Just Cause 4 managed to do something that no other game in the series has accomplished. It made me bored of Just Cause. While I've never thought of the series as anything particularly excellent, it's always been a reliable source of fun over the top blockbuster action. But this latest entry in the series has committed itself to bland and repetitive mission design that makes the later half of the game feel less like playing through a ridiculous Hollywood action scene and more like scratching things off a to do list.

Which isn't to say that the previous installment didn't fall into similar problems, but there most missions were "go into enemy base and don't leave until it's on fire" and the game let you go wild with however you wanted to do it. Here however you are given much more specific goals which get repetitive really fast. Escorting prisoners, stealing pass codes, and driving bombs into the ocean are things that I will be very happy for future installments to discard. I'm not saying that repetitive missions are inherently a bad design choice but when your world map is this large has such an immense list of locations to visit then you need to design more than 4-5 missions to do in them.

It's not all bad though, the trademark Hook-shot/Para-shoot/Wing-suit combo makes a much welcome return here which is still one of the most satisfying movement systems in all of video games. I really do appreciate games that make the simple act of traversing the map an interesting and satisfying mechanic into itself, and if nothing else the series has mastered that.

When things do finally get going the action is still the same old Just Cause chaos that I come back to this series for, with every single object in the vicinity seeming begging to just explode at the slightest provocation. It's just that this is the first entry in the series where causing chaos isn't incentivized and that's a major problem that effects every single part of the game.

If you'd like to play a good version of this game then I can still recommend Just Cause 3, it's just bizarre to me that this game seems to have forgotten so many lessons that they learned just one game prior.