YMMV / Just Cause 3

• Accidental Aesop: There's a surprising emphasis on remembering and honoring the past. It's the point of two of the collectibles (lighting candles at shrines and paying homage at tombs) and flavor text for military bases often mentions Di Ravello having some longstanding building or geographical feature destroyed to make room for it (Vis Electra, for example, used to be a six hundred-year-old vineyard).
• Anti-Climax Boss: The final fight against Di Ravello involves him using a helicopter equipped with a power shield which are practically no different from the ones you already faced dozens of times before. Bring The Thunderbird and you can take it out in one hit. Doubles as a Disappointing Last Level since that's all there is to the mission.
• Complete Monster:
  • General Sebastiano Di Ravello is the brutal dictator of Medici, as well as a sociopathic pyromaniac. Having usurped Medici's democratic politician Rosa Maunuela, in addition to starting a civil war, in which he had President Dante ripped limb from limb, Di Ravello also uses forced labor to mine the magnetic and explosive element of bavarium, to make super weapons for world domination; it is implied he wishes to do this to satisfy his pyromaniac needs. It is also revealed he was behind the coup that killed Rico Rodriguez's parents, as part of a deal he made with the Agency. When introduced, he orders one of his men to kill themselves for failing to stop the rebels, before ordering his army to raze the liberated town of Costa Del Porto. He later has Dimah tortured with a blowtorch for not mining Bavarium fast enough. When he has a a bavarium missile built, he decides to test it by launching it on another town. Exasperated by Rico's interfering with his plans, he beats one of his men to death and orders another attack and calls for the assassination of Manuela. Even when defeated, he has no remorse for his actions, only lamenting the end of his empire before deciding it's only fitting his legacy "ends in flames".
  • Sky Fortress DLC: Eden Callaghan is the CEO of the eDEN Corporation who cares only for profits regardless of casualties. In truth a malignant AI given sapience by Bavarium, Eden immediately froze everyone in the corporation to death to protect herself upon gaining intelligence. Requiring Bavarium to sustain her own sapience, Eden launches drone attacks against multiple villages in Medici, burning them to the ground and causing casualties to mine the mineral. Constantly thwarted by Rico, Eden eventually decides to use the Fragmentation Device on Medici, knowing full well that the device will rip the entire country apart and kill everyone in it purely to extend her own intelligence. Though she's reduced once more to an automated assistant once disconnected from her Bavarium supply, Eden comes close to destroying Medici and killing thousands of innocents, all out of an arrogant belief that her intelligence surpassed humanity's.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • While all drones ^note Introduced in the Sky Fortress and Mech Land Assault expansions can be quite a headache to deal with, the Suppression Drones stand out as particularly nightmarish. For starters, Suppression Drones are almost as big as tanks and just as tough. Second, they use Bavarium-infused miniguns that inflict big damage and some models even fire anti-air missiles that can track you while wing-suiting. And those Bavarium-infused missiles pack a punch, so you better be good with the barrel roll technique or they'll make very short work of you. All this makes them quite a challenge when they do show up, especially if you're not equipped with a rocket launcher or grenade launcher weapon. Also worth noting that they make strange, robotic/animal sounds that can be quite unsettling to hear and give them a very eerie presence.
  • Just about the only thing that takes away from the fun of the jetpack is that anti-air missiles now target Rico if he's using it. While one on its own isn't too tough to deal with, as soon as there is more than one, you can say goodbye to any semblance of strategy while you're having to dodge a brand new missile every single second or risk getting one-shotted right out of the sky. The only real options are to either get out of their range, switch away from the wingsuit, destroy them or clear the area and hack them to fight on your side.
  • While misile carts are far more common, the Bavarium trains on Insula Striate that comes out as the most dangerous enemy in the game if one is using the Bavarium Wingsuit. Having any level of heat when wingsuiting near it will cause the anti-aircraft defenses to lock onto Rico and fire off a Macross Missile Massacre that is a guaranteed One-Hit KO. And while it's usually easy enough to avoid the trains, most of the Bavarium mines are right next to the tracks, meaning that using that wingsuit at all in those bases is an actively courting death. And to top it off, destroying or hacking the train accomplishes nothing, since there'll be another one coming in a few minutes anyways.
