1. You know how in a lot of big action games, when it gets to the point things are really gonna pop off, you just get pushed into a quick time event and have to sit there like a dumbass and periodically press a button while you watch the fireworks? Just Cause 3 doesn't make you do that. In Just Cause 3, you not only set off the fireworks yourself, you get to pick which fireworks go off and what you use to light them.
2. Just to be clear what this means: you will regularly grapple onto a helicopter that is shooting you, chuck the pilot out the window, take control of the helicopter and send it careening into an enemy fuel tank while simultaneously parachuting out and latching onto another helicopter to repeat the process. This is just a normal thing you will do. It is basic gameplay in Just Cause 3.
3. Structurally, this is pretty much climb-a-tower-to-reveal-map-icons type open world game. You don't actually climb towers but defeating enemy bases gives you similar icon action.
4. The open world is huge and I am normally indifferent to world size but it is just so much fun to get around, it helps to have a long way to go between objectives sometimes. You have a grappling hook arm band thing that whips you along fast as a dandy and then a quickly deployable parachute and wingsuit when you go airborne. Physics are just realistic enough to have some drama to them but still allow you to fling yourself about in ways that would certainly destroy a human being in short order.
5. Gunplay is pretty tame. It is all run and gun w/ some aim assist. There's ironsights eventually but only as an unlockable. The magic in combat is in the little grappling hook arm band thing which you can use for a high variety of violent purposes. You can use it to throw an explosive barrel into a gas tank. You can latch it onto a man's chest and throw yourself at him. You can tie a jet airplane to the ground. You get the idea.
6. Though Just Cause 3 is pretty much a textbook male power fantasy, I have to give it credit for having a broad group of female characters that don't exist just to get rescued. The leader of an idealistic rebellion, its highest ranked scientist and the head of a scrappy group of mercenaries are all women. This is pretty much any person that's in charge of anything aside from the villains. Not bad.
7. This said, plotwise we are strongly in "Who even cares?" territory. You are on some kind Italian archipelago run by an obviously evil dictator and your goal is to overthrow him through the unorthodox use of his own helicopters.
8. You have regenerating health and this combined w/ the fact that you can use your little grappling hook thing to zing out of any situation at a moment's notice makes you practically invincible if you chose to be. You chose to stick around more often than not but you probably will cheese your way through some tricky situations from time to time by firing a few shots and zooming away to safety over and over.
9. Similarly, the punishment for death is rather minor. Everything you've destroyed up until your death stays destroyed so you can just keep taking things out few at a time between deaths rather than come up w/ a better approach or strategy.
10. You gain all of your major abilities w/in a few hours of gameplay, which is a good thing. It always drives me nuts when the most fun elements of combat aren't available for the full game. There are a lot of bonus items and skills you can earn through about a million various challenges that you unlock as the game progresses. Some of these are powerful enough as to make some difficult tasks trivially easy but, honestly, I didn't really find the challenges enjoyable enough to play most of them so I guess that kinda solves that problem.
11. An open world this big and this open-ended as far as gameplay is bound to have some rough points. I accept a bit of weirdness as the price of admission in a game w/ such potential for edge cases but, esp. toward the end, I found it a bit galling that what I'd done had very little effect on the world itself. It'd be cool if, for example, as you started taking out enemy oil rigs, you'd see enemy tanks out of gas on the side of the road or something. The way it is, the missions are exactly the same whether you've left the enemy's network of bases relatively in tact or destroyed almost all of them. It makes the world feel a bit shallow in spite of its massive size.
12. The story missions are also just kinda crappy. Let's just say there's lots of escort missions and the grand scale battles that end each chapter only partly make up for this.
13. If you want a game where you can attach an exploding barrel to a moving vehicle and watch the combined mess crash spectacularly into a satellite dish, Just Cause 3 is your game. If you want a game where you can wing walk on a fighter jet and bazooka other fighter jets, Just Cause 3 is your game. Lots of games do this kind of thing but this series is pretty unique in letting you do it whenever you want. It makes some compromises in other areas but in terms of gameplay spectacle, it is second to none. I can't say it's a perfect game but I will say I am very excited for Just Cause 4.
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