I never finished it. But then, I spent a lot of time liberating and kind of loved every minute. Seeing your posts makes me want to go back and play it again. :)
I would so go back and play this if it didn’t have that godawful challenge-based character advancement system.
-Tom
This was definitely a “two steps forward, two steps back” kind of sequel, which is a bummer. It was not bad per se but was not clearly better than JC2 due to the weird choices they made in designing it.
I’d say it was worse than JC2 gameplay wise, though the graphics were nicer?
There is always a chance with Request Wednesday. ;)
I think it has some issues and is still clearly better than JC2, which had a ridiculously oppressive heat system, limited your access to the fun toys behind a wall of loading and huge cash payouts, and had very little variety.
Just giving you automatic, infinitely available triggered explosive charges makes 3 the clear winner, IMO.
This is a useful discussion to me, I recently bought JC2 and 3 on sale and wasn’t sure if I should start with 2 or just jump into 3.
Just Cause 2 , I felt had more impressive things to blow up. :)
Don’t forget to check out the destructible and derailable trains on the north part of the island! Currently the only game on the market (in the entire world) that has trains you can derail. Very fun.
Did you ever find your save game, or was it gone for good? Or did that bug not affect you?
The HEAT system in Just Cause 2 could make for some pretty difficult game play, agreed, though I still liked it a lot and didn’t mind it so much, especially after applying multiple/strong tether mods. One thing that did really drive me nuts (apart from the already mentioned having to re-buy cool DLC stuff like the parachute rockets and special weapons/vehicles etc. with in game money all the time) was that the game didn’t have a way to tell you what you’d missed or where it was when you wanted to complete a town/city/base. I must have spent at least a couple of hours over a session or two looking for one lone effing water tower on top of a building in one of the big cities, just paragliding above and panning the camera around. I FINALLY found it through dumb luck, and I only even knew what I was looking for by consulting websites and such and figuring out that I’d gotten all the statues, gas stations, propaganda trucks etc. That’s one thing I really like about JC3 in contrast.
I will say that the size of JC2’s map was bonkers at the time, and its graphics and vistas were amazing. Also I loved the Not-Singapore setting.
JC3 has some problems for sure (that terrible horrible no-good very bad fake accent of the main villain for one, UGH). I wonder to what extent some of the upgrade path stuff can be addressed with mods or cheats? Things like the wingsuit make up for it.
I love the voice acting for that character! It may be a terrible accent but it’s well delivered and totally fits the b-grade aesthetic the series goes for. And those tapes you collect are pretty funny. As is David Tennant as the ‘kidnapped celebrity’ doing the forced propaganda radio broadcasts. :)
No, my save is gone, but I started over. Meh.
For those who have Windows Spotlight as their lock screen, today’s image looks to be a picture of the real-life bridge that inspired the big one that you blow up in JC3. Unfortunately it doesn’t say where it actually stands (I have the app installed that automatically fetches the images for you, because the regular functionality that shows you info would just cack out regularly and stop switching the images).
Was it this:
I just got around to finishing this. After a while I gave up on the challenges, because many of them were an exercise in frustration or bad driving physics. The game itself wasn’t terrible, but for some reason that I can’t remember now, I loved the hell out of Just Cause 2. It might have been the story missions, etc that were fun, or the characters, or the great voice acting. This game was sadly lacking in all of those aspects. Story missions were more of the same (blow up a base to liberate an area, or blow up a base to…complete a story line), and there were no interesting characters.
I guess I’m not going to buy the DLC…
You are not alone. I felt the game peaked at JC2 as well. Three seemed some differences, the setting was part of it. I actually have a hard time putting my finger on why I didn’t like 3 as much.
It really was the gating of skill points behind challenges, it sucked!
The 2nd game also had far more impressive things to blow up. I still remember the giant goldeneye-esq satellite dish.
All I know about JC3 was that it came with Denuvo and that the version on PS4 had terrible loading times, but luckily I still haven’t completed everything in JC2 so there’s no rush. A mix of JC2 and Mercenaries would’ve been perfect.
Early in the game I looked over the skills, and decided that I wasn’t going to stress over unlocking them. Many didn’t look very useful, and a number of them were made obsolete by DLC. Ended up getting most of them anyway, as it wasn’t necessary to five-star every challenge to unlock everything.
By far the most fun I had in the game was flying around and blowing up things with the bavarium wingsuit from the Sky Fortress DLC, on par with grappling everywhere in JC2. That said, the DLC is best played early on, to have the new toys available to use for the rest of the game. Once you’ve finished the main game, yeah, probably not worth it.