There are two kinds of story generated by a Just Cause game, I reckon. The first kind of story is breathless - action piled upon improbable reaction with no pauses in the telling whatsoever. The other kind of story - you could call it the Larry Story - is defined by its pauses: confusion, disbelief, slow realisation, shame. This guy was dead...and I think I killed him...and then I attached him to my car...? And to a balloon...? And I drove around for another half hour?
Just Cause 4 isn't short on the first kind of story, of course. Here's an example from a mission I encountered about halfway in.
I had learned that my nemesis - the bland dictator I had turned up in the Latin American state of Solis to take down - had learned how to meddle with the weather. Blizzards, sandstorms, lightning, that kind of thing. He knew how to make tornados, and now my guys, the liberators had learned how to make them too. The plan was to make a tornado, grow it to a great size and ride it straight into one of his cities. (I think this was the plan anyway - snappy, memorable plotting is not a series strength.)
We started out in the countryside and the tornado started to grow. Here's where the story gets breathless. We were driving an armoured car that could withstand the tornado, but little else in the environment could, so as we followed the twister down the road it started to chew up everything else in sight - barns, traffic, foliage. My NPC colleague in the armoured car put on a mix-tape and we listened to that for a bit as the wind howled, but the tornado could not be entirely trusted. Enemies had set up wind cannons to blow it off its path so I had to get out of the car, fight through the storm and take those out. By the time that was done, we were in the city where our own wind cannons were waiting, but the baddies were attacking them. Because of all that jazz I had to zap back and forth between the skyscrapers these cannons were mounted on, clearing off waves of skirmishers. Finally, when the tornado was big enough, I rode a thermal or whatever it was to the very top and then dived inside and whiteness filled the screen.
What's new? The plot is very similar to the previous games. The bad guy can control the weather this time, which means that the campaign is built around a series of set-pieces as you take out machines that cause stuff like lightning, sandstorms, and that twister, and there's a link to hero Rico Rodriguez's father, but it's business as usual in every way that matters. Solis, meanwhile, the country you're dropped into, is pretty and varied - jungle, desert, snow and lovely coast all accounted for, alongside lovely spiny mountains and looping roads. But like other Just Cause locations, it utterly fails to come into focus as an actual place where set-pieces are connected in any kind of meaningful way. More than before, in fact, this is just a cluster of concrete military bases where the missions happen, connected by foliage and expanses of sand or snow. None of this matters, of course. It never has with Just Cause.
The weather effects are new! And in the missions when you go up against them they're pretty exciting. Driving a boat into a thunderstorm or following red lights that throb through the mineral wind of a sandstorm make for some lovely moments, and it's a thrill to pull the parachute and discover that - oh boy - you've made a huge, huge mistake as you're carried miles from your objective. But elsewhere, the missions you use to unlock regions of the map are made from a handful of endlessly repeated pieces: go here, protect this hacker, download something from this console, escort these soldiers, find and wreck these generators. The blandness of the things you often do in Just Cause make for poor reading, but they're bland for a decent reason, I think: the tools you have at your disposal are the real stars here, and the missions exist simply to give you reasons to use them in the heat of combat.
The retractor and booster rocket have both been seen before. The retractor allows you to link two things together and then pull them towards one another. The booster now allows you to attach many, many rockets to an object and then set them going at once, blasting a cargo crate, perhaps, across a busy military base for fun and profit. The balloon is where the money is, though. It's the Fulton Recovery System from Metal Gear, except now you can use it offensively rather than just for picking up cargo. You can point the tether at a baddie and attach a balloon to them, sending them into the sky. Then you can cut the thread and drop them back to earth. Or you can use the balloon to rip a piece of machinery apart. Or you can use it to get rid of pursuing cars. And on and on.
All of these gadgets can be arranged in loadouts, and all of them can be flared with mods, which you pay for by completing three chains of side-missions, one of which did not seem to appear on my map screen for vast stretches of the adventure, but in a game like Just Cause, who's to say if that's the game's fault or mine? Anyway, the mods allow you to do stuff like fill the balloons with hydrogen, which as history knows, is a terribly good idea, or add a tasty yank moment to the retractor. In truth, these gadgets are so much fun together or in combination - particularly when deployed in close quarters and by accident - that the mods didn't make much of an impact for me. They're built around the idea that you play Just Cause with clarity and precision, but this is never a precise experience for me. Example: in one mission, I was escorting a hacker in a buggy and I missed a turn in the road and fell off a cliff and continued to fall for what the game informed me was a kilometer and a half. We ended up underwater. I still completed the mission. But I didn't do it with clarity of precision.
Just Cause gets away with this, though, just as it gets away with building a sequel around a few stand-out weather missions and a bunch of balloons, because it has that rare commodity in games. Just Cause is charming, and Just Cause 4 is as charming as all the others. Rico isn't just a liberator on a mission, he is likable and fun to be around. He moves beautifully, he hums Wagner as he obliterates his own bases in a helicopter, and even when he isn't humming he sounds amazing as he zips about, a muddle of buckles and winches and tiny motors purring. The plot pulls off a potentially murky blend of regime change and climate-conspiracy because it's obvious that nobody expects anybody to think too seriously about these things, and the game beneath the plot throws the same objectives at you over and over again because it knows that the tools you're given are fun enough to ensure that you can do things a little differently each time.
How long will this confection hold together? I don't know. I forget Just Cause games the minute I complete them, and yet the moment the next one appears on the horizon, waving a couple of balloons, I'm back in, boots-first. Rico loves this stuff. I love this stuff. Even Larry, I suspect, sort of loves this stuff too. (Rest in peace, obviously.)
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