strengthen the idea that open world exploration could be silly as well as serious.

Fast Forward to 2018 and the fourth instalment of the Just Cause series seems to be forgetting its roots a tad.

For the record, I loved Just Cause 2 and there was some enjoyment to it’s sequel as they leaned more into the weirder side of things, but with JC4 it feels like a bit of a step back from its predecessors. Gone are the party airships, the bombastic explosions and colourful set pieces as we’re forced into a long series of either fetch quests, guarding areas whilst they’re being ‘hacked’ or pushing a button and fending off waves of bad guys.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, what is Just Cause 4?

The fourth instalment in developer Avalanche Studios open world sandbox series, players take control of Rico ‘The Destabiliser’ Rodriguez in the fictional South American locale of Solis as they set about freeing the oppressed locales from another power hungry dictator. The game starts in medias res as you’re dumped outside of the mountain top hideaway of despot Oscar Espinosa. A man whose character was designed by a marketing exec that just finished marathoning a bunch of bog standard action movies.

Espinosa keeps control of his tin-pot dictatorship through the use of a series of weather controlling devices that Rico’s father helped create. Your goal is to destroy the weather devices, overthrow him and generally destabilise the area to the point where even a charity concert by Bono couldn’t help it.

This is managed by completing a series of missions set out to you by the supporting cast of characters that you’re introduced to with a handwave and forget just as quickly. Our main friend in need is a woman named Mira Morales, who brings Rico in after Just Cause 3, something new players will find slightly confusing as she’s introduced like someone you should already know.

From there you have to take part in a paint the map style approach of freeing areas from Espinosa’s private militias grasp by causing enough chaos that the locals join up on your crusade to violently bring democracy to this tropical locale. This manifests itself in a bar onscreen that you fill up by completing missions, events and generally blowing up everything insight.

Whilst on paper that sounds fun, in practice it equates to constantly grinding up enough experience to recruit enough local lads to free an area only to find that it’s permanently locked off from you until you complete additional side requirements. This could be freeing other specific additional areas of the map first or completing side-objectives hidden away in a particular area.

Where it starts to grind is the distance between distractions. Most of these missions are so mind numbingly far apart that you will spend most of your time just driving from one spot to another, constantly circling around trying to find something to do. Then when you do find a mission to sink some time into it’s as I previously described in the introduction. You’re either fending off waves of bad guys for a set amount of time whilst an offscreen support character ‘hacks the network’, pushing a series of buttons to power something up or preventing something from being destroyed for a set amount of time. In practice this is as boring and frustrating as it sounds.

The game makes things even more difficult in what I swear is spiteful delight as it spawns endless snipers, grenades and attack helicopters at times literally on top of you as you ragdoll around  helplessly from the constant damage.

One instance when it became completely laughable was on a small isolated island completely cut-off from anyone and anything. Yet armoured APCs, tanks and dune buggies were somehow spawning en masse three feet behind me, piling on top of one another and then summarily exploding in a massive fireball. I would have enjoyed watching this insane spectacle if it weren’t for the attack helicopters and jets that were continually carpet-bombing poor Rico into oblivion just as fast as I could take them down.

The occasional escort quest is thrown in for good measure at times as well and often the pathing of the npc you’re supposed to be protecting will drive as if their car is the last shopping cart in the store and all the wheels are broken. Get used to wild veering whenever the roads get too packed with cars and start praying should they ever need to go across a bridge. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve been fighting tooth and nail to defend an npc vehicle only for it to suddenly lurch off the road and explode in a ditch if another car so much as brushes against it.

It’s an exercise in frustration and bad pathing that can be maddeningly hysterical to watch as the AI struggles at even the most bare bones of times to navigate around anything in front of them.

The game also come into its own when it comes to how overly aggressive it is with its wanted system.

In order to stop you from going too nuts with the explosions and carnage there’s an implemented wanted system of sorts that, similar to GTA, increases in difficulty the longer you’re alive causing havoc. But, in Just Cause 4’s case you can trigger this, at times, without any explanation or reason as to why you’re now being viciously hunted. And there’s just the same amount of vagueness as how you lower it or how far you need to travel to stop being pursued.

