‘Just Cause 4’ lets you use anything, even the weather, as a weapon

By Phil Hornshaw June 19, 2018

Just Cause 4 Key Art — Image used with permission by copyright holder

The best part of the Just Cause 4 E3 2018 demo? When the Avalanche developers playing the game used a tornado to kill an airport.

The latest addition to the open-world action-adventure series makes a lot of changes and improvements to Just Cause‘s many opportunities to use in-game physics to pull down buildings, destroy vehicles, and blow stuff up. Extreme weather is the headliner, and for good reason. Avalanche has amped up the dynamic weather in Just Cause 4‘s fictional South American nation of Solis to be a bigger part of the gameplay moment-to-moment — including huge, incredibly powerful tornadoes.

In the hands-off demo shown to journalists at E3, Avalanche showed us what players can expect when the wind picks up and the sky grows dark.

Storm chaser

As in Just Cause 3, Rico is leading a revolution in the sequel, this time against the mercenary group Black Hand. After a few demonstrations of new systems at play in Just Cause 4 (more on that in a bit), Avalanche skipped straight to a story mission in Just Cause 4 in which you don’t just have to avoid a tornado but use it to do your dirty work.

Extreme weather is part of the open world; tornadoes, sandstorms, blizzards and thunderstorms can happen any time.

The mission finds protagonist Rico attempting to take out an enemy airport, but it’s too big for one man to bring down. Luckily, the area where the airport is located is known for tornado activity, and that provides a solution that Rico can exploit for his own ends.The Black Hand didn’t construct an airport in tornado alley without thinking it through, though.

The airport bristles with “wind cannons,” big devices designed to literally hold tornadoes at bay. Rico’s mission is to take them out and let nature run its course.

Rico starts by jumping in an armored storm chaser truck, one of the few vehicles heavy enough to resist being pulled into a cyclone. Racing down the street, he soon comes upon the tornado, a massive cyclone ripping apart everything in its path. The storm interacts with the world on a physical level, picking up and tossing objects according to their weight. Just Cause titles have long been physics playgrounds, and extreme weather takes it to a new level.

After catching up to the tornado, Rico hops out, using his parachute and wingsuit to zip past, avoiding the high winds, toward the airport. Landing in the compound and fighting off some troops, he fires some rockets at wind cannons to destroy the airports defenses and allow the huge tornado to sweep through.

Just Cause 4 Rocket Helicopter

Just Cause 4 Tornado

Just Cause 4 Bridge

Just Cause 4 Motocross Bridge

Chao ensues. The tornado picks up enemies, vehicles, stationary guns, and even a literal jet liner or two. Occasionally, huge objects spun around the cyclone would drop out and go flying, or tumble back to the ground and explode in a huge shower of flame and smoke.

Avalanche explained that it won’t just be story missions where tornadoes show up. Extreme weather is part of the open world and events like tornadoes, sandstorms, blizzards and thunderstorms can happen any time. When they do, it’ll be up to players to manage them, avoid them, or use them to their advantage.

Little Rocket Man

Weather isn’t the only set of new physics toys to mess with. Rico’s grappling hook, the tool that defines Just Cause gameplay, is getting an overhaul. You’ll have more options to use the grappling hook to take advantage of Just Cause 4‘s physics systems and hilariously wreck stuff.

Solis is massive—it spans some 1,024 square miles and several different biomes

The grapple will have three abilities in Just Cause 4. The tether, returning from Just Cause 3, lets you tie objects together to make them smash into each other. Boosters, which are basically just little rocket engines, also return from the last game. The new option is the airlifter, a balloon you can attach to send objects and people flying into the sky.

Using the abilities in combination makes it possible to create some ridiculous situations. Avalanche attached airlifters to a big fuel tank, then tossed some boosters on, creating a giant makeshift missile. Airlifters can float objects, and you can use the grapple to gain some control over where they end up. Tethering, boosting, and airlifting will give players a ton of new options to make use of physics to blow things up in Just Cause 4.

Just Cause 4: Force of Nature [ESRB]

Avalanche is touting a huge open world — Solis spans some 1,024 square miles and several different biomes — so there should be a whole lot of potential for destroying stuff in creative ways. If nothing else, Just Cause 4 showed how much fun messing with in-game physics can be as you fly around creating mayhem wherever you go.

Look for Just Cause 4 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on December 4, 2018.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Phil Hornshaw is an author, freelance writer and journalist living in Los Angeles. He is the co-author of The Space Hero's…

Gaming

The best traits to level first in Remnant 2

Three characters shoot at a boss in Remnant 2.

