Far Cry 4….or is that Far Cry 3.5

Platform: PC
Genre Category: FPS
Date of Release: November 18^th 2014
ESRB: M
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
WN Rating:
Official Site URL: http://far-cry.ubi.com/en-gb/home/index.aspx

Title: Far Cry 4
Format: Disk/Digital
Genre: Adventure, Action, FPS, Open World.

Note: Sadly no screenshots for this game. I took close to 30 (as I usually do) and they all turned out to be black. Apparently it’s an engine thing, and nothing I’ve tried resolves it. Sorry.

Synopsis:

Hidden in the majestic Himalayas lies Kyrat, a country steeped in tradition and violence. You are Ajay Ghale. Traveling to Kyrat to fulfil your mother’s dying wish, you find yourself caught up in a civil war to overthrow the oppressive regime of dictator Pagan Min.

Explore and navigate this vast open world, where danger and unpredictability lurk around every corner. Here, every decision counts, and every second is a story. Welcome to Kyrat.

Story

All told the story isn’t that great, it’s no work of art. However I found myself compelled to do several playthrough’s, just so I could see how the different events played out. So while the story isn’t amazing, it’s good enough to keep you interested, but it does have a few flaws.

Ubisoft seem have tried to go for a shades of grey story, where there is no clear ‘good’ and ‘evil’, which on the surface of things would be fine. However they couldn’t help falling into the traps all developers seem to do when it comes to this sort of story. Sure there’s no ‘good’ guy but there’s ‘evil’ and then there’s the ‘so evil only an idiot would follow me’. Which is rather a missed opportunity. It was an amazing chance for a lesser of two evils storyline.

Like its predecessor, Far Cry 3, the main guy is a throw away character. I personally didn’t care about him at all and would have forgotten all about him, if not for the fact his name is thrown around every few minutes.

This is a shame, since while I wasn’t a huge fan of the FC3 protagonist, he certainly had more personality than Ajay. What’s more he actually questioned things now and again, and agonised a bit over what he was becoming. Ajay on the other hand feels like a machine, who only responds in set way. He also doesn’t question anything or seem concerned that he’s becoming a one man army who can murder anything and everything….except for eagles!

Truth be told the characters around him, Pagan Min, Sabal, Amita, are all immensely better developed and more personable that you are. Which is a shame really, since the story shifts focus because of it, it suddenly not about you doing you’re thing, fulfilling your mother’s last wish to go to Lakshmana; but about them doing theirs; using you as their hammer.

To be honest, Far Cry 4 has a lot to live up to when it came to their villains. You had an awesome lead villains in FC3, and two meh ones. Vaas and his Sister were bloody awesome, the way they acted and the story flowed around them was amazingly well crafted, though I do seem to be in a minority with regards to that. Buck and Vass’s boss, Hoyte were terrible. Ending in nothing more than a dull quick time event.

Pagan Min however is right up there with Vaas IMO. His personality is just amazing, tied with a voice actor who really brings the character to life. Over the course of the game I found I was looking forward to his banter on the phone, though sadly he’s way under used and doesn’t really appear anywhere near as much as Vaas did in Far Cry 3.

Amita and Sabal vary from interesting to just down right dull. Initially when they’re introduced you’ve got a potentially great conflict going on. You’ve got Sabal on one side, an ultra-nationalist who wants things to go back to the way they were before Pagan. Traditional values and the acceptance of the ‘old’ values that made up Kyrat. Amita however is on the side of progression and modernisation, progression and looking forward to the future.

The problem however is the way this is played out, Sabal ends up feeling more like a paedophile lusting after the Taurn Matara, Bhadra; he’s also revealed to be a mass murderer. His entire personality, while interesting at first, is revealed as being really creepy and frankly a little disturbing.

Amita however, is revealed as a drug peddling money grubbing whore. Who’s more than happy to sell the soul of her country in a bid to make things ‘better’, frankly she’s just as creepy as Sabal, in a different way.

It was like the writers decided to try and make all of the characters equally creepy. Which for me is a shame, this is such a missed opportunity for the old confronting the modern. We’d have Sabal the nationalist, who stood for the old values, and Amita the revolutionary who wants to change and become modern.

This conflict could have been amazing, with some really awesome rivalry between the two. I’d love to have seen how this played out as you sided with one side or the other. Over the course of the game these rivalries would have taken some interesting turns.

Instead all we get are some silted confrontations that you don’t really end up caring about, or even caring about the characters. Frankly I ended up caring more about Bhadra than I did any of the other characters, with the exception of Pagan Min of course!

Now that’s not to say the story is bad, because honestly it isn’t all that bad, not great but not bad. However given that we’re on the fourth game I was hoping things would improve, story wise.

So let’s talk about the game mechanics, which a lot of reviews are criticising because it’s not that much different from Far Cry 3. Which is technically true, and that’s due to the changes in the game being small steps forward, rather than the leaps and bounds that people were expecting.

If you look at the game in context, you will see a lot of advances, though small. Although it’s also worth noting there are some dam annoying step backwards!