I’ve lost count of the amount of times I was minding my own business in a helicopter only for it to suddenly explode around me as several hostile fighter jets scream past, abruptly U-turn and then crash into the surrounding buildings or hillsides. Attack choppers will relentlessly hunt you down for so much as looking at them and APCs will ram you off the road without the slightest hesitation. It all amounts to constant noise and dogpiling at every turn that just disparages you from causing anarchy, the game’s main selling point. Even though the developers themselves have said the AI is a step-up from previous instalments, in normal gameplay that’s hard to see.

I will admit though that some of the scenery is nice, the mountains especially are detailed and there are some fun little paths to wander up and down at your own pace. Although there’s no reward for this other than admiring the work put into the game as fun things to do are often few and far between.

With a story pacing that’s often breakneck and prolific content gating until you slowly grind up enough lads to liberate an area providing the majority of the padding to this game, it seems the once vast, full and zany sandbox has been thinned out over the years in favour of much more toned down and mundane gameplay.

In closing, I wanted to like Just Cause 4 going in. I had fond memories of previous versions and a lot of time sunk into the unofficial multiplayer version of Just Cause 2, but this current instalment fails to live up to those expectations of an open world sandbox filled with toys for anarchy. I would not recommend this game and to quote a commonly asked Google question: “What is the point of Just Cause 4?”

Final Thoughts On Prey

Recently I managed to make a significant dent in my videogame backlog by finishing off Prey, so I thought I would get my opinion of it out before my frustration with the game gives me an aneurysm.

Published by Bethesda, Prey is a first-person sci-fi shooter that pits you against a range of horrible aliens on a spaceship with a bunch of weird and wonderful abilities and weapons. Not to be confused with the 2006 game Prey, a first-person sci-fi shooter that pits you against aliens on a spaceship with a bunch of weird weapons and abilities.

It’s confusing, isn’t it?

In the 2017 edition of Prey, you play the role of Morgan Yu a brilliant engineer and scientist that wakes up one morning in his comfy, quiet studio apartment in San Francisco where everything is calm and peaceful. Through a Groundhog Day style series of events, Morgan finds out that he’s actually aboard the research vessel Talos 1 and things have taken a turn for the worst. The ships infested with a race of shapeshifting psychic aliens called Typhon and Morgan must escape Talos 1, get his memory back and find out how everything went pear-shaped.

I really enjoyed the setting of Prey, it has some nice System Shock vibes to it as you explore the ship both inside and out, crafting resources from scrap you find lying around whilst approaching every situation in the game any way you like.

For example, if you’re presented with a locked door to a room you can try to hack it, crawl through a nearby maintenance vent or fling subtlety to the wind, smash a hole in the window, turn into a mug with your Typhon abilities and slide on inside.

The freedom you have over the environment is a nice change from normal first-person shooter games I’ve played where you must go a specific way or perform a set action to progress like breaching a room full of terrorists or performing a QTE to continue. Plus, it leads to a lot of fun moments where you find yourself going “Was I meant to do it that way?” as you mess around with Prey’s rather liberal physics engine.

It’s also got the most immersive ‘floating around in Zero-G’ mechanics I’ve ever seen. It genuinely feels like you’re weightless in suit as you gently bump off walls, zoom along corridors with a slight press of your thrusters letting physics take the wheel and it’s quite satisfying to watch nearby items in the environment ragdoll in low gravity after an explosion. Throw in the occasional deep breath from Morgan’s Oxygen Regulator as he floats along in his suit and the muffled sounds of weapon fire and it’s easy to lose yourself in the moment as you just bob along in space admiring the scenery.

The stories compelling, the alien powers you can use are interesting and combining them with your ordinary weapons can make you a force to be reckoned with onboard Talos 1 as you create all sorts of carnage.

However, as much as I enjoyed this game there are several issues I had with it and after taking some time to process it all after finishing the game I might as well line them all up now for further critique/mockery.