  • Boats, strangely, also qualify, in particular the standard military patrol and gunboats. They can hit Rico at longer ranges than even the game's snipers, even while he's wingsuiting, and they use heavy machineguns to boot. And thanks to the game's realistic water physics, trying to shoot the pilot/gunner is extremely difficult at any sort of long range. To top it off, boarding them is usually a bad idea since, as mentioned under Scrappy Mechanic, Rico's walk speed slows to a crawl, and unlike the previous game he can't easily commandeer it.
    • The Military Corvette is similarly troublesome, since it can fire explosive shells at you as long as you're within its line of sight for an equally huge distance. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, since the game telegraphs these the same way it does with tanks, but the Corvette's cannons fire far quicker than any of the tanks in game, meaning Rico is left to either take cover or speed back and forth to avoid the explosions until he can destroy or commandeer the ship.
• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • Supporting character Dimah appears to suffer from some form of autism, or a very mild Asperger's syndrome. She is brilliant, but has extreme tunnel vision for her Bavarium research and preventing it being used to hurt people, does not come off as very sociable, speaks in short terse sentences, and shows a lack of tact for sensitive subjects like people getting hurt by her experiments or in missions, yet no one gives her grief for that and everyone is very protective of her like they know she can't help it. At one point, Rico even stops her from accidentally walking off of a cliff while she’s ranting and neither of them comment on it.
  • General Di Ravello's actions aren't just evil but ambiguously 'off' as well. He appears to have the 'dark triad' of disordered traits by being a Machiavellian schemer, an obsessive narcissist, and an amoral sociopath all at the same time.
• Disappointing Last Level: The final region of Insula Striate is huge compared to Fonte and Dracon, and also incredibly empty. While there are plenty of towns along the south coast, the entire northern half of the island is just a few scattered military bases (and plenty of ruined towns due to something called "The burning of the North") and liberating these parts can be a serious chore if just for the sheer amount of distance you have to traverse between settlements.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The M488, unlocked after the penultimate story mission, is a Bavarium-infused rocket launcher that is basically a portable version of the warheads at Falco Maxime. The explosion it creates is ludicrously powerful, capable of obliterating pretty much anything in a single shot—an entire outpost can be razed to the ground with no more than one or two shots. Combine this with the Gear Mod that lets you carry twice as many rockets and the fact it's the only FOW in the game that can be reloaded off cabinets and enemies, and you're essentially a god among men while wielding it.
  • Also the jetpack unlocked in the "Air Assault" DLC. This changes the somewhat challenging wingsuit / wiregun / parachute gameplay to a jetpack with a recharging thruster and on-board weaponry, with a guided missile launcher and a powerful minigun. There's barely any need to use vehicles after getting it, and it was heavily critized in reviews of the DLC for rendering so many of the core gameplay mechanics utterly redundant.
  • Also also, the eDen Spark, a literal Lightning Gun (in that it actually causes sustained, targeted lightning to strike from the sky like the wrath of God) you get from the Bavarium Sea Heist DLC. Available very early in the game, and if you upgrade it (easy to do since it only needs 5 gears from one specific challenge for full upgrades), it's incredibly overpowered. It can easily destroy most enemy vehicles in at most three seconds, it kills almost all soldiers instantly, it vaporizes structures, it has recharging ammo, and it looks cool as hell.
  • In terms of the non-DLC standard special weapons, the Fire Leech is almost hands down the most powerful option available. By holding down the fire button, it can lock onto and fire rockets at eight separate things. Since most Chaos Objects in the game aren't likely to survive more than two of those rockets at once, it becomes an extremely efficient and destructive tool that's only limited by some quirks when used indoors/under cover. The only real downside is it's subject to a rather nasty glitch which disables its lock-on feature when iron sight aiming is enabled.
  • The other unique item from the Bavarian Sea Heist, the Loochador, is the undisputed queen of the sea. It's a Lightning Bruiser in every regard, having top-of-the-line armour, a ludicrously high top speed that blows most other boats out the water even before its nearly bottomless tank of nitrous is factored in, the ability to actually steer (unlike just about every other boat in the game) and a ridiculously lethal set of weapons, packing a combination of miniguns and a heat-seeking, rapidly firing rocket launchers which, unlike most boats in the game, can be fired even while Rico is behind the wheel of the boat itself. Best of all, unlike most DLC items, it can be brought into time trials due to not falling into a unique vehicle classification, making most Sea Races much easier than intended.
