Just Cause™ 3: Multiplayer Mod Chaos, now with friends

The mod opens up the entire Just Cause 3 map to multiplayer, with servers holding up to hundreds of players at once. Everything you did alone is now done next to people who are also holding a rocket launcher. You grapple onto a passing car, someone else grapples onto you, and before long the whole thing is a rolling pile of vehicles and bad decisions.

The modes cover the classics: deathmatch, races on the roads and in the air, skydiving, freeroam, and chases where a fighter jet is a perfectly reasonable way to play tag. State-of-the-art synchronisation keeps the lag down, which is impressive work for a fan project. One honest note: the world itself is quieter than in the single-player game, with few NPCs around, so the entertainment comes from the other players rather than the island's garrisons.

If deathmatch and racing are not enough, the mod lets you build your own game modes, and the community has taken that offer seriously. Servers run community-created modes that keep evolving, from standard shooters to strange little inventions like contests over who can cause the most explosions in a minute.

That customisation is the point of the whole project. The team behind it, coders from Germany, Austria and the UK, spent more than a year building it so that players themselves could build on top of their work. Every server can be its own thing: one night you are skydiving off a mountain with forty strangers, the next you are in a race where half the field is flying jets. The game stays funny because the rules keep changing.