To start things off we have the difficulty curve at the beginning that ramps up to an insane degree after the first couple of hours. Unless you invest heavily in Typhon powers and weapon upgrades right out the gate you’re going to be pounded into the dirt by pretty much everything. Especially the cheap EMP spam projectiles from Technopaths that can knock out your electrical based weapons and your entire suit if you’re in Zero-G.

I get that in a videogame difficulty is supposed to progress gradually higher as the game goes along to mirror your own increasing skill and abilities, but Prey insists on just dumping high level enemies on you super early on that only serve to strip you of ammunition and healing items that you just spent so long trying to scrounge up for in the first place.

Another issue that, at the time of writing, was pretty bad was the almost vindictive enjoyment the game had in removing items, weapons and ammunition from my inventory through what’s now been colloquially coined by the community as ‘Door Demons’.

What do I mean by that?

Well, during my playthrough of Prey there were points in the game where I would go through a loading screen door, emerge on the other side and be surprised to find that the game at random decided that I didn’t need an item in my inventory. At first, I didn’t notice this rather aggravating bug until it decided to strip me of my most powerful weapon in the game. Of course, I thought that I must have accidently dropped it in the previous room during a fight and after scrounging the area for an hour I gave up, reloaded a previous save that was significantly further back went through the door and it happened again.

According to the Prey forums this bug is still prevalent and there seems to be no immediate fix coming, so for now anyone playing Prey just has to deal. It’s like someone walking up to you at random intervals in the game and punching you in the head, just chock it up to ‘Extra Difficulty Level’ I guess.

Couple that with the aggravatingly long load times between sections and you’ve got yourself a ringside seat to the next performance of ‘Controller Thrown Off A Wall In B-Flat’.

Now this last part is going to go straight into spoiler territory, so if you don’t want the ending of Prey ruined then turn away now, finish the game and then come back.

 

 

*************************** Spoilers Below **********************************

 

 

Now the biggest problem I had with Prey would be its endings, there’s three of them and only two have any impact on the story. Although most modern games tend to offer this, where Prey let me down was that the developers behind the game, Arkane Studios, said that there would be “tons of permutations” within the games endings. But, there’s only really two sub-endings within the two main ones.

To simplify things, I’ll explain what exactly happens upon finishing the game.

When you get to the final chapter you’re given the option to either escape the ship whilst detonating a device that neutralises the Typhon or just blowing the ship up completely.

Once you pick one of these options you’re given a short cutscene, end credit sequence and then suddenly the game screen lifts to reveal that surprise, surprise, it’s all been a simulation based on the real Morgan Yu’s memories aboard the Talos 1 incident. You are in fact not Morgan Yu since he apparently died offscreen a while ago, instead you’re a Typhon hybrid that his brother Alex has been experimenting on.

Now, as aggravatingly cliched and awful as that ending is, where it really pushed my buttons was that I was presented with an array of robots that were all voiced by NPC’s in the game that I interacted with. This makeshift robotic Jury then lists off your interactions with their digital avatar selves within the simulation, did you save or kill them in their side quest, did you run an errand for them, did you use too many Typhon augments or not kill enough aliens, that sort of thing.

It’s at this point that the ‘many permutations’ that the game developers boasted so much about falls out of the air dead. Because you can almost see the logic diagram that they wrote for this; ‘Did player do A? if yes play voice clip A, did they not do A? play voice clip B’, repeat ad nausea.

Once I saw this the entire threat of the games ‘your choices matter’ just completely collapsed because clearly my choices didn’t matter at all. It just parrots back the things that I did with no real consequence other than my character being killed as a ‘failed experiment’ if I was too much of a bad boy. But even then, I genuinely think I could have scraped by with much less of what the game deemed as positive actions on my playthrough.

Once the Jury finished their deliberation you’re then given the option to assist Alex or kill everyone in the room. Naturally I saved beforehand to see where each ending differed and was instantly let down to see that they didn’t. Instead of some unique dialogue or a cutscene showing the consequences of this apparently monumental decision, I was instead given a 10 second clip in each choice of either shaking Alex’s hand or ramming a tentacle through his heart before the screen cut to black.

