HiGame

It’s been five long years since we last saw Rico Rodriguez get up to some explosive shenanigans in Just Cause 2. Finally, Rico has returned, and the fast-paced action we’ve come to expect from the series has never been better. Just Cause 3 delivers exactly what fans were looking for in terms of gameplay, but performance here is more than a little sketchy.

Over on our sister site IGN, the PC version received a rating of 8/10. And based on 33 reviews, the PC version is sporting a score of 76/100 on Metacritic. In a year jam-packed with heavy hitters like The Witcher 3 and Metal Gear Solid V, this probably won’t be a game of the year contender, but it’s still very much worth playing if madcap action is what you’re craving.

Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry has already run performance tests on numerous PC configurations, and the results are pretty good. A Core i3 Haswell CPU with a GeForce GTX 950 graphics card can handle the game with settings all the way cranked up, but older hardware didn’t fare quite as well. If you’re running Just Cause 3 on a GeForce GTX 750 Ti, the game can’t maintain a 30fps lock.

Sadly, you’ll either need to turn down the graphical settings or live with a shoddy frame rate if you’re running on aging PC hardware. Performance issues on older gear is unfortunate, but it’s definitely not surprising.

On the console side, the situation is exactly what you’d expect. The PS4 version is running at 1920×1080, and the Xbox One is limited to 1600×900. In terms of effects and level of detail, the two versions are nearly identical, and are roughly comparable to the “High” setting on the PC version.

During heavy action, both the Xbox One and PS4 begin dropping frames. And when the engine bogs down, you can start to see some tearing at the top of the screen. It’s a shame that sub-30fps gameplay is considered par for the course, but that’s an issue much larger than this particular release. If you’re unwilling to deal with dropped frames, maybe console gaming just isn’t for you.


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