In terms of storytelling and gameplay, this is definitely better than the previous two games.
Storywise, it is less serious compared to the previous game and it expanded Rico's background as it is also set on his homeland. Rico quits The Agency to return to and free his homeland. One thing I like about this is because you are working with the rebellion, hijacking civilian vehicles sometimes results in funny dialogue where they don't mind you stealing their vehicles such as "Be careful switching, it sticks in second!" or "Anything for the Revolution!". While the previous two games finished the final bosses in a ridiculous and explosive manner, this one kinda ends underwhelmingly (to be fair, you have already destroyed the major bases and resources so the big bad shouldn't have any means to create a superweapon at that point). Other story points involves people who Rico knew back then and some deals The Agency took part of before the events of the first game.
On gameplay, a lot of improvements have been made. First off, you get a wingsuit that allows more horizontal movement compared to the parachute. The previous games gave you explosives but when you run out of them, it's hard to destroy key structures. This was addressed by giving you infinite explosives with 3 - 5 of them active, depends on your upgrades. But what if you don't want to use explosives? You can still tether two objects as in the previous games but now you can have it pull the two objects. This allows you to liberate areas without even firing a single shot. You can even use this to have two choppers crash into each other.
Challenges/races were made more significant compared to the previous games. They now give you gears that allows you to upgrade your equipment. Remember the explosives? You can now have the option to have it propel the thing that it's attached to before exploding. While the upgrades are good in general, the problem is that some of the upgrades should have been unlocked from the start such as precision aiming and slingsuit to reel. The challenges themselves are a mixed bag. You don't need to get a perfect score to unlock all upgrades but you need to get around 3 - 4 to unlock them all. I personally enjoy the wingsuit challenges but it seems that others hate it.
Rebel drop replaced the black market delivery from JC2. You can get unlocked weapons and vehicles delivered to you using the beacons found in liberated bases or random encounter rewards. With the garages, you can now have almost all civilian vehicles delivered to you, tractor included. Military vehicles are unlocked by liberating military bases.
Collectibles are still a thing but not much compared to JC2. These will unlock some weapons, free fast travel, off road vehicles and a plane. It will also give you some backstory regarding the villains rise to power. The proximity detector that you had in the previous game is still present so it shouldn't be hard to find these. Liberating a province will also display the positions of the items in the map.
For the DLC, there are a couple of DLC types as I would call it: The Air, Land and Sea DLCs and the individual items that were preorder bonuses that has been sold separately.
The items are just weaponized variants of some vehicles (Boat, sports car, buggy), a new mech and some weapons. I didn't see much of a use for the vehicles and the weapons are fun in their own way. The mech was something that I did use a lot because it was fun launching rockets and using gravity against your opponents.
The Air, Land and Sea expansion pass contains new missions, vehicle and weapons. Some of these missions will be available early on and would make the main game easier if completed earlier on. The rewards are overpowered but you can always choose not to use them if you want.
While the missions have their own cutscenes, they're basically slideshows with voiceover on them.
Air (Sky Fortress):
- Accessed with the mission icon that has wings on it
- Gives you the bavarium wingsuit which gives you boost, machineguns and bavarium rockets. You get targeted by SAMs if you are wearing this. Can be disabled in the main menu's DLC option. You will also be wearing the default wingsuit during wingsuit challenges
- You also get a gun named bavarium splitter. It's an energy gun that has low accuracy unless you use the precision aim.
- You get a drone as a rebel drop
Land (Mech Assault):
- Accessed with the mission icon that has a globe on it
- You get access to mechs. Both an autocannon and bavarium splitter variant . Mechs are equipped with GRIP (Mech's Gravitational Remote Influence Projector) which allows you to grab, throw and use force pulse (Similar to Air Propulsion Gun in JC2 but a lot more powerful)
- Power core weapon that can disable vehicles and allows you to hijack mechs
- Bavarium Mech rebel support that can be called via rebel drop. One is enough to liberate a base on it's own.
Sea (Bavarium Sea Heist):
- Accessed with the mission icon that has an anchor on it
- You get a rocket boat named Loochador. It has nitro that can be used for an extended amount of time, has homing rockets and miniguns attached.
- You also get the Eden spark which allows you to call lightning. Only downside is you can't use them indoors.
Overall the DLC makes for an enjoyable experience but isn't really required. I would recommend the Land sea and air expansions compared to the others.
The only problems that I had with this game is the low framerate on some areas as well as the frequent loading. Not sure how it fares on consoles as I'm playing on windows. It would take a while if you failed a challenge and wanted to redo it; the loading times does not help as well.
This game also relies on online DRM so you are logged in before playing which might take a long time. There might be times that you'll get disconnected and the game will attempt to reconnect everytime you access your PDA. There are ways to remove the online checking but I haven't tried those yet. There is a long intro of Rico relaxing on the beach. While it looks cool, you can't skip it and it boring after a while. Another problem is that the logging in portion happens after the intro so I'd recommend getting a mod that removes the intro if you get tired of it.