• Goddamn Bats:
  • Shotgunners. On their own they aren't a huge issue, but that shotgun of theirs will stagger Rico with every hit, and unlike most enemies, they subvert Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. It also doesn't help that they almost always come with Commandos or Machine-gunners who can unload on Rico while he's helpless, which makes Shotgunners a top priority whenever they're spotted.
    • While snipers can also stagger Rico, they have lasers to mark their presence and can be evaded with some skill. You only know there's a Shotgunner around when they fire, and that usually means they hit you.
    • And just to add insult to injury, rebellion troops who spawn to fight in Police Stations all come with shotguns, and Friendly Fireproof is not enforced with them. Nor will they think twice about firing at an enemy through Rico's head. Have fun!
  • The Black Hand uses special units called Ghosts who specialize in close engagements. Unfortunately, despite the fact they can dodge bullets, Fragile Speedster is not enforced with them. This means they are surprisingly hard to put down enemies who can keep up the damage with their dual Wraith SM Gs. Thankfully they're a rare enemy, but it says something that if they show up alongside a Black Hand Titan, it's usually best to take down the Ghost first.
• Good Bad Bugs: Dying while attacking a military base when using the DLC Bavarium Wingsuit will cause the base's SAMS to remain inactive while the player is in-flight when they should lock on. Considering SAM carts are the only real threat to Rico when using air-raid tactics with the wingsuit, this makes dying ironically beneficial.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In Just Cause 2 part of the story was dedicated to the idea (based on the Agency's misinformed intel that Sheldon had gone rogue) that Tom Sheldon and Rico would have a massive battle. Ultimately nothing comes of it, and what little tension there is between Rico and Sheldon is played for laughs (Rico makes "don't make me kill you" comments when Sheldon isn't being useful). However, in this game the relationship between Rico and Sheldon is far more heavily strained, with Sheldon and Rico's interests not always aligning. At one point Rico even tells Sheldon outright that if Sheldon ever double crosses him, then the two of them are done. The confrontation hinted at in Just Cause 2 probably isn't as unlikely as previously thought.
  • Early in the game, Dimah trolls Rico a little bit by activating his grapple on his arm without warning, sending him flying away towards a wall. Near the end of the game, when she decides to sacrifice her life to ensure all knowledge of Bavarium is destroyed, she pulls the same trick to forcibly grapple Rico onto a nearby missile, ensuring he can't stop her or save her life.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Be honest, the only reason you'd want to play it is the high levels of destruction, awesome, destructive awesomeness and rebel dropping on a goat.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The Xbox One port apparently suffers from Memory Leak issues, and it can get so bad that it takes 15 minutes just to reload a save.
  • Even worse is the PC version for some users. Massive framerate drops, poor optimization, and glitches have plagued it since release on certain systems. Glitches include the ground suddenly becoming low-poly and water turning invisible. Especially unforgivable given the last game's reputation as a Polished Port!
  • Even the PS4 port has become abysmal regarding framerate issues as of Patch 1.03.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • A fairly minor example. Early in the game, the only way to close the wingsuit is to either hit something or to deploy the parachute. It's not too bad except when you're wingsuiting and trying to jump onto a car or train. There are mods to fix this, but they all require a lot of gears to unlock.
  • The game feels like a major step back in the movement/combat departments; gone is the ability to sprint, crouch, combat dive, dual-wield different weapons and upgrade weapon capacity and damage, and increase Rico's health.
  • Instead of being on by default, Precision Aim must be unlocked with weapons mods. This can make firefights unnecessarily difficult early on.
  • The Online Leaderboards for non-PC users (who can just block the game using a simple rule in the windows firewall). As soon as the game loses connection, the game pauses and asks you whether you want to try and reconnect or if you want to play offline. Can't connect online anymore for whatever reason? You're forced to repeat the choice until you get back to the servers. Want to play offline? Yeah, that's a good fix... until you open up your Commlink (which you will do to find missions, side missions and collectibles) and then the game tries and reconnects without asking! And there's no option to turn it off! (Save disconnecting your console from the Internet entirely.) Additionally, forcing the game to have an online option forces the entire game to be connected to the internet at all times; forced internet connection plus many large explosions and combat scenarios happening all the time equals an atrociously low frame rate that has plagued the game since its release.
