Every time I boot up Just Cause 3, I experience a few minutes of absolute awesomeness. An average journey in the game starts with me performing a perfect backflip with my grappling hook, followed by an ascent into the atmosphere with an indestructible parachute. Judiciously switching between grappling hook, parachute and wingsuit keeps momentum going. Before I knew it, I’d arrived at my destination: a red and silver warehouse full of papier-mâché gas tanks and fascists.

Ironically, the moment I blasted the grenade launcher into my hand, the game froze. I groaned, because this has happened before and it will happen again before I finish the game.

Weapons of interactive destruction

Just Cause 3 on PC is a fireball, both digitally and figuratively. The third part of the series sees the pseudo-protagonist Rico Rodriguez return to the country where he grew up. His mission is to indiscriminately destroy the infrastructure of the state, using means that are not strictly necessary but certainly diverse.

The fictional island republic of Medici, which appears to be in the Mediterranean, is under the rule of General Sebastiano di Ravello. This man is a psychopath and a dictator, but also happens to be sitting on the world’s only Bavarium (the game’s replacement for Unobtainium). This makes him a confidant to the West, especially the CIA, who hire Rico, hoping for easier access to the explosive/inexhaustible energy source/magic space rock.

Most of this geopolitical shell is ripped apart when Rodriguez boards a cargo plane into the country with a rocket launcher, before jumping into the ocean.

Just Cause 3 matches the hectic, destructive tone of Just Cause 2, though the story is a bit more silly this time around. Just Cause 3 isn’t entirely devoid of pathos, however: there are some surprisingly thoughtful moments here and there – particularly when it comes to the exploitation of the rebellious Medici clan by government agents – but the plot is so simple, and told at such a broken, ferocious pace, that between destroying radar antennas and hitchhiking to the underside of a gunship, I barely had time to care about any of that stuff.

The open world comes together

Just Cause 3’s greatness isn’t just because it lets you do silly stunts and over-the-top moves, which happens in a lot of games. In most games, though, these action scenes are reduced to a cutscene, a quicktime event, or simply pressing the analog stick to the right until the corresponding scene is triggered.

Just Cause 3, on the other hand, lets its fully controllable systems wreak havoc and, when used in the right order, do amazing things. Medici remains a physics sandbox, as my time in the trenches under a blazing ATV proves. But that’s offset by the fact that I’ve repeatedly driven exploding jeeps off cliffs and parachuted out to say “THWIP!” at passing planes (which then often crashed into a guard post, by lucky coincidence, liberating even more of the island).

Even if these daring acrobatic feats are somehow trivial in the game, you always end up feeling like you should be fully credited for their execution. The game doesn’t just show you the amazing things your character can do; it lets you control these amazing things, too.

As with most open-world games, all of these mechanics serve the overall goal of taking back control from the bad guys, district by district. In this case, that means destroying very specific (and sometimes infuriatingly specific) facilities while getting shot at.

Rico gains the ability to fly, use an infinite supply of weapons, and detonate remote-controlled bombs about 15 minutes into One Man D-Day. This means that it’s nearly impossible to gain new destructive abilities by continuing to play.

Instead, most of the unlockable extras are quality of life improvements: upgrades like air brakes for the wingsuit and nitrous oxide for the primitive ground transport. This is where Just Cause 3’s mundane ring races, car chases, and other predictable open-world filler actually come in handy. The better you perform in each activity category, the more upgrades you unlock.

The usual open-world trivia isn’t just an excuse to try out every tool at your disposal. It’s also a way to accumulate more of those tools. It’s a great system that’s very satisfying.

I mean, hopefully.

Then it all falls apart

That important “will it work or not” caveat doesn’t apply every time Rico eats gravel (or a tank shell) because he mishandles his awesome double-sided grappling hook winch. Our somewhat heroic protagonist is extremely resilient, which is a godsend given the oppressive heat that pervades GTA-style. If Rico keeps moving, he can easily stay ahead of entire companies of military-like foes. If he doesn’t… well, Medici might need a new one-man infiltration squad.

No, what I’m actually referring to is the incredible number of stutters, glitches, and just plain bugs I had to deal with while testing Just Cause 3. On a computer close to the developer’s recommended specs listed on Steam (the only exception being a GTX 770 graphics card instead of a GTX 780), Just Cause 3 was purely awesome at multiple combinations of resolution and graphics settings.

Even with everything set to low quality and all special effects turned off, the frame rate can drop from oily like gun oil to jagged like shrapnel when a grenade is thrown, but often without any explosions. These performance drops seem just as likely to occur in the middle of an intense firefight as when flying over a great horizon. There were moments when performance hit “acceptable,” but the stuttering was pretty much constant.

It feels amazing to land a wingsuit at 150mph or pull a tank off a cliff from 40 paces away, but those epic moments are quickly forgotten when twice as many failed attempts and the frame rate stutters.

An interruption to carnage

Had the performance issues been limited to frame rate alone, I might have been more likely to write it off as simply too demanding for my mortal PC (despite the min/recommended specs). But there were plenty of other technical issues when I played the game. Some low points:

• Periodic freezing for a minute or two when pausing, resuming, completing a mission, and especially at the end of the game
• Frequent audio and video desyncing
• Controls no longer functioning after quitting the game and switching back again
• Entire ocean disappearing – twice
• Random loss of connection to Square Enix’s servers

The last point is especially important, as it’s unlikely to be fixed unless Square changes their entire online system. Just Cause 3 is a purely single-player game, but as soon as you start the game (unless your computer is completely offline), it automatically connects to Square’s Uplay-like servers. This connection will enable the game to show you up-to-date leaderboards of little facts as you play, like the furthest jump with a car or the longest time without touching the ground.

Getting people to use a great system that they might not have thought of otherwise is a good incentive. I struggled a few times to stay airborne mid-skydive when other players’ times mocked my own.

But in the last few days, this “service” has made Just Cause 3 go from virtually unplayable to completely unplayable. If you lose connection to the game’s servers automatically (which happened every few minutes in the last few days before the game’s release), you’ll have to wait another minute or two while the game attempts to reconnect. If this process inevitably fails, you can finally opt for the sweet reprieve of offline mode.

However, this sense of security doesn’t last long, as “offline mode” only lasts until you pause the game, look at the map, or browse a critical upgrade, at which point the game will halt and attempt to reconnect, defeating the very essence of “offline mode.”

Connection lost…

It’s a shame that a review of a game that would be great fun if it worked has to read like just a bug report. But I can only report on the game I was given to review. And right now, just a day before the game is available for public download, the game is broken in many ways and unplayable in many ways (at least on PC; no console version was available to try before release).

Several other reviewers I spoke to also reported similar “issues” while playing. However, this issue does not seem to affect everyone. Livestreams and other videos of the game running perfectly smoothly have not been banned for several days.

The developers seem to be aware of at least some of the possible issues with the game and have promised that they are working on solutions. If these issues can be ironed out soon after release, I’d fully recommend the game. But given the ongoing issues with recent PC releases such as Warner Bros.’ Batman: Arkham Knight, that’s hardly a safe assumption.

In a moment of clarity, I fell in love with Just Cause 3, and I’ll probably be back after a few patches or a few hundred dollars on some new PC gear.

The Good

• Open world activities feel meaningful
• Beautiful island nation to destroy
• Can do amazing deeds without showing

The Bad

• Disjointed and poorly explained story
• Horrible bugs and glitches
• Unstable servers constantly interrupt the flow in this single player game Overview

The Ugly

• If you overestimate the altitude you’ll end up face first in the dirt

Verdict

Just Cause 3 is a great game – if it runs properly on your system. Give it a try.