There’s no way I can defend this, it’s weak and rather than take a simplistic but stylized look, such as Viewtiful Joe, or Okami, Just Cause 4 seems like it’s attempting to keep up with the graphical powerhouse games, but showed up in a beater, and … I can’t ignore the quality here. Try not to focus on in game models, they don’t look much better. Similarly, while Rico Rodriguez and a few main characters look fine, many of the background models might even be Playstation 2 era models, they just look phenomenally bad, even one of the people that assist Rico for a decent chunk of the story just looks awful every time he’s on screen. I’m not sure what the main villain should look like but he feels unfinished. There’s stylized graphics, and then there’s weak graphics that feel incomplete. However, Just Cause 4 abuses that choice and instead has just consistently bad quality to the graphics they provide. Indeed, most of my experience with Just Cause 3 and many of my issues were probably due to poor performance, so weaker graphics, and better performance would be preferable. Now it’s possible that this was done in a way of a tradeoff, where extremely low visuals could be used to have far better experience or performance of the game. I’m personally running this game on rather excessive hardware and yet the experience is weak.
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I think Just Cause 4 has some great moments, but the character models feel like they belong on an Xbox 360 rather than an Xbox One, or a PlayStation 3 instead of a PlayStation 4. I honestly feel like the graphics would be more at home in the previous generation. Thomas Was Alone is a fantastic game with minimalist graphics, Nethack is still one of my favorites with just a set of Ascii characters, so realize that when I’m calling out Just Cause 4, it’s beyond just an aesthetic, but rather a failed look that makes the game noticeably awkward. I normally don’t judge games based on graphics because any game can work with any graphical set. However, the graphics in Just Cause 4 can look terrible and do so very often. Not in game, but a cutscene and it looks like this. This set off several red flags, and perhaps I should have listened to them.ĭon’t get me wrong, Just Cause as a franchise has never been the height of graphics, there’s a huge open world and a ton of stuff to do, and graphically, this game has always been about a half step behind other games released in the same year, or empty world in the case of the original game.
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The models seem to hover over the scene, the faces look out of place, and there’s almost a cartoon cutout around the focus of the scene, the leader of the villains. The first thing noticed by myself and probably any player is how awful the first cutscene looks. But, oh boy, did it find other problems to replace it. I still remember issues with Just Cause 3’s stability in my review for that years after release, and Just Cause 4 didn’t present any technical problems. Many of the original reports of bugs doesn’t seem to happen, and in fact, I can even say the game runs surprisingly well.