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Grumblings of Just Cause 3's uneven PlayStation 4 and Xbox One performance has circulated since its late 2015 launch - a subject broached in our original Face-Off comparison. The recently released patch 1.05 gives us a chance to fully reassess the console experience, with a look at further-flung locales and a focus on the more riotous, gun-toting gameplay it offers. For a little perspective, all of our new tests also compare it to the previous patch 1.04, to see if there's been any real improvement.Long story short: its worst drops are very similar to those we recorded around release, with physics-based destruction being the main culprit as expected. Our analysis below (focusing on the Lavanda on Rocca Blau regions) syncs movement up to get authentic action on the go, and despite a 30fps cap, we're looking at long stretches of 15 to 25fps playback once the action really kick off. Additionally, we've seen far less flattering scenarios from other players, with one capture in particular showing stuttering 0fps performance. We've yet recreate that exact same issue, but the drops we do have on capture ourselves are significant, and it does affect playability on both PS4 and Xbox One.
Of course, we're putting a big strain on Avalanche's engine with all these effects, and the physics-based carnage. This is a fair case for it however; destruction plays a big part in Just Cause 3's appeal, and if this core gameplay conceit is consistently producing results like this - as low as 15fps - we can appreciate people's frustration with its console performance. There's no apparent improvement on the latest patch 1.05 either, and in fact we see it fall visibly lower than 1.04 at points - though it's worth stressing that identical runs on the same patch can give a wild range of results, making any thing approaching like-for-like testing extremely challenging.
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