Watch Rico chase a tornado and railgun a wind cannon in new Just Cause 4 video

Avalanche Studios has released a new Just Cause 4 gameplay video showing hero Rico Rodriguez chasing a tornado, railgunning a wind cannon and grappling hook diving off of a drone. It's as brilliantly absurd as it sounds.

The video, above, looks like it's taken from the same hands-off demo that Phil was shown back at E3 (although Avalanche didn't release any footage at the time). Rico first chases down the tornado in his armoured Storm Chaser while dodging enemy fire before wingsuiting into to airport as jet planes crash and spin around him.

The Black Hand, the baddies du jour, have taken over the airport and are holding back the tornado with some wind cannons, naturally. Rico must take the cannons out: for the first, he blasts a railgun—a new weapon to the series—and for the second he attaches boosters that sends it cartwheeling on the spot until it explodes.

Each new weapon will have a secondary fire, narrative director Omar Shakir explains in the video—the railgun can deploy a friendly drone, for example, which Rico can also use as a grappling point.

Honestly, it looks pretty similar to Just Cause 3, but the new Apex engine is impressive. Every object that's sucked into the tornado is having its trajectory calculated in real time, so it's not just creating pre-determined chaos as it moves across the world.

No doubt we'll hear more about Just Cause 4 at Gamescom, so stay tuned.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.