Just Cause 4: oh how the mighty have fallen

Just Cause 4 is an open-world action shooter that was released in 2018 with mediocre reviews. Just Cause 4 (JC4) is the fourth installment of the franchise which realistically peaked with Just Cause 2 in 2010. 

The game takes place on yet another island where Rico has to overthrow the dictator of that small island nation, and just like in the other ones, said dictator has some sort of weapon of mass destruction that needs to be dealt with. In JC4 that weapon is a device that controls weather and the real aim of the game is to destroy said weapon and after that get rid of the dictator. There are also some mentions of Rico's father who apparently helped build that weather controlling device. And that in all its simplicity is the story. There is very little of note about the story other that what was said as there is very little content in the game to begin with. 

How the game actually progresses is not any better. To destroy the weather controlling device, called Illapa, the player needs to destroy 3 different cores that the device has that control different aspects of the weather like wind, rain etc. And to get access to those 3 different core you need to clear different zones. The entire map is divided to 30+ zones that need to be cleared to gain access to the weather cores in the middle of those areas. Each zone has a different mission to complete to gain control of said zone. The problem with that is that there is only ~5 different types of missions so what you end up doing is the same missions over and over again just in different locations. The cores itself have their specific missions to destroy them and some setup beforehand but that is very little to distract from the tedious grind that taking over the island is. 

And that is not even the worst part, as the game is so simplistic, it doesn't take forever to grind through it. The main issue is that the game feels like the developers actually removed a lot of features compared to the previous games. Just Cause 3 had so many interesting and cool gadgets compared to Just Cause 2 but those have pretty much been taken away except for the wingsuit. The shooting mechanics in the game feels very bare bones just like the rest of the game. 

All in all Just cause 4 just feels like the devs just needed to make something and they rushed this featureless product out ASAP, or what this really is is just a demo for how the Just Cause mobile will work since it felt a lot more like a mobile game than a proper game and for that reason it will only get a 4/10

Kingdom Come: Deliverance; a diamond but not perfectly polished

Kingdom come deliverance is and Action-Adventure RPG. It was released in 2018 and it had quite good reception even though people were saying that it was riddled with bugs. Personally I didn't encounter any actual bugs but I do agree with the fact that this is an amazing game. 

The overarching story of Kingdom Come seems like a bit of a basic one, with the main motivation of the main character being revenge. You play the role of Henry, the blacksmiths son who lives a simple life but yearns for adventure and soon gets what he wan'ts but no in a way that anyone would want. The village you are from gets attacked and your parents get killed and you want to avenge them. The story does evolve from simple revenge to helping save the country from a foreign invasion, which again is nothing new but it does help with the evolution of Henry's talents as they are the best aspect of the game. Even tho the story has some, more or less, unsurprising twists, it is well built to evolve Henry from a simple townsfolk to a proper knight. 

And that is arguably the best part of the game. How brilliantly the increase in different skills is executed. In Kingdom Come when you level a skill it doesn't just give you a slightly higher number, although that is also a part of it, it actually makes Henry better at it. The best explanation of this is how combat becomes more complex. In the early game Henry knows how to swing his sword and that's about it but as the fighting skills increases he actually learns how to block, how to parry, how to do different combos to break the enemy, and those become easier to execute as you level up and also when you as a player learn to use them properly. 

Another great example of leveling skills is alchemy. Alchemy in the game is somewhat complex as you have to make sure you use all the correct ingredients down to the base, you need to add them all in the correct order and make sure you warm and cool the potion the right amount which can be quite difficult for a first timer. With this skill again you become better at it as a player and it is easier to create potions, but also as Henry levels up in alchemy, it is easier for him to succeed in creating a potion as even if you make a small unnoticeable mistake, the craft will still succeed compared to if you did that same mistake at lower levels. 

A great example of how alchemy level affects potions and how the outcome of quests can change based on it. There is one quest where you find a village that has been struck by disease and you need to find a cure for it. After some searching you are able to find out what is wrong with the villagers, what kind of cure they need and the recipe for it. At this point you can either try to convince an actual alchemist to craft the potion or craft it yourself. If you craft it yourself there is the possibility of the potion being botched. And when you botch the potion like I did, the game does not tell you "quest failed" or anything like that, what it does is go on as nothing had happened. You can bring the potion to the villagers, they drink it and seem to have been cured. Much later on you will find out that even though the villagers did seem to get better, in the end the potion did now work and they pretty much all died. A sad ending for the village but interesting to see how my actions actually affect the world around me as a I succeed or screw up certain parts. 

Unfortunately, even though the best part about the game are the skills and the combat and how it works, it's not all roses. There were plenty of talk at the launch of the game of buggy it was. Even tho I did not encounter any bugs, I did have a feeling that the game could have been more polished. The combat, even tho fantastic, did sometimes leave me wondering why did I die? It could be that it is just one of the consequences of building a more complex combat system, that it doesn't always work quite as it should. But that leaves a question if such combat system should then be built at all. In this case I believe the answer is yes but it can be very hit or miss. While in this game the combat system was one of the reasons of its success, one could argue that had it been slightly more off, or slightly more buggier it could have broken the game instead. This time it worked but might not be a risk worth taking every time. 

For this game, I need to mention the DLC as well. It is not often that I buy DLC for this type of game but since I got the game for free from Epic and the DLC was one that I really wanted to see in the game I had to buy it. Most of the DLC's seem to be just a separate short story lines that you play as different characters, but the one I was most excited about was building your own village. I read a lot about people complaining that the DLC was boring as they could just purchase everything straight up so it didn't offer much but I did not have the same experience. It could be that those people bought and played that DLC much after completing the main game whereas I bought it when I was still in the middle stages of the game. Perhaps for that reason I had to actually manage the village and make sure everything was going smoothly. The DLC itself was amazing. At one point of the stage you clear an old abandoned village that has been taken over by bandits. After that you are given the opportunity to restore it to what it once was. You need to make sure that the town is making enough money and resources to support itself. You need to go around the region hiring experts like blacksmiths or traders to you village and provide them with the proper tools for the job. And even tho all of that is amazing to play and see the town grow it had one major issue. You could not building all of the buildings. Now I would understand it if you had the option of building hundreds of buildings but that is not the case. A few of the buildings had a choice like building a butchery or bakery. Why can't I build both? Who knows. 

All in all the game was a fantastic play but could have used with some more polishing and patching. Next time I would also like to see a town building or a base of operations be part of the main game. Overall scoring for this game (not counting the DLC) will be almsot a perfect 9/10