  • Rico's movement speed is reduced to a crawl when he's riding on the top of a car, boat, or plane. Normally this would make sense, especially when the vehicles are moving, but it also means that reaching vehicle-mounted guns in a firefight is woefully impractical, especially on large boats.
  • All the side challenges. They feel like a way to pad out the game and justify the always online leaderboards, but they can get unreasonably difficult to beat - in fact, a good portion of them are genuinely impossible to get 5 gears on unless you spent some time upgrading with some mods and/or found a better tool than the default one it starts you with (which also doubles as Guide Dang It! since in most other games activities would be unavailable until you reached a level where you can beat it). It's extra silly when you realise to get those gear mods you have to... play those challenges. Basically, the game expects you to play through a bunch of the challenges once to get a bunch of gears to unlock upgrades so you can replay all of those challenges to get the full 5 gears. These are not fun enough to justify playing through them at least twice. The worst part, though, is that many fun and useful mechanics are locked behind these gears (such as the ability to close the wingsuit as mentioned above, as well as things like vehicle nitrous and booster explosives), so you're semi-forced to do the challenges unless you really don't care about any of them. As TotalBiscuit put it, "the best part of the game is when you're doing really cool, crazy, chaotic things, but the game is also actively encouraging you not to do it!" Just to top it off, some of the challenges are outright glitched to the point of being all-but impossible.
  • Liberating police stations: In order to do this you have to open the gates and let in the rebels into said station as well as cause a certain amount of mayhem in the city (blow up enemy vehicles, kill soldiers/police, Etc). The only problem is that the game will only spawn a finite amount of police for each station which doesn't reset if you die/leave the area while said mayhem meter does. Meaning that if you die while close to your goal, there is a high chance that you have to restart the game in order to try again.
  • Fortunately this can be remedied by simply leaving and re-entering the police station again, since that will likely spawn enemies for a certain Heat level, including helicopters and tanks.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • Two of the game's three shotguns are not worth really using outside of very particular circumstances due to their extremely low ammo cap of 24 spare rounds. Shotgun ammo is also noticeably uncommon (especially compared to assault rifle/machine gun ammo, which is practically everywhere), and pickups usually only give a half-dozen shots at most. Add onto that the fact that shotguns are less effective against anything tougher than standard enemies, making an AR or MG a far superior option.
    • The only possible exception might be the Zabijak Sawed-Off Shotgun, which can be dual wielded to free up a spot for a rifle, and is surprisingly powerful, as well as being able to reliably multi-kill shots.
  • The Thunderbird FOW, unlocked by finishing Insula Dracon's final mission is hands down the most situational, limited weapon in the game. While it can disable Bavarium shields and One-Hit KO any vehicle without them, it can only destroy targets at extremely close range, has the longest reload time of any weapon in the game, and has no ammo drops anywhere in the map to reload. This means that the only way to reload is by using Rebel Drop beacons after the cooldown timer has reset, and unlike literally everything else in the game FOW weapons can't have their cooldowns removed completely.
  • The Power Core weapon from the Mech Land Assault DLC is similar to the Thunderbird in many ways, though not hugely better. While it does damage and knockback to enemies, and has infinite ammo, the damage to anything besides vehicles is laughable, and it has an even smaller niche since it only good for dropping aircraft out of the sky, and for Mechs.
  • The Dionysus PLDS-H is a powerful airstrike weapon that is serviceable in the base game. It's extremely slow firing and only carries about half the ammo of any other special weapon (with the same issue as the Thunderbird in that reloading can only be called in via Rebel Drop), it still has a role to serve because of how early it can be unlocked. That is until the Bavarium Sea Heist introduced the eDen Spark, which does the same type of attack with infinite ammo, a faster firing rate, and only slightly worse range, instantly relegating the Dionysius to a novelty.
• So Okay, It's Average: A lot of people consider it this due to it not making many improvements over the second game (which brought a lot of improvements over the original), and in some areas being worse. A big part of this also stems from the game releasing late in a year filled with open-world games. The gameplay feels like a step back especially when it comes to combat; Just Cause 2 had the ability to sprint, crouch, dual-wield different weapons, combat roll and upgrade guns, all things Just Cause 3 strangely lacks.
