For Rico Rodriguez, the hero of the Only Cause games, the crunch of glass and the punch of bullets are the sounds of summer. It is a fantastic job his missions put him beneath a hot sun; differently, his balmy high jinks would seem less benign and more homicidal. If he had to work with wet leaves, cold wind, and heavens of slush, his glamour would turn grim. He would be Action Man compared to murderer. It is because of this that the protagonist of Just Cause 4, who has the power to restrain the prediction, must be stopped.
His name is Oscar Espinosa, and he’s the first villain to weaponise the weather because Sir August De Wynter, at 1998’s The Avengers, Who had been played, in a comedic casting coup, by Sean Connery — the joke being that it had been just that strain of megalomaniac Connery thwarted time and again as James Bond. In Just Cause 4, but there is no such wit; Espinosa is as boring as a raincloud. However, to give him his due, his methods are all tailor-made to irritate Rico, who spends most of his job day at the atmosphere.
The traversal in Only Cause 4 is a wondrous thing. It’s a celestial Balancing act involving Batman, gliding on pockets of air, and Spider-Man, darting and twanging off surfaces. Rico’s grappling hook lofts him skywards; his wing suit whisks him and his parachute, bobbing on the breeze, provides him the stately atmosphere of Superman. Lousy weather, then, is his kryptonite. Clearly it is Rico, over the troubled paradise of Solís, that is under siege.
Not that there are not locals in need of assistance. You are charged with winning the hearts and minds of a rebel militia and scorching enemy turf with skirmishes. There is no sense of emotion or desperation in the tyrannised people, but then, I would be concerned for any spirit that comes to Only Cause 4 for its narrative. Why bother to unspool the fuse of a story when you can blow up things with such ease and speed? Besides, Rico is not the magnificent type; his emotions are the last things to detonate.
It’s just as well, too, because the nitty-gritty of the everyday Program needs your attention. Advancing your militia’s front line requires adequate Chaos Points, and that’s best taken as both description and instruction. Fireballs should be cultivated like flowering flowers, their seeds disperse across the property in the form of gasoline canisters, generators, barrels, and vehicles. And there’s little to stand on your way. Espinosa’s forces will assuage any nagging fears you have that AI introduces any measure of threat to our future. They amble into your iron sights like lemmings, and stand around like guinea pigs, to be experimented in the title of bizarre science.
Rico’s Grapple grants you the power to tether them to a another, Butting heads like coconuts. Even better, why don’t you send one pinging into a red barrel, or play conkers with a pair of helicopters? Behold the joys of elasticity! The very best thing about the battle is that this ludicrous playful approach; it goes a very long way to alleviate the repetition of claiming enemy turf. There are even helium balloons, which, with forlorn cruelty, can send troops drifting up to the stratosphere — the closest they will get to the skies. Imagine if Che Guevara employed such risible strategies.
Down to the floor, it doesn’t matter how Internecine the battle gets, provided that the Chaos is still climbing. The series’ title has ever been a statement, not a question. Missions are the best method to find the things you need to advance, but they are packed with pointless wadding. In case you need to hack on one terminal, the odds are you’ll be requested to hack two more; it’s an artificial method of pumping up the missions but, paradoxically, ends up deflating them. At one point, laying siege to an enemy base, my contact chirps in my ear,’They have put some sign jammers around the base. That is a problem.’ Rico answers,’No. They’re only postponing the inevitable.’ Really, Avalanche should take note.
This dull, slogging mission frame gives you undesirable pause for thought, a mortal sin in a match such as this. The first Only Cause sprang in the gold rush which sifted through the wake of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, And, at a brazen show of oneupmanship, pushed you from a plane before handing over control. More than simply airborne, Rico was born in the atmosphere. As the series has surged on, things have only ramped up. The problem is that you become velocitised. Just Cause 4 is fearful of letting up on the accelerator, for fear that anything slower than a lightning bolt will probably feel like a crawl. It is perfectly summarised during a mission, which sees Rico stirring up and chasing a tornado as it rakes through the countryside and into a town. That is exactly what the developers at Avalanche Studios do: they’re storm chasers.
The master stroke of Just Cause 4 is that it puts you in Rico’s Place; as long as it is possible to remain airborne and keep the high going, you Can fill a weekend using affordable thrills the likes of that you will receive Nowhere else. When he catches up with that hurricane, he makes a person Harpoon of himself and stabs into its own heart. Whatever his strategy was, one Of his allies opinions,’It’s fucking nuts.’ Back comes the answer:’And That’s why it’s likely to work.