Firstly the crafting, and while I understand what they were aiming for, it feels ham-fisted and worse than in Far Cry 3, which I honestly didn’t think was possible.

Like last time you can have four weapons, and increasing them is done through crafting. However unlike last time one of those slots is a mandatory one handed slot. This is due, I believe, to the mechanic they added allowing you to shoot and drive. However at first pass this is very limiting, since the early game one handed guns are garbage, unless you have the ‘limited edition’ game which comes with the best one handed gun for free. However even then it’s not the best gun, and I found I didn’t use the gun as it was pointless and underpowered. It wasn’t until I unlocked the one handed grenade launcher that things got worthwhile.

The crafting, beyond this, is the same. Kill a series of different animals, collect their skins and then make the next ‘tier’ of upgrades.

Again I wish they’d expanded on this and made a proper crafting system rather than the production line we have.

The hunting is done a bit better, and given a sort of context. But given the way the game plays it’s really no different than the original picking up hunting missions in Far Cry 3. This would have been pretty awesome if they’d changed it up a bit and given the hunting some context and visual changes.

The other ‘issue’ I had with the hunting was that I had the ‘exotic’ skins needed for the final upgrades long before I had even gotten the third tier of upgrades. Again, while I would have liked to see some changes to this system I can understand the ‘if it’s not broken, don’t fix it’ mentality. However as a fan of the franchise, I honestly hope they change this in the next game as it needs a refresh.

One of the other things I didn’t like so much was the fact they changed the amount of guns, I haven’t checked but it actually seems there’s less to choose from this time around. They lumped them all together in a big mess, and I also really hate the fact that they’ve gated the weapons even worse this time round. In Far Cry 3 the vast majority of the guns were available from the outset, if you had the cash. A few were gated as rewards for certain things, which made for a good sense of achievement.

This time around however the weapons are all gated behind mission progression as well as the arena and coop events. Towers only unlocks a few weapons, and most of those are garbage that are lesser weapons than ones you already have. For me, the only weapon I really wanted (Bushman), was gated behind a requirement of level 10 n the Arena, a part of the game I have no interest in.

One last negative before I move onto what I did like, and that’s the way the pacing goes in the story, and the way it’s tied to the world size.

So, Ubisoft claim that the game world is roughly the size of the first island of Far Cry 3, but because of the way it’s designed, the content is a lot denser and actually has roughly the same amount as the entire of Far Cry 3, but more secondary and tertiary missions.

This is both true, and one of the biggest flaws of the game.

Your first part of the game is spent in Southern Kyrat, which is tiny and does end up feeling very restricted, especially when you keep running into walls telling you to complete missions to open up the area you’re going to. They set it up so as to force you to do at least one each of the various secondary quests. My guess is they wanted to introduce you to the characters, which is fine. However I didn’t like the way it pushed you into them.

This was also true with the way the main missions worked, it felt very forced and fake the way they handled the progression. Or rather there really didn’t feel like any progression, rather a series of gates you go through.

They made a big thing about how this game is choice driven, and how there’s multiple choices that change the way the game develops blah blah blah, total BS. Sure there’s several missions throughout the game where you have to side with Sabal or Amita, and each time its supposed to have the consequence of reducing the persons you didn’t supports power base. And the game does a very good job of giving you that illusion. However in the last mission all your choices are invalidated and you’re once again given an either or mission, this time it’s the final one. The problem I have here is that you could have sided with Sabal throughout the entire game, and then in the last mission change sides and support Amita without any consequence. For me, this was a huge let down, since I was expecting so much more given the blurb.

Conclusion

So, overall I find myself looking at this as more of another Blood Dragon, or a Far Cry 3.5 rather than Far cry 4.

As I played through the game I enjoyed the new elements, the Buzzer, shooting and driving, merchants wandering around the world. But I couldn’t get past the limitations of the game world, and the birds!! Those damn birds drove me insane, you can’t walk more that 10ft without a bird pouncing on you.

The big question is: Should I buy Far Cry 4? Sadly I have to say no, at its current price it’s not worth buying, and the season pass is definitely not worth it. When it invariably goes on sale for 50% or more off, then I’d say it’s possibly worth it.

That said, given you can get the full edition of Far Cry 3 with the deluxe pack for around $10 these days (it’s usually on sale somewhere, and the steam sales are coming up this month) I’d say get that.

My Rig & Methodology

• i5 4670 3.4Ghz CPU
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770 WindForce 3x OC 4096MB GDDR5
• 8GB 1866 RAM
• 1Tb HDD 7200

Please note that while I am a PC gamer I’m not a PC Elitist, I don’t care about FPS on any level. What I care about the most is that the game looks good and plays smoothly. So if a game plays at 30, 60, 2000 or anything in between doesn’t bother me. 30fps is the minimum for me however, anything lower than that and I don’t see it as being good.

Play time varies on the game in question but I generally play the game to completion at least once, usually twice. Unless the game is particularly bad 😀