Just Cause 3

Just Cause 3 returned players to the role of Rico Rodriguez, an agent fighting to liberate his fictional home Mediterranean republic of Medici from dictator General Di Ravello. The series' signature emphasis on absurd, physics-driven action reached its largest form yet on PS4, with an open world full of mountains, islands, and cities awaiting complete destruction.

The foundation of the gameplay remained the iconic grappling hook, letting players combine parachute, wingsuit, and grapple into fluid uninterrupted movement across the whole map, complemented by an extensive arsenal of weapons and vehicles from tanks to fighter jets. The game focused on liberating villages and towns from the regime's rule by destroying propaganda statues, towers, and military infrastructure, with destruction designed to be spectacular and almost limitless. Buildings collapsed, tanks exploded in chain reactions, and bridges crumbled under the force of explosives. On PS4, the scale of destruction and the open world sometimes hit the console's technical limits, showing up as frame-rate drops during larger explosions, but the overall sense of freedom of movement wasn't fundamentally undermined by this.

The game was rounded out by a challenge editor and a system of unlockable upgrades for the hook, parachute, and wingsuit, which gradually expanded movement abilities and allowed for ever more spectacular cascading traversals across the entire island archipelago. The sprawling map of Medici, made up of a mainland and dozens of smaller islands, offered considerable vertical and horizontal terrain variety, from snow-capped mountain peaks to sunny coastlines full of military ports.

Critics praised above all the joy of movement using the hook and wingsuit and the honest, no-strings-attached fun of destruction, even though the story and side content were seen as secondary to the technical stunts. Just Cause 3 became a symbol of the sandbox destruction-action genre with no pretense of realism, and its movement system influenced later open-world games striving for similarly fluid traversal.

Why play it: For players craving no-strings-attached fun from moving with the hook and wingsuit and honest destruction with no emphasis on realism, Just Cause 3 is a symbol of sandbox action whose movement system influenced later open-world games.