Just Cause 3 Should’ve Just Focused on the Explosions

Just Cause 3, the latest in a series of games about causing as many explosions as humanly possible, has a perspective problem. For all the joy it wrings out of mayhem, it's a game that doesn't see itself clearly, that can't accurately account for its own strengths and weaknesses. It encourages the players to do things that it can't quite let them do, and it features elements that don't seem to fit.

Which isn't to say the game, released earlier this month on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Windows, isn't thrilling in its best moments, or that it's not worth playing. If your to-do list includes flying a plane into another plane so you can revel in having exploded some planes, then this game is likely for you. Someone just needs to hand it a mirror.

Just Cause 3 takes the player to Medici, a fictional island nation in the Mediterranean, a riff on an Italian villa replete with sunflowers, beautiful skyscapes, and the militarized machinations of one General di Ravello, cartoonish dictator extraordinaire. As returning series protagonist Rico Rodriquez, it's your job to depose di Ravello. Preferably by breaking all of his things.

Rico Rodriquez is well equipped for this job. He's a James Bond for the Iraq War generation, a tornado of implausible destruction. Give Rico five minutes with anything, and through a combination of guns, bombs, and vehicular theft, it will be a smoking pile of rubble. Just Cause 3 revels in the aesthetics of destruction, and most of the game's tasks for the player consist of locating and destroying di Ravello's outposts, military bases, and the infrastructure he makes use of in civilian centers.