Overall it's a pretty fun game
Storywise, it is less serious compared to the previous game and it expanded Rico's background as it is also set on his homeland. Rico quits The Agency to return to and free his homeland. One thing I like about this is because you are working with the rebellion, hijacking civilian vehicles sometimes results in funny dialogue where they don't mind you stealing their vehicles such as "Be careful switching, it sticks in second!" or "Anything for the Revolution!". While the previous two games finished the final bosses in a ridiculous and explosive manner, this one kinda ends underwhelmingly (to be fair, you have already destroyed the major bases and resources so the big bad shouldn't have any means to create a superweapon at that point). Other story points involves people who Rico knew back then and some deals The Agency took part of before the events of the first game.
On gameplay, a lot of improvements have been made. First off, you get a wingsuit that allows more horizontal movement compared to the parachute. The previous games gave you explosives but when you run out of them, it's hard to destroy key structures. This was addressed by giving you infinite explosives with 3 - 5 of them active, depends on your upgrades. But what if you don't want to use explosives? You can still tether two objects as in the previous games but now you can have it pull the two objects. This allows you to liberate areas without even firing a single shot. You can even use this to have two choppers crash into each other.
Challenges/races were made more significant compared to the previous games. They now give you gears that allows you to upgrade your equipment. Remember the explosives? You can now have the option to have it propel the thing that it's attached to before exploding. While the upgrades are good in general, the problem is that some of the upgrades should have been unlocked from the start such as precision aiming and slingsuit to reel. The challenges themselves are a mixed bag. You don't need to get a perfect score to unlock all upgrades but you need to get around 3 - 4 to unlock them all. I personally enjoy the wingsuit challenges but it seems that others hate it.
Rebel drop replaced the black market delivery from JC2. You can get unlocked weapons and vehicles delivered to you using the beacons found in liberated bases or random encounter rewards. With the garages, you can now have almost all civilian vehicles delivered to you, tractor included. Military vehicles are unlocked by liberating military bases.
Collectibles are still a thing but not much compared to JC2. These will unlock some weapons, free fast travel, off road vehicles and a plane. It will also give you some backstory regarding the villains rise to power. The proximity detector that you had in the previous game is still present so it shouldn't be hard to find these. Liberating a province will also display the positions of the items in the map.
For the DLC, there are a couple of DLC types as I would call it: The Air, Land and Sea DLCs and the individual items that were preorder bonuses that has been sold separately.
The items are just weaponized variants of some vehicles (Boat, sports car, buggy), a new mech and some weapons. I didn't see much of a use for the vehicles and the weapons are fun in their own way. The mech was something that I did use a lot because it was fun launching rockets and using gravity against your opponents.
The Air, Land and Sea expansion pass contains new missions, vehicle and weapons. Some of these missions will be available early on and would make the main game easier if completed earlier on. The rewards are overpowered but you can always choose not to use them if you want.
While the missions have their own cutscenes, they're basically slideshows with voiceover on them.
Air (Sky Fortress):
- Accessed with the mission icon that has wings on it
- Gives you the bavarium wingsuit which gives you boost, machineguns and bavarium rockets. You get targeted by SAMs if you are wearing this. Can be disabled in the main menu's DLC option. You will also be wearing the default wingsuit during wingsuit challenges
- You also get a gun named bavarium splitter. It's an energy gun that has low accuracy unless you use the precision aim.
- You get a drone as a rebel drop
Land (Mech Assault):
- Accessed with the mission icon that has a globe on it
- You get access to mechs. Both an autocannon and bavarium splitter variant . Mechs are equipped with GRIP (Mech's Gravitational Remote Influence Projector) which allows you to grab, throw and use force pulse (Similar to Air Propulsion Gun in JC2 but a lot more powerful)
- Power core weapon that can disable vehicles and allows you to hijack mechs
- Bavarium Mech rebel support that can be called via rebel drop. One is enough to liberate a base on it's own.
Sea (Bavarium Sea Heist):
- Accessed with the mission icon that has an anchor on it
- You get a rocket boat named Loochador. It has nitro that can be used for an extended amount of time, has homing rockets and miniguns attached.
- You also get the Eden spark which allows you to call lightning. Only downside is you can't use them indoors.
Overall the DLC makes for an enjoyable experience but isn't really required. I would recommend the Land sea and air expansions compared to the others.
The only problems that I had with this game is the low framerate on some areas as well as the frequent loading. Not sure how it fares on consoles as I'm playing on windows. It would take a while if you failed a challenge and wanted to redo it; the loading times does not help as well.
This game also relies on online DRM so you are logged in before playing which might take a long time. There might be times that you'll get disconnected and the game will attempt to reconnect everytime you access your PDA. There are ways to remove the online checking but I haven't tried those yet. There is a long intro of Rico relaxing on the beach. While it looks cool, you can't skip it and it boring after a while. Another problem is that the logging in portion happens after the intro so I'd recommend getting a mod that removes the intro if you get tired of it.
Overall it's a pretty fun game