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The jetpack - or Bavarium Wingsuit - that you're given at the very start of Just Cause 3's new Sky Fortress DLC is quite a thing. Seriously. Hold a button to blast off from the ground, and then you're up, up and away, riding a trail of neon blue fog as you head for the stars. That initial boost won't last forever, but once you're gliding, you can top yourself up with toots on a recharging thruster, and you can even air brake to pull off fancy turns, or to screw up fancy turns and starfisj yourself against a tree. You have a machine gun and a rocket launcher, both available in-air and saved from spamming by their own cooldowns. Best of all is a barrel roll, which you can pull off just as an enemy missile is about to hit you. It's a beautiful thing, in-game text announcing your success as the golden contrail of the rocket with your name on it races past inches from an arm or leg. People talk about Sky Fortress as being the Iron Man mod, and you glimpse it very clearly in these moments. Swoosh!Yeah, that jetpack is quite a thing. The rest of the campaign that's built around it is less endearing. It's not a disaster by any means, and I had a pleasant enough afternoon rattling through the mini-campaign's three missions and the padding required to unlock them. The problem is that the whole thing feels a bit like padding.
I think it's the fault of geography. Back on the islands of Medici, Just Cause 3 can rope in that beautiful, expansive open world to bring life to missions which, in truth, tend to be made up of very simple tasks: hunt this down and kill it, hunt this down and protect it while everyone else tries to kill it. The ultimate Just Cause mission is happy to devolve into a convoy: hardly a brilliant piece of creative thinking, but the sheer fact that you're moving through a landscape that's rigged for happy accidents gives it a fresh sense of life.
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