Just Cause 2 is a high water mark for me. The story is shit, of course; the number of games with good writing is very small. But the controls are so perfect, responsive, simple, powerful and endlessly fun. It is comparable only to the original Crackdown for me in terms of action games with perfect, addictive puppeteering. I'm always in search of anything comparable and have never understood why those systems aren't emulated more.
Just Cause 3 was a disaster for me. Suddenly we are given linearity when the whole enjoyment was endlessly, leisurely zooming around a tropical paradise blowing shit up. And the controls, with the overly complicated wingsuit and reduced function of the parachute, where you could no longer glide around forever without climbing and waiting to sink again, just annoyed me. I didn't last long with it at all. Everything they changed about the structure of the game was for the worse, to me.
This, the fourth installment, I probably got in a bundle and had no expectations for. The results are mixed. The controls still are wonky and overly complex-- nowhere near as fun as JC2. But they've restored the freedom of the open world and the thrill of flying anywhere you please and causing chaos.
There are other things that suck:
They've fallen in with the trend of masking draw distance with a haze over everything, something i will never stop complaining about. You can turn it off to a degree but it still sucks, especially since all of the games quest markers are the same light blue as the haze and blend into the background, a ridiculous choice. I really don't want to feel like I've developed cataracts while I play a game and I will never stop complaining about this trend of making every new world look like it's suffering from massive air pollution. I would much rather see the environment clearly and sharply, and accept a little draw distance, than fight my way through every game in a fog. Please, if by some miracle anyone anywhere in development ever reads my reviews, stop putting haze on everything, I'm begging you, it sucks so bad.
The thing that irritates me most of all about JC4 is that they have replaced the psychotic, impossible completionist goals of JC2-- little things to blow up in every village to liberate them (that I secretly loved and addictively tried to master for months and months) with terrible "stunts" to complete in every town. This is just boring, unfun busywork. Why would I want to fly the annoying wingsuit through little rings ten thousand times when I could be blowing shit up, and searching through the exquisitely crafted little towns for supply boxes. It's just not fun. You can still blow shit up but it doesn't do anything but jack up your chaos score, there's no satisfying element to it anymore. Bad choice. Put a few stunts and races around if you must, but there are way too many, and I know if I bother to play the game much more I will skip every one of them.
It's hard for a franchise to move forward when they've had one entry that was so perfect in many ways, but I feel like much as with Crackdown, the people in charge haven't quite understood what was so delightfully addictive about their own best work. And I won't feel the need to play this endlessly as a result. It's way, way better than JC3, a step in the right direction, but still not what I want from the game.

There are quite a few games like this now, downhill bike racers. I play them all for a few hours and really enjoy the tactile sensation of riding the bike and the lovely tracks and scenery, then I quickly hit a skill wall where i find it impossible to do the tricks the game requires. Too old or never had the motor skills to begin with. I cannot do most of the tricks here to save my life and the game doesn't even tell you how do to a lot of them. Every one of these games is like that. I wish there was one I could play and enjoy cause for a little while they're very nice!
Also the second level of this one on the career run is just non-stop haze all the way through the biome (forest) making it completely impossible for me to even just run down the track. I've been loudly anti-haze in games and continue to be, its a shitty lazy ugly mechanic, stop putting haze on everything!

Played this years ago and found it too unfinished and esoteric. Picking it back up now that its out of early access, It looks lovely and has a pleasing Minecraft-like progression that requires some struggle. At times it is still a little bit too esoteric for me; pages of instructions and even in-game videos that sometimes only add confusion when you want a simple answer. Or things like the multi-tool, which you have to make in order to do very basic things like pick up and move objects you've placed...only to find out it requires fuel to operate and that fuel is difficult to find without an even more advanced tool. It's a bit unnecessary.
I would have much rather had a bigger focus on aesthetics and crafting since all the elements are there; Sims-lite meets survival in space.
Still, it's very enjoyable if you can let yourself sink into it. Not everyone will want to do that, but if you liked Astroneer or Planet Crafter you may dig it.

An exercise in corporate blanditry.

Profoundly unsexy. Sterile, hostile UI. Bland companions with bland romances that lack any sort of passion or intrigue. They stand around in your ship making bland water cooler talk and after a while it sinks in...you are at work. This game is a job.

Every successive Bethesda game since Morrowind has been a slow descent into corporate sterilization. Now in Starfield you literally span the galaxy just to go to board meetings and lawyer offices, in between gunning down bandits at the copy/pasted planetary outposts. Mass Effect Andromeda was a better game than this. We all owe it an apology. Hell I even owe Cyberpunk 2077 an apology in comparison to this. At least the outfits and photo mode were fun.

Other terrible things:
-The loading. It will take up a huge amount of your playtime. In cities every little room is in a loading zone. Quests needlessly require you to march in and out of loading areas 6 or 7 times- it's mindless, thoughtless inconsiderate violence upon the player. If you thought Faridah's quest in Deus Ex: HR was aggravating you ain't seen nothing yet.
-The writing. Quests are worse than ever, people talk like HR zombies and you get a choice of three different libertarian responses to choose from every time. City guards say things like "Private sector is where the money is!" The game offers you about 7 different ways to be a cop. The way the npc's condescendingly praise you like a toddler after every quest is so mortifying.
The future they've imagined 300 years from now is just 2023 office culture with a reskin. People still use current lingo or have pronounced earth based accents. There is no humor or cleverness in any of it from the grand design to the smallest dialogue. The future is just one big USA corporate office park, complete with an underclass in every city who we still haven't gathered the will to do anything to help. A profoundly depressing and bleak conception.
Fallout 4 at least had a few good side quests that were full of weird shit like the old days. I've found maybe two like that out of hundreds so far. The way the game opens and just tosses you into the story is so lazy and derivative, just totally careless, cynical and joyless. Then you get further in to your 'powers' and realize it's just reskinned Skyrim except with no interesting coherent world to lose yourself in. The Starborn are dumped on you in the same unceremonious way as the intro. None of the factions differ from each other in any meaningful way. None of your quest choices mean anything at all. Even building your character is pointless, if you play long enough you can unlock everything, there's no strategy to it.
-The haze. Why does every single game have to have a thick haze over everything now? Is the future on other planets polluted too? it sucks shit and I hate it. Let me see clearly please.
-The hundreds of planets you can go to are boring and mostly identical, and you can't even fly to them or between them. Just more loading screens. Scanning them is sort of fun but almost every single one of them is already heavily colonized with copy/paste outposts, so it doesn't make any sense.
-Speaking of copy/paste, where are the dungeons? Even the Fallout games had unusual places for you to stumble on and explore. The pre-marked outposts you sometimes run into on planets amount to three or four different quests that repeat over and over. When I say they are copy-pasted I mean literally every pixel down to placement and type of loot and location of mobs/npc's. It makes exploring completely pointless. Even some of the official quests in the game send you through the same abandoned mine over and over. Shades of DA2.
-The level scaling makes no sense. You will take down a level 24 starship then get creamed a few days after by a level 4. The terrormorphs that everyone is so terrified of die easier than some spacer bosses. I gave up trying to see any logic in it, just keep shooting until things die.

I could go on. So the question is why am I still playing? The old addictive loop I guess, of filtering through loot and selling it. Hoping upon hope I find one of those fun side quests that made Fallout 4 barely worth it. I really should stop. When you find yourself sitting there running through the long list of quests in Neon yelling "This is dogshit! This is busywork!" at your screen then you really should just stop...but I've been in anticipation of this for so long I can't quite give up on it yet even after 90+ hours. It's a degrading feeling.

Maybe it will be worth a damn in a year or two when modders have made it into something fun.