Posted in: Games, PAX West, Video Games | Tagged: Avalanche Studios, Just Cause, just cause 4, PAX West, PAX West 2018, Square Enix

Just Cause 4's Extreme Weather is a Mixed Blessing

One of the new features of Avalanche Studios' new Apex engine is the use of extreme weather conditions in Just Cause 4. At PAX West, the JC dev team from Avalanche walked groups of press through the massive thunderstorm that takes over parts of the rain forest in an effort to show us just how brutal the extreme weather conditions can be. While the Gamescom footage of Just Cause 4 showed the tornado gameplay, the PAX West presentation focused on the storm that hits the rainforest area of the map.

The reasoning behind Just Cause 4's extreme weather was pretty simple. Rico Rodriguez is pretty hard to kill, especially while grappling around and using his wingsuit to avoid enemy fire. So if it's hard to kill him with enemy AI, the team at Avalanche decided against nerfing their protagonist and instead decided to give him a bigger and badder adversary. Nature.

So really, the biggest thing you've got to worry about in Just Cause 4 are the various extreme weather conditions. You can easily find yourself the target of lightning strikes while gliding around the rainforest, or get sucked into a tornado. However, you can also use the weather against your own enemies by flinging them into the path of the tornado or by letting them get struck down by lightning.

And damn is that satisfying to watch.

The walk through demo also went into some of the changes coming to the vehicles, supply drops, and grappling hook skills in JC4. In Just Cause 4 you'll be able to orient your supply drops, allowing you to set up vehicles facing the right way. So they'll be a little less janky than in JC3. Additionally, there are more weapons and vehicles coming than ever before.

As for the grappling hook, you'll be able to use a new skill, airlifters. Which will take an object and lift it into the sky. The hook's tethers and rocket boosters are returning, and you'll be able to use more tethers and boosters than before, as well as use them in combination. So you can use boosters to augment a series of airlifters in order to give yourself a flying tank.

Or, you can use airlifters on enemies near the tornado and watch them get pulled into the vortex. Because if you can think it, you can probably do it.

As Just Cause 4 is a sandbox game, the walkthrough demo was done in a live code version of the game, but it was relatively stable for our walkthrough. Which is good news. Massive open-world sandbox games can be a bit unpredictable, so having a demo work as expected is always a good sign.

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