After about 35 hours I finally rolled the credits on Far Cry 4 last night, and I have been at a loss on how to approach my analysis of it. The game has been at times rote, inspired, empowering, frustrating and everything in between. This post is going to be a bit more disjointed than usual as I think the structure reflects how I currently feel about the game. So, without further ado, my parting thoughts on the fourth Far Cry game.
The grind, oh god the grind
I possess a completionist streak in me, but it is more of a compulsion and I tend not to find joy in it. Ubisoft open world games are particularly compulsive for me as they all dole out treasure maps that mark each and every collectible in the game world. Far Cry 4 is no different and I proceeded to spend countless hours collecting every lost letter, journal entry, and treasure chest the first half of the game could offer. I liken it to popping bubble wrap, with the bubble wrap in this case being the world map. However once I broke into the northern portion of the game world and saw hundreds more insubstantial collectibles to gather, my will broke. At that point I made a compromise; I would only collect story related collectibles and not bother with the inconsequential treasure chests. It proved to be a far better experience and did not impact my ability to gain all available power-ups and unlocks.
Clearly I can't say I enjoyed this aspect of the game, but I still can't figure out if the shortcoming is on me or on Ubisoft. On one hand, the collectibles are truly optional and I did not need them to finish the game in any way. On the other hand, the map design is explicitly designed to draw your eyes to the hundreds of icons spread across the world. An argument can be made for both sides, one where Ubisoft is promoting a stagnating game design path to lengthen their games and one where market demands force developers to hit arbitrary “time to completion” counts to justify the high price of their games. I can't say for sure which side of the debate I fall on, but for now it seems that my patience with open world games is growing thin. I feel that I may need to take a break from the genre for a while because of it.
The good and bad of repeating yourself
Far Cry 4 offers some of the best shooter gameplay in modern video games. Although much hasn't changed since Far Cry 3, I would take the shooting of this series over anything else, save for maybe Call of Duty. To that end, the shooter related gameplay in Far Cry 4 is crazy fun. Taking over outposts, running assassinations, and going through campaign missions never got old throughout the duration of the game. This gameplay is married to an excellent stealth system that gives depth to how you approach combat as well as a wildlife system that provides a fun bit of randomness to the proceedings. Ubisoft smartly chose to emphasize these strengths of the previous games and even found ways to bring them further up front. The auto-drive system in particular is an inspired choice so that you can always be focused on shooting.
That being said, Ubisoft also chose to emphasize an aspect of Far Cry 3 that didn't work all that great, the platforming. Here, like in the last game, you must climb towers to reveal portions of the map and proceed to your next objective. These towers, while occasionally frustrating, are for the most part inoffensive. However, as Kyrat is in the Himalayas, platforming and climbing are now integrated into the game world to a major extent. You are given a grappling hook early on to scale these heights and it quickly becomes a necessary tool to access the more interesting parts of the world. At first this all seems very cool, but quickly becomes a slog of cheap deaths. First person platforming has been terrible since the days of Half-Life and much hasn't changed here. I could not count how many times I fell off a cliff because the game did not register me pressing jump at the correct time. The deaths from falling are also very finicky in what constitutes a safe drop versus what will kill you. Oftentimes a simple 10 foot drop would lead to my untimely death whereas other times I would not have a scratch on me. This is especially frustrating as the PS4 version of the game has extremely long load times, which gave me plenty of time to seethe at the latest cheap death. Obviously this is all probably realistic as to what a 10-15 foot drop on to rock would do to a human, but Ajay Ghale can easily shrug off rockets and machine gun fire, so clearly realism isn't the standard here. You can do better, Ubisoft.
I didn't hate the story
After the bro-tastic story of the last game, I was not expecting much from Far Cry 4's narrative. However, upon completion I felt pretty satisfied how Ajay and Pagan's journey ended. The characters in particular helped sell the story. Amita and Sabal were excellent foils to one another and allowed the middle of the campaign to have conflict while Pagan Min was sidelined for a bit. The governors, Paul De Pleur, Noore and Yuma were all well drawn out and kept the story interesting during what otherwise would feel like rote mini-boss missions. And of course, there's Pagan Min. Troy Baker does an excellent job establishing a personality to this larger than life despot that could have easily been a cartoon character. Despite the atrocities he commits, the character remains charismatic enough that I wasn't too perturbed whenever Ajay didn't just shoot him in the head every time they met (although seriously, this trope needs to just die already). The one improvement that could have been made is having wardrobe changes for Pagan Min. He is established to be this vain character who very much cares about his appearance. Why then, over the weeks or months that the story takes to play out, is he always wearing the same purple suit?
The side mission characters are a bit more of a mixed bag. Longinus, the warlord-turned-gunrunner/preacher is by far the most interesting of the bunch. He started out as a man clearly lying to himself and others with his baptism by the gun rhetoric (although I'm sure someone smarter than me can write up something profound about how Longinus reflects that Africa's relationship with Christianity is colored by the bayonet of colonialism). That said, as you follow his quest line you can see that he is genuinely trying to make amends and truly be a good man, even if his methods themselves can be classified as evil. Emerson Brooks deserves a lot of credit bringing this complex character to life. Yogi and Reggie, however, are simply the worst. The drug addled duo will cause Ajay to ingest and inject various experimental hallucinogens for a purpose that isn't fully explained. Don't get me wrong, it's not the drug use that bothers me, it's just the pointlessness of it. These missions are just excuses for the developers to make the world trip out with various colors, and you can almost hear them checking the box saying “make more missions like the weed field/flamethrower one from the last game”.
Final Thoughts
Overall I would say that I enjoyed my time with Far Cry 4, but unless they do something radically different with the next game, I'm afraid it will join the growing pile of series I'm done playing. I'll probably have some more thoughts on the state of open-world gaming in an upcoming post, but that will have to wait until I've had more time to digest this game. Next up, I intend to play a shorter game as a palette cleanser. Right now it is between Grim Fandango Remastered, a game that has been on my wall of shame for quite a while, or Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris, which caught my eye after playing (and loving) Lara Croft GO. Let me know in the comments which would be the better bet for to play. See you next time duders!
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