Much of Remnant 2's leveling process is based around increasing the ranks of traits that you'll discover throughout your journe. This will give you plenty of opportunities to build a character that best matches your playstyle. In the game's opening hours, however, each character will begin with just a few traits that can be leveled, and your equally limited trait points can make deciding which of those you want to invest in somewhat of a challenge. In this guide, we'll give you our opinion on which of these are best to focus on for optimizing the early part of your adventure. Here are the best traits to level first in Remnant 2
Best traits to level first in Remnant 2
When beginning the game with a new character, you'll have only five traits – one archetype trait exclusive to the archetype you've chosen and four core traits that every character begins with. Your archetype trait will level automatically as you play with that archetype, so you don't need to do anything with that trait. Instead, let's take a look at the four other core traits and discuss which ones are best to invest in.
Vigor
Vigor improves your overall health, which means you can take more damage before dying. This is likely the most important trait to pump points into, especially when first setting out into the dangerous world of Remnant 2. Enemies hit hard (especially bosses) and you have limited healing options during these opening hours, so you'll need every bit of extra health you can get. It wouldn't hurt to prioritize this trait until you get it to level 10, actually, as you'll be able to get plenty more points as the game progresses, and being able to take a few more hits against the game's first few bosses is immensely helpful. This is even more true for Challengers in team compositions where they'll be tanking and spending a lot of time in melee range.
Endurance
Endurance improves your overall stamina, which will allow you to run and roll more during combat. This is a great option to level up if you're playing a character that is focused on melee, as it will allow you to run more when you get surrounded or roll out of the way of enemy attacks without worrying as much about your stamina meter. For primarily ranged players, though, it's a bit less useful, so you're probably better putting those points elsewhere early on. As with Vigor, though, Challengers will likely benefit most from the trait due to their tendency to be a group's close-quarters combat specialist.
Spirit
Spirit improves your weapon mod power generation. This helps you to earn the ability to use your weapon mods more often in combat, meaning that its usefulness is entirely dependent on how useful your weapon mods are to your build. At the beginning of the game, your weapon mods will be most helpful during boss battles, and you're likely to end them before generating a second use of your mod anyways. Because of this, Spirit is likely better saved for leveling later on so that you can focus on survivability first. Gunslingers, however, are likely to see this as a good option in group settings because they're designed to be a DPS powerhouse.
Expertise
Expertise improves the cooldown speed of your archetype skills. This will aid you in using these skills more frequently, which can be a help against bosses and packs of deadly foes. However, like with Spirit, the usefulness of this trait in the initial few hours of the game is limited due to the already long cooldowns and the speed at which many bosses are likely to fall anyways. While Vigor should still be a priority for most classes, Expertise can be a particularly worthwhile trait for Medics who are playing with a group, as it's vital to keep their healing capabilities available as much as possible.

Gaming

Fortnite Artifact Axe: how to destroy stones and best location

Animated image showing Fortnite Artifact Axe

Anyone who plays Fortnite long enough will come to love its yearly summer festivities, and as usual, this year's Summer Escape Event has proven to be a great time for players looking to engage in fun quests and earn new cosmetics. This week provides a new quest that tasks you with destroying 10 stones in battle royale mode, which offers you the reward of a new harvesting tool known as the Artifact Axe. If you're wondering what qualifies as a stone and how to destroy them, we'll give you the details below.
How to destroy stones in Fortnite to earn the Artifact Axe
First of all, you've probably hidden behind some of these stones before because, well, the game is actually just referring to the large rocks you can find scattered all across the map. Some are larger than others, but they're all easily identifiable and can be destroyed by smacking them repeatedly with a harvesting tool. In other words, you're quite likely to run across plenty of them playing naturally, especially if you spend any time in forests or along the coast.

If you're wanting to know of a spot that will help you knock the quest out quicker, you can try heading to the beach to the south of Kenjutsu Crossing at the bottom of the map.

Gaming

This trick guarantees you’ll get bots only in every Fortnite match

how to play split screen fortnite duo

Fortnite is one of the biggest names in gaming, and it's quite easy to understand how it became a global phenomenon. The beloved battle royale is overflowing with things to do, and weekly updates ensure that there are always new weapons and items to engage with, fresh locales to visit on its ever-changing map, and plenty of XP to earn via daily and weekly challenges.

With so much to keep players coming back for more, you can be certain finding a lobby filled with other folks is an easy thing to do. But you've also probably noticed that many matches -- particularly in lower and mid-tier lobbies -- mix bots in with real players. This helps to fill out lobbies faster so you can get in and play consistently, and it also serves as a way to ensure that everyone in the match has a few opportunities to eliminate some baddies regardless of their skill level.