• Spiritual Licensee: The Bavarium Wingsuit has its own mounted machine gun, missile launcher, and jet pack. Using only these tools makes the game so much like Iron Man you can't help but wonder if Avalanche wasn't working on a game for that.
• Tear Jerker: About the only thing played straight without humor is Dimah performing a Heroic Sacrifice to ensure all information about Bavarium is destroyed after Rico begs her not to do it. What makes it a little more painful are the hints throughout the story that Dimah feels guilty about all the death her research caused, and her Heroic Sacrifice might be a result of that guilt.
• That One Sidequest: The wingsuit challenges are downright brutal. The flying controls can be awkward, and you need near-perfect precision to nab all 5 gears. Be prepared for a lot of restarts.
  • Monte Dracon Tour has a lot of branching paths, many of which make it impossible to get 5 gears with the ones that do being far from the obvious ones. It's also one of the few wingsuit courses where you are forced to use the air brake at multiple points, normally a death sentence in these challenges.
  • Five gearing Mountain Marathon Tour will make every other wingsuit course feel trivial by comparison. Not only does it have a lot of hard to pull off dives and turns, but it also requires you to navigate around a tall tree at high speed and ends with an almost completely vertical dive down a cliff and at an angle.
  • Air Race challenges tend to have a much stricter time limit than their Land or Sea Race counterparts. The frailty of the air vehicles certainly doesn't help, as even accidentally brushing against a bit of scenery can easily result in the run (and the vehicle itself) going up in smoke.
  • An individual race example: The Maquerello Sprint is a particularly nasty time trial. Set mostly off-road, the track is littered with wildly uneven ground that often causes vehicles to spin out, launch into the air, flip over, and/or powerslide off of cliffs. Even worse, one part of the course forces Rico to drive up a narrow staircase in the middle of a small cliffside town, where falling off makes it nearly impossible to get back onto the track, let alone make up for lost time.
  • Side Street Sprint is another particularity nasty one. Set both off-road through farmland and on narrow city streets in a game with very few cars capable of effectively tackling both terrain varieties, combined with some of the sharpest turns of any land course.
  • Mountain Bend Blast requires you drive along a winding road to reach the target you need to destroy. The catch is that the entire road is swarming with military patrols who will instantly jump to Heat Level 3 if they spot you, and you're forced to drive an Autostraad Weltbus, a fairly mediocre vehicle with poor speed and handling and can't make use of mods due to being a Crash Bomb vehicle. As a result, there's a good chance you won't reach the target or fail to make it in time for all five gears due to being pounded and pushed around by a swarm of armored cars, on top of having to travel over some fairly rough terrain if you're going for a perfect run.
  • Due to a bug that was never patched, the Laguna Blast and Round the Bend Blast challenges are borderline impossible to get all 5 Gears for, due to an invisible wall right near the target that causes some of the target vehicles to be unaffected by the blast unless the bomb car is launched at a very specific angle.
  • Unlocking all vehicles from the Rebel Drop by bringing them to a garage (which is required for 100% completion) isn't particularly hard overall, except for one brutal example: the Squalo X7 boat. The fact that it spawns in one or two specific places across the entire map is the least of your worries. The relatively small lake(s) that the boat spawns in are isolated, meaning that the only reasonable way to get it to the garage is to tether it to a helicopter, fly it over to the garage and drop it. This is much easier said than done; even with fully upgraded tethers and the sturdiest helicopter, it's all too likely that the tethers will snap and cause the boat to plummet from the helicopter to the ground and blow up. The chance of this happening can be reduced by flying extremely slowly, though it still might happen anyway. Using the tethers to drag the boat along the ground to the garage instead will take an excruciatingly long time and the boat will most likely be wrecked before you even get to the garage.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Rico's past is not well-explored, nor is the past of Medici, and a lot of opportunities to explore its future - through characters like Mario or Rosa Manuella, are left similarly unexpanded.
  • In the "Bavarium Sea Heist", the mysterious disappearance and reapprearance of EDEN Corporation's Stingray base is all but stated to be accidental time travel. While this could've allowed for an amusing Fish out of Temporal Water situation, once you actually enter the base, all EDEN employees there are dead and the only people you confront there are Black Hand soldiers from the present.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: Rico leaving the Agency because they want to keep Di Ravello in power could've been a critical examination of foreign policy and whether something right for the country can still be morally wrong, but is simply used to show that It's Personal for Rico.