Just Cause 3

I've been playing this as a nice little release from the brutality of the XCom Long War 2 mod. It's been quite successful at that. Mostly.

Pro's:

BOOM! Boooom boom boom boom KAABLUUUYYY!! pop boom! Look no further, we've got your power fantasies right here, folks!

The grapple really encourages a lot of clever ways to kills soldiers and make more things go boom.

The physics engine is pretty good! Not awesome but certainly good enough to be fun.

If you get the mech expansion, you'll find mechs have a big gravity gun much like in Half Life 2.

Lots of content with the expansions (I got the XL version).

The game does some sort of Steam (?) login while loading. As you do various things (e.g. climb mountains via parachute & grapple), the game tracks your personal best and shows you a few people who've done better/worse. Seeing what other people have done doesn't do anything for me as they are all total strangers but I do like topping my own personal best numbers.

Start the game and it loads all the way up, including loading your latest save.

Issues:

Your latest save is actually your ONLY save. If it gets corrupted or if you forget and start a new game just to see the start again, all your progress is GONE.

While the start up is hands free, it seems to burn a lot of time doing nothing. Maybe there's something going on that I can't see but it sure looks to me like Rico sits on that beach for a good 30 seconds after the background load finishes.

The story is pretty weak, even for a pure action game.

Keyboard controls for the wingsuit... blah. Airplanes seem incredibly hard to fly, too. They might be better with controllers but I want my headshots!

Neutral but Interesting:

Checkpoint saves only. It saves any time you make meaningful progress so this isn't a big deal.

Expansion weapons are mighty powerful. Your going to need some willpower to keep from making the game too easy by using them. (I'm thinking mostly of the lightning gun which acts a bit like an infinite ammo RPG that only works outdoors - which means most everything.)

Collections are a waste of time, as near as I can tell. Yeah, you can open up free travel if you find all the little shrines but the only chance you'll ever find them all is to liberate the whole place - thus opening up free travel anyway. Even if you look up a map, the time you spend finding all the shrines is going to be more than the time you save with fast travel. Just ignore the things. (Well, except maybe cars. Maybe.)

The Steam login also lets you compete against your Steam friends… somehow. None of my Steam friends have played the game so I don't really know what the story is there.

The price is still $60 for the base game ($85 for the game + expansions) even though the game released on Nov 30, 2015! Luckily, it gets pretty deep discounts on sales.

Been meaning to give it a try, heard it's wonderful for turning your brain off for a few hours.
But think it's pretty badly optimized, at least from hear say.

Haven't picked up the 3rd one yet, waiting on a sale. I really enjoyed messing around in the first ones. I have no idea what the story is about but I'm great at grappling guys to cars and plains and such. Never even got close to finishing either game because I just have too much fun screwing around.

There's been some fixing in the game and NVIDIA drivers in the past few months. I haven't noticed any issues along those lines.

Hmmm, you know, maybe I should say what you actually DO in the game? Not everyone played JC1 and/or 2.

So basically you're playing the part of Rico Rodriguez, who's trying to liberate a small, multi-island nation. You do this by blowing stuff up. Lots of stuff. When taking over military bases, you blow up their transformers, water towers, fuel tanks, and maybe a base commander. When taking over towns you blow up propaganda speakers, billboards, statues, take over the police station, and finally raise a flag. Once you do this, the enemy will magically vanish. (Really! I've seen pilots stuck in mid-air when their helicopter vanished around them!)

The game is VERY free with its weapons. You'll have no trouble finding plenty of machine guns, grenades, grenade launchers, chain guns, helicopters, and tanks. Even if you can't find any at the time, you can spend flares to call up your rebel friends to drop some weapons in for you. The people are incredibly forgiving, too - some will even cheer you on as you steal their car.

The big claim to fame is the grapple. Point your grapple at a ledge, click, and you'll zip up to the ledge. Point it further along the ground and you'll zip forward. Pull your parachute out as you're zipping forward and you'll go flying. You can also attach both ends of your grapple line, turning it into a tether between two objects. So you might tether an attacking soldier to a fleeing civilian car and the car will drag the soldier away. Hold down the shift key and the tether shrinks to nothing. Tether that soldier to a high tower, shrink the tether, and the soldier is dragged up into the sky. You can even make the tether vanish by pressing V so, if you're dragging the soldier up then hit V, you'll launch the poor soldier into the sky! There's no end of mayhem you can do with this thing! (You're pretty much expected to use it to move around, too - Rico's ability to actually run and jump himself is pretty sad.)

JC3 added a wingsuit. It acts as a transport mode between the parachute and just outright falling. Once you get up to speed, you can fly! You've got to be moving pretty quick, though - once you slow down you start dropping fast.

There are also a bunch of "challenges" all around the map. Races have you speeding along in a car/motorcycle/boat/airplane as fast as you can. There's a wingsuit challenge where you fly through hoops, trying not to faceplant along the way. There are destruction challenges where you blow up as much as you can. There's a challenge where they give you a car with a bomb attached. The bomb's timer ticks down whenever your speed drops below a certain point. The goal is to get to a distant object and dive out (which automatically triggers the bomb, I think), causing as much damage as possible. These challenges serve as the method to upgrade your gear. The better you do, the more points you earn, which earns you better gear upgrades. (There's no choice about what to upgrade, though, so don't think this is some sort of RPG hybrid.)

Oh, and there's story missions. The story isn't so good but the missions they put you on are fun. Don't go skipping them! You'll need to liberate regions to keep the story going.

It's probably most like the Saints Row games, really. Less story, more fireballs.