When that happened oh boy the red mist descended, I was upset, I was angry, I was filled with a frustrated rage that I’ve not felt since the early days of Dark Souls.

I felt insulted by the game, it had had built up this fascinating and intricately woven spaceship story of tension and drama as I had to make all my decisions count and seriously think about all my actions and their potential consequences. But no, it was ‘all a dream’, your decisions didn’t matter and the main character is dead here’s your endings I guess, we’re off to focus on the sequel.

I really enjoyed Prey at the beginning, it has some legitimately good moments, the mechanics are fun and incredibly easy to get to grips with. The story is intriguing, but the way it just completely falls apart at the end is just terrible and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

I wanted to like Prey more than I did, I had so many great moments in it and I would still recommend picking it up when it’s cheap because the gameplay and setting is the best thing about it. Just, ignore the story and stick to messing around with psychic powers and the ability to turn into a mug instead.

Review of Night In The Woods

 

When I was… never mind how old… I packed up my life into a single car and returned to the little town where I went to college. I enrolled in one of their graduate programs, and spent an entire semester musing over what a mistake I’d made. Not that furthering your education is a bad thing, but I certainly wasn’t doing it for the right reasons. Like so many people of this generation, institutions like graduate school become a hiding ground. An expensive cellar that you can hide in until the proverbial sharknado of the world at large stops spitting Makos into your above ground pool.
Of course, life doesn’t really work that way. As Thomas Wolfe pointed out, you can’t go home again. Which would explain my parents increasingly negative opinions of my idea that I move back in and become a gentleman of leisure in my thirties. Developers of the indie game Night In The Woods truly understand that desire: to return to a simpler time. They also understand that nothing is ever quite that simple. And that’s what makes Night In The Woods so heartwrenching and effective.
Night In The Woods is an narrative-driven adventure game from developer Infinite Fall. You play as Mae Borowski, a troubled young woman who returns to her hometown after dropping out of college. Mae is also a cat, figured I should point that out. The art style is important to point out. It has such a beautiful children’s storybook quality to it that it clashes with the serious topics you encounter in wonderfully contradictory way. Everything about the visuals impressed me, largely because it didn’t need to be this gorgeous. The animations are crisp, the characters are expressive, the light and color is full and rich. And with a game that’s as focused on narrative as Night In The Woods is, they could have gotten away with far less focus on that visual aspect. But they didn’t, and it’s that level of extra that makes this game stand out.
Mae’s hometown of Possum Springs is alive. A former mining town that has fallen on hard times, the working class ennui is palpable. The people within it are altogether too real: their problems too relatable. It’s this setting that gets Mae going on something of a coming of age story: as her days progress, Mae learns more about herself, and the player learns more about Mae and the friends she’s returned to. The realities of work, death, and regret are heavy in the hearts of many characters: some who would have done anything to have Mae’s opportunities, and now resent her for turning her back on them. The problems are definitely real, maybe even a little too real. Moments of clarity and confusion really resonated with me. I could truly relate with what many of these characters are going through, and I may have uttered “goddammit, cat girl: get out of my head” on more than one occasion.
Eventually, the small town atmosphere morphs into a David Lynch style mystery. There are rumblings of people going missing, and Mae begins to believe that she’s seeing ghosts. She has bizarre dream sequences that make her question reality and her place in it. And if there was any place that I felt the story was a little weak, it was as this mystery unwinds. Without giving anything away, Mae delves deeper and deeper into a creepy, cultish underbelly of her small town, better understanding her own broken mindset in the process. And I just wasn’t completely sold on the supernatural aspect of it all.

Review: For Honor

For Honor is a duel-centric game that pits Knights, Vikings, and Samurai against each other. Just throw in Pirates, Ninjas, Dinosaurs, and rampant xenophobia and you’ve got: INTERNET THE GAME!