Far Cry 3 was a fantastic game. Sure it had its problems, namely the kind of disgusting story, but it was one of the best open world games I had ever played. It was graphically incredible, the gameplay felt pretty good, it actually decently pulled off 1st person stealth, and the side content was in most cases actually worth doing. The hunting/crafting system from FC3 is one of the rare cases of really effectively incentivizing the player to deviate from the main content. I enjoyed Far Cry 3 so much that I was even willing to tolerate the stinking cesspool that is uPlay in order to pick up and play Far Cry 4. I can not overstate how much I hate uPlay, it's goddamn terrible. THAT'S how much I wanted to play Far Cry 4.

Far Cry 4 takes a lot of the concepts of Far Cry 3 and runs with them. Well, not runs, more like slowly inches forward with them. There are some definite improvements to basic gameplay concepts in this game. Many of them are relatively minor, but offer a lot in the way of conveniences. For example, there are a lot of grapple points on cliffs and mountains, making it a lot easier to traverse the landscape. Also, and this is a really small thing, when you kill an animal a small "X" appears on the map where their corpse is. I can't count how many times I killed an animal with a long range arrow in FC3 only to lose the body in the long grass once I got up there. It's small stuff like this that's easy to take for granted, but makes a nice difference in moment to moment gameplay.

The hunting/crafting system is still here, and I'm still a fan of it. Giving players tangible and measurable rewards is the perfect incentive to engage in side activity. This is also true to a lesser extent of climbing towers and liberating outposts. Completing these gift you the odd free gun, and there's actually a pretty good amount of fun and variety in completing these tasks. If they had split up side content into hunting, towers, outposts, and a few collectibles I'd be happy. Unfortunately, they piled on WAY more side content than that, and quite frankly it's really overwhelming. The map is more littered with waypoints than a Google Maps search for Starbucks in Seattle. The amount of content falls a little bit on the "too much" side of things.

Also, while we're at it, I have a major bone to pick with Ubisoft about finishing side content. There are some pretty nice guns in Far Cry 4 called signature guns. These are unlocked by finishing set amounts of side content. One that caught my eye was a really nice sniper rifle. In my first few hours of playing I saw that and thought "Well, I use snipers a lot in these games. I'm going to go unlock this right away". Unfortunately unlocking this weapon meant liberating all 24(ish) outposts in the whole game. This was going to take several hours, but I was okay with that.

After liberating about 15 outposts I was flying a glider to the next one and I hit an invisible wall in the sky. The message appeared on the screen "Complete more story missions to unlock Northern Kyrat". FFFFFUUUUCCCCKKKK that! I had just spent HOURS knocking down all the outposts for the express purpose of getting this sniper rifle early in my playthrough, and now the game's telling me I need to finish like 3/4 of the main story before I can finish unlocking it. I was pissed! AC: Black Flag did this too. I went out of my way to unlock a set of armor in that game, only to find out that the last step in the unlocking process was on an island you can't get to until the last eighth of the game. I HATE this. At least tell me up front that this will be the case before I waste a bunch of my time.

Sigh...with that frustration set in, it was time to stop flying around doing needless side content grinding and get to the main story. I've pretty universally heard that the story in FC4 is much more palatable than in FC3. Let me be the first person to say I disagree completely. The main villain, Pagan Minn, is pretty decent, but he just doesn't have much of a presence through most of the game. The main character has zero personality, and his motivations are never really clear. For example, why the hell does he keep getting drugged and dumped in the woods by two stoners, yet he keeps voluntarily coming back to do it again? The whole thing is just pretty by the numbers and dull, but that pales in comparison to my main issue with the story.

Throughout the campaign there are main quests where you must align with one of the two rebellion leaders, Sabal or Amita. Sabal is deeply rooted in the culture and history of Kyrat and wants traditions upheld. Amita has a vision for the future of Kyrat and wants to enact change. They're both unbelievably petty assholes, and wholly unlikable. Whichever one you don't side with turns into anything from a pouty child to accusing you of negligent homicide. Oh and the one you actually DO side with seems much more interested in telling the other one to suck it than being happy about the progress you've made for the rebellion. They're both horrible people, and I was curious how it was going to end. It ends by one of them telling you to straight up murder the other. Holy shit guys, chill!

Say what you want about the FC3 story, but at least it had some really cool moments (burning the pot farm, anyone?), an unbelievably awesome villain in Vaas, and characters who, albeit kinda shitty people, mostly were just understandably scared and wanted to go home. Even the protagonist had a steak of likability to him. Every once in a while he got a little too caught up in the action and you could tell he was giddy with excitement at blowing up a tank or jumping off a cliff. The FC4 protagonist can be entirely summed up by his response to most people "I don't like or trust you, but I'll blindly do what you're asking me anyway".

Is Far Cry 4 a good game? Absolutely. From a gameplay standpoint it's a more polished FC3, and Far Cry 3 was incredible. FC4 isn't incredible though. The story, amazingly, took a step backwards and the changes to gameplay, while certainly welcome, are little more than tweaking of the original formula. If you're willing to brave to shitpile that is uPlay, give Far Cry 4 a try, just don't expect any more or less than a slightly improved and slightly less interesting Far Cry 3.

I'm very much with you on a lot of this stuff, the story was terrible, I kept wishing for a moment where I could join Pagan and off my 'allies' they were that horribly written.
And the dialogue of some of the side characters was cringe worthy.
The radio station guy who goes off on his tangents and even at one point says something along the lines of "Oh, am I being RANDOM right now?"
Like all of the humor the ubi guys could muster is memes and "HEY, we're being RANDOM, haha, WACKY randomness! Right guys? How raaaaaandom, random is fuuuuuuuunnnnyyyy lololololololol", the race car announcer was awful as well.

There was one character in the entire game that was likeable (Bahdra) and it's implied at the end of the game if you choose Sabal then she gets turned into a slave and if you choose Amita sounds like she just straight up murders her or sends her to a prison or something foul.

The unlock stuff was kind of shitty too but it didn't hit me as bad as it seemed to have for you, mostly because all I wanted was a bow and silenced sniper and you can get both pretty early, so the rest of the weapons were ancillary play things to me.

All that being said, what a fun game to play. The animal interactions were so fun, I loved that on one mission I got to ride around on an elephant and toss enemies around while nearby a pissed off rhino was stomping on people as well, shit was greeeeeeat.

But man, they really need to work on their writing, it is something awful, Far Cry 2's story wasn't so bad really, wish they would try to recapture that.

I beat this game in 15 minutes

I thought the mechanics in the game were really well done and the story sucked. What really wore me down though was that the setting didn't have a whole lot of diversity.

I thought Far Cry 4 was a good time waster, but the story was horrible. I liked a few of the missions, I thought the driving was fun, and I liked just cruising around. I did enjoy the 4 fortress fights, I wish there was more of those.