When I’m a leaf on the wind, cooly skimming down the coast, I’m more than happy to set aside my gripes and live in the moment. It somehow manages to be irritatingly difficult and overly easy at the same time, and is frustrating as often as it is rewarding. The game locks off too many basic upgrades behind repetitive side challenges, and too many of those upgrades are superfluous. Enemies are spammy and annoying, and enemy artificial intelligence feels dated and ridiculous.

The narrative is so undercooked it’s raw, and the majority of the story missions are bad. Just Cause 3 can be a very enjoyable game, as long as you’re willing to overlook some glaring, maddening problems. Should the performance of the game improve through driver updates and patches, I’ll update the review. Given how mixed I am on Just Cause 3 in general, I’m not comfortable recommending the game until I’m sure of whether the final version will work properly. Early technical performance reports from people who’ve played the console versions are troubling, however. Meanwhile, I received a code for the PS4 version just today, so I can’t yet authoritatively speak to how the game runs on consoles. Nvidia will no doubt release an optimized driver to coincide with Just Cause 3’s retail release, but I don’t know how much that’ll improve things on the PC end. Running the game in windowed mode helps things, but only a bit: My experience has been significantly hampered by bugs, visual glitches, and performance hitches, along with several hard crashes to desktop. I run a 4GB GTX970 GPU and a 3.5Ghz Intel i7 CPU, and have been unable to maintain a steady frame-rate in full screen mode no matter what settings I tweak. Note: I’m leaning toward giving Just Cause 3 a heavily qualified Yes based on how fun the game can be, but I’m not comfortable doing so just yet, largely because the early PC build that I played had some significant performance problems.

Can I really recommend something so strange and hobbled, so sloppy and frustrating and uneven? Then something or other would bring me crashing to the ground, and my estimation of Just Cause 3 would follow close behind. Leaping from the walls of a cliffside military base, detonating a remote explosive while catching the breeze under my wings, I’ll say to myself, “Okay, this is a game I can recommend.” In those moments, it’s possible to forget I’m playing a deeply flawed game and revel in the things it does best. In those moments, it’s possible to forgive Just Cause 3 its many shortcomings. I’ll whiz through a mountain pass and buzz oh-so-close to a clutch of pines, the sound of wind in my ears and a grin on my face. The new open-world game from Avalanche Studios captures the thrill of flight in a way that very few games manage.

Just cause 3 reset bases