Far Cry 4

Despite owning two predecessors to this one, this is actually the first Far Cry game I’ve played and I’m not sure what I made of the whole experience. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s a very good, well constructed, free-flowing game but I’m not sure I enjoyed it very much and here are the reasons why.

Far Cr 4 follows the story of Ajay Ghale returning to his home of Kyrat after spending a lot of time in America acquiring a consumer-friendly American accent. Upon his arrival, he is greeted by the local dictator Pagan Min, the guy with the worst fashion sense in the country. As the start of the game, he invites you to dinner and then leaves you alone. Here you have a choice; wait for him to return which results in the end credits rolling, or get up and leave and embark on a 40 plus hour quest to take him out along with all his little lackies.

The gameplay is very solid and I particularly liked the shooting mechanics. The reason for this is something I’ve mentioned in other reviews – I like to be able to aim at someone’s head and actually shoot them in the head. Far Cry 4 does this very well which makes clearing out an outpost with a sniper rifle, or bow and arrow, an absolute joy.

One criticism is that the world is very large and it takes ages to get anywhere. Most of the roads and vehicles are useless and driving is fucking difficult so I ended up walking most places, especially when looking for collectibles. This really drags out the play time, especially for me who spent a lot of the time walking miles from an outpost only to die and have to start again. I think this is probably more to do with me sucking at the game though.

Another part of it I couldn’t get on board with was the characters of Yogi and Reggie. These were two of the most infuriating characters in gaming history. You encounter them, go on some kind of acid trip bender and wake up without any of your stuff... then you keep going back for more?! It makes no sense. And they are annoying characters who seem to be in the game just to make English people look like drug addicts.

Graphically, it’s lovely. It’s a very attractive world where everything looks amazing and it’s pretty much glitch free. A lot of work has to go in to making a world where you walk from one end of it to other without getting caught on scenery or falling through the floor. Bravo.

Musically, it’s very blah and bland, although effort has gone in to make it sound authentically Kyrati. On the sound front, the most annoying part of the game is the radio host Rabi Ray Rana. He calls himself a freedom fighter but doesn’t actually do any fighting other than spilling shit over his pirate radio station. All he does is bad mouth Pagan Min and does so on a very short loop and ends up saying the same thing over and over again to the point where I was so sick of hearing him say ‘the elephant in the room’ that I actively avoided driving even more despite the additional time it added to my playthrough.

Achievements – 1,250 Points – 57 Achievements

Achievements wise there isn’t anything majorly difficult, just time consuming and a few you need to be aware of if you want to save time. For example, one achievement requires you to clear an outpost without being detected. This is much easier to do at the beginning of the game as there are less guards. If you miss out early on, you can replay the outposts to get this.

Completing the campaign fully will net you most of the main game achievements with a few exceptions. The more memorable ones for me were for killing a dude with an arrow from over 60 meters (I had to practice a lot to get the distance right) and killing two targets with one shot from a sniper. With this second one getting two guys to line up was a massive pain in the ass.

There are four grinding ones which annoyed me. You basically have to reply certain outposts to hammer out the requirements relatively quickly. You need to kill 30 enemies with an elephant, 30 enemies with mortar rounds (so you have to play an outpost with a mortar and set off the alarm), 50 enemies with fire and you have to distract 15 enemies with rocks. Considering the easiest way to clear an outpost is to sit back with a sniper, I barely did any of this and just worked on the achievements separately.

Multiplayer

There are two elements to the multiplayer; online versus and co-op. The versus mode only has one achievement but it requires you to finish a public match of each of the game types. It requires six players to actually start these matches and no one was playing the game when I wanted to so I had to get some friends to help get it – annoying when all you have to do is play a match.

The co-op was a bit stupid too. You can join anyone’s game but playing in co-op is much more of a friend thing to do. Playing with random people never works for me and I would more than likely end up playing with some fucking idiots, so had to get someone likeminded to get the achievements. The achievements themselves take less than half an hour to get if you do have someone so it’s not too bad. But still, it’s an unnecessary addition.

Downloadable Content

There is one single player DLC expansion that has you take Ajay into the Valley of the Yetis. It’s a weird additional piece of the game that doesn’t really make any sense as some crazy people are trying to kill you for whatever reason.

Thankfully the DLC is just a single player expansion of the main game with a new area to explore and new challenges to complete. I found this a real pain in the ass to get to the end of but I think this may have been because I was bored of the gameplay by this point and no amount of wacky storylines could change this.

Far Cry 4 is a very good game but I did find it monotonous and boring after a while. I guess no matter how good a game is, that can’t guarantee personal enjoyment. That said, I will be playing some of the other ones in the series with the exception of Far Cry 2. That one can jump of a bridge.