YMMV / Just Cause 4

• Complete Monster: Oscar Espinosa is the dictator of Solis, creator of the Black Hand, and the head of Project Illapa. Years prior to the game, Oscar convinces his father to weaponize Project Illapa to sell it to the highest bidder, believing that using Illapa for the good of the people was a waste of money. When Miguel Rodriguez, father of Rico and co-creator of Project Illapa, decides to leave the project in disgust of Oscar's intentions, Oscar sends General Sebastiano Di Ravello to kill him while imprisoning Lanza in order to force him to continue working on Illapa. When Rico attempts to depose him years later, Oscar orders for Illapa to be activated in an attempt to kill Rico, before sending the Black Hand to capture Mira Morales, who assisted Rico, and to capture or kill Lucas and the rest of the local resistance members if Mira doesn't surrender. After Rico destroys the weather core, Oscar decides to flee, leaving his men to die. Later, Oscar reveals his intentions of using a perfected weather core to kill the resistance and even his own men, and then sell it to the Agency for trillions of dollars, uncaring of the lives that will potentially be lost in the process. A greedy dictator willing to kill many for his own benefit, Oscar establishes himself as one of Rico Rodriguez's most personal foes.
• Contested Sequel: This game takes a couple steps forward and a couple steps back after Just Cause 3. While the gameplay elements have been improved in some places, such as essential abilities that had to be unlocked before now available from the get-go, and the new tether gadgets being well-received along with having less performance issues at launch, a number of players consider the graphics, controls, and missions to have received a significant downgrade. In addition, the game world is filled with small towns and bases that you can find if you explore, unlike the somewhat underpopulated world of Just Cause 3. However, locations are now completed by performing stunts, rather than by finding collectibles and destructible objects. This means there is little incentive to explore the locations themselves or partake in the wanton destruction the series is famous for. Also how there are less variety and more annoying type of missions, instead the missions are usually time-limit bound defend or point-to-point activity.
• Demonic Spiders: Drones. They fly extremely fast, are really small, and are next to impossible to hit.
• Game-Breaker: A minor one, but if you equip a hook loadout with high speed yank mod and explosive balloons mod you basically get a free mid-range mook instant death machine. Due to yank breaking the cord instantly upon being set it will blow up the balloon instantly once the second half is placed which becomes a fairly reliable, if a little weak, instant explosive that takes out normal enemies instantly, and high speed yanking will cause all kinds of damage, including a lot to any mook that survives the explosive balloon. While not quite as deadly to vehicles you can still whittle them down with the explosives or just fling them off course with the yank, making it a handy general use combat loadout.
• Genius Bonus: Project Illapa is named for the Incan god of thunder and rain.
• Moral Event Horizon: Espinosa crossed it by redirecting tornadoes towards heavily populated cities as a test of Project Illapa's capabilities.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Completing territory checklist are now done by doing repetitive side missions, hidden exploration missions, or nigh-impossible stunts. All the while the Mission Control responsible for the mission is yapping almost nonstop.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Most of the main missions are done in a strict time limit or defending something that is not only fragile, but the amount of enemy reinforcements overwhelm the player even on the lowest difficulty, with, unlike previous games, soldier backups often coming late or never.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • The Frontline mechanic could be good in principle, opening the possibility of dynamic war across the map - but in practice, it's implemented as a one-way advance towards liberating more and more of the map, with no way for the Black Hand to push back the frontline. Additionally, you can free up some of your squads by advancing in the right manner, but this just gives you more squads than you need, as over time you both gain new squads and free up existing ones. Overall, the lackluster implementation of Frontlines is just not very meaningful to gameplay.
  • Destroying Chaos objects; A former stable of the series that's now completely optional as more than enough chaos is generated by simply fighting the Black Hand. Blowing them up is also no longer required to "complete" settlements.
  • The only purpose of Chaos itself is to recruit more squads and will quickly become vestigial once you can't recruit anymore.