Far Cry 4

The spark of Clint Hocking's vision for Far Cry 2 exists in Far Cry 4, but it's buried under the weight of about thirty six Assassin's Creed games. The world is still a very emergent sandbox and a soup of different AI behaviors are able to interact in potentially amusing ways, but unfortunately the game deprecates that avenue at any opportunity in favor of filling out checklists. Want to unlock the only silenced sniper rifle in the game? Do four vehicle escort missions using the grenade launcher. Want to be able to take less fall damage? You'll have to liberate two outposts without being detected. How do any of these tasks correlate to the rewards you are given? If you want the endless sprinting skill you'll stop asking questions.

There's a lot of content in Far Cry 4, but only about 20% of it is any good. Following the story missions and clearing outposts is a good time-- the game genuinely is a high quality FPS with some really fun weapons and an adequate-ish stealth system to utilize in between blowing things up. However, with the arbitrary unlock system in place a lot of the best stuff is held over your head until you participate in the worst stuff first. It's like investing in boredom in the hopes of it turning into fun later: Climb the stupid towers and maybe you'll get a super fun LMG ten hours from now. These repetitive, pointless filler activities are just awful. Climbing the towers is not quick, fun, or challenging. You look around for the ledge with telltale ropes that indicate a mantle-able surface. You press the jump key somewhere within 50 feet of these ledges and your character locks into a slow, prefab mantling animation (except for when he doesn't and you fall for no reason and get to start over). From your new position on top of the ledge, you wander around looking for the next ledge. Once you've found it you mantle it and then repeat about ten times to reach the top of the tower. The game then asks you to repeat this whole process sixteen more times. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Far Cry 4 takes place in the nation of Kyrat, which is a fictionalized mix of Nepal and Tibet. Kyrat is a nation split between its dictator, a flamboyant psychopath named Pagan Minh, and the Golden Path, a network of rebels. You are the long lost son of the Golden Path's founder and you stumble into the rebel network in the middle of a power struggle between Amita and Sabal. Amita is a rationalist who is willing to turn to the drug trade to fund her idea of a new nation, while Sabal is a traditionalist who favors the Gods and the old practices like child brides. Missions will often have two paths for supporting each one and, of course, it all culminates in having to kill one or the other. The whole time the game maintains that your choices will have consequences. What they fail to mention is how the consequence will be the roughly same regardless of your choice. SPOILER ALERT: Either one turns out to be a cutthroat psychopath the second Pagan Minh is dead. Of course there's more to the story than that, but it's all crammed into the last second. Like in Far Cry 3 there's a bit of a meta thing going on, however it doesn't really amount to much. Troy Baker puts in a good performance as Pagan, but it's hard to see the character as anything but a repetition of Vaas from the previous game. He's crazy, intense, unpredictable, and enjoys pompous monologues about nothing. Got it.

Unfortunately Kyrat never really feels like it's at war. First of all, the civilian population seems to be made up of around sixty people. Then there are all the wacky characters you meet that come straight out of a PS2-era Grand Theft Auto. It makes sense that a delusional fashion designer obsessed with some upcoming pageant would exist in an American city, but encountering one living in a dilapidated shack in some in war-torn third world country is a bit harder to swallow. If it's supposed to be an intentionally surreal addition, then I'll count it as a failure-- it's too hokey and comes off as a dumb, shallow gag instead. Pagan's decidedly nonthreatening relationship with the player is also head-scratching. He treats you nicely and seems to hate the idea of harm coming to you (why the dictator can't stop his own army from shooting at you on sight is not something the game bothers to explain with much detail). He calls you up from time to time to talk about Kanye West's twitter account or to tell you that he was in love with your mother. He's a little creepy-sounding and he is responsible for other characters' horrible misfortunes, but the stakes are pretty low all things considered and I felt ill-motivated to confront him. Judging by the game's ending, there was meant to be a bit of internal conflict between the player's desire to kill and spare Pagan. This possibly explains the light touch he's given, but frankly I wasn't able to care one way or the other.

Being such a mountainous region means the world has a lot of 'verticality.' What verticality means in this instance is that instead of driving straight from point A to point B, you have to take long detours around large mountains. Alternatively, you can use your grappling hook to scale them. To scale mountains with your grappling hook, you look around for a ledge with telltale ropes that indicate a grapple-able surface. You look at it and hold the E key, which sends out the grappling hook. Then you hold the left mouse button to slowly climb the rope until you get to the top. Usually this only gets you partially up the mountain-- you have to find another grapple point to climb the rest of the way. If this sounds like the least engaging way to scale the side of a cliff in a video game, you're very right. If it sounds like just I repeated huge chunks of the earlier paragraph where I talked about bell towers, that's simply me getting into the spirit of things. Repeat. Repeat.

Despite all of this there is a lot to like about Far Cry 4. The problem is that there is much more that is hateable about it, and it's frustrating because the crud would be so easy to ignore if they didn't arbitrarily force you to do at least some of everything. I did as few of the side activities as possible and I still feel as though I did far more of them than I would have liked. I also did far too much boring travelling to objective markers, but that's just open world games.

Now re-read this review six more times and you'll unlock a slightly different looking pistol.