I know i'm a little late to the party, but i'm currently having a lot of fun playing through good games that have patiently been sitting in my library for years. Far Cry 4 has recently been promoted to my "finished games" list and i'm glad it did! Here's why:
⏰ If you're pressed for time, skip to my TL;DR at the end of this article.
👍 The main bad guy is once again amazing!
I bet most of you played Far Cry 3 and hopefully appreciated what an amazing character the main bad guy, Vaas, was. How he was angry, then ironic, then smart, then passionate.. I could go on, but suffice to say he had enough personalities to be admitted to a mental institution! On the flipside, Vaas was only a lowly grunt; a pawn in the grand scheme of things. Pagan Min on the other hand, is anything but a lowly grunt:
Pagan Min, the main bad guy of Far Cry 4, is just as colorful as Vaas was, but he is also the dictator of a whole fr***ing country! He talks the part, acts the part and certainly dresses the part:
I bet the pink color is what grabbed your attention right away. Once you play through the introductory chapter though, you'll have a hard time forgetting that pen he's holding in his hand, trust me!
👍 There's a ton of stuff to do!
I can't compose a complete list, but i'll give you my personally most memorable activities:
✔️ Unlocking and upgrading weapons: I remember going into a stealth mission with a silenced sniper rifle and a silenced submachine gun. Nobody knew what hit them. Nobody lived to tell about it.
The Shredder is a high-rate silenced submachine gun; perfect for a stealthy playstyle.
✔️ Unlocking and upgrading a house: A spot right in the middle of the map that provides me with armor and a helicopter everytime i visit? Yes please.
✔️ Hunting down rare animals: The game gave me only a shotgun and tasked me with hunting down a really vicious Rhino. My trusty sniper rifle would have made quick work of him, but with only a shotgun i had to resort to luring the animal and eliminating it from higher ground.
If you see a rhino angrily run towards you, smashing every car in its way, then congrats, you've just met Karkadann the rare rhino.
✔️ Assassination and rescue missions: I really like having those in games, because they add variety to the gameplay. For assassinations i kept circling the enemy bases until i could line up the perfect shot with my sniper rifle, while for rescue missions i slowly lured enemies away from their buddies and silently took them out.
✔️ Do good deeds for karma: I eliminated a pack of wolves before they killed an unprotected civilian and got karma points. I saw an enemy capturing a civilian, took out the enemy and got karma points. After a while i used my karma points to unlock what became my favorite weapon in the game.
✔️ Smoke pot, enter a trippy world full of daemons and fight them off with a bow and a pet tiger at your side. Need i say more?
How would you like to have that as a pet?
✔️ Explore caves. Climb mountains. Climb towers. The inner Lara Croft in me was totally satisfied!
✔️ Replay enemy camps to get a perfect score: I really like clearing enemy camps stealthily, but sometimes i just miss an alarm or two and all hell breaks loose. No problem, i can replay every enemy camp whenever i want to.
👍 The story, although a bit of a cliché, is nicely delivered
"If you've played one Ubisoft Game, you've played them all", is what i keep reading these days and, let's be honest, it's also somewhat true. Games like Ghost Recon or The Division feature huge & varied maps, lots of activities, but are also a bit weak in ways of storytelling and character-building. Well, we're talking about an older Ubisoft title here, so you would be correct to assume that the story is much more gripping (but also that the map is much less varied - more on that later).
Amita and Sabal are constantly fighting and eventually you'll need to pick a side.
Yes, you're captured by the bad guy; you escape; you come back with an army and a heart full of revenge. Nothing groundbreaking here, i know. But the characters! One of the reasons i still gladly devote my time to older games is the importance the developers used to place on the lines of dialogue and their delivery. Sure, the models don't look as nice as contemporary ones, but damn it when they speak i can feel them!
Surprisingly Ajay Ghale, your character, is the weakest in terms of voice acting, but i'll let this slide since Ubisoft maybe didn't want to force a certain character on the players in an RPG. Everybody else though is very fun to interact with: First, there's your rebel leaders; the smooth-talking Sabal and the ultra-passionate Amita. Then there's your Americans, the blood-thirsty Hurk and CIA agent Willis, who probably both graduated with honours from the University of Crazy! And last but certainly not least, there's Pagan Min, the mad dictator that will make you angry, then make you laugh; fill you with lies, then open your eyes to the truth.
That's Hurk. Word of advice: Never trust a guy who runs around on land with a harpoon gun.
No game is perferct of course and Far Cry 4 is no exception:
👎 Are you sick of the jungle? Well that's all you're getting mister!
It's not the worst thing for a game to have a theme and stick to it, but i wouldn't mind if this game featured like a volcanic environment or a huge network of caves or something of that sort for me to explore. At least it has a few snowy missions, although i would have liked more of them.
👎 It's an RPG and it shows
You'll see enemies spawn and move in weird ways. You'll hear inappropriate dialogue, like a woman flirting with you in the middle of a firefight. You'll need to hunt down the last remaining enemy, who decided to wander off in the distance, in order to complete a mission. You know, the usual RPG shortcomings.
👎 Sometimes you'll see things coming a mile away
As i've already written, there's quite a few cliche moments in this game. Things like a very obvious silence when somethings about to happen. Things like something being too easy to be over. I'm personally a sucker for hollywood copy-paste stuff, but others will undoubtedly roll their eyes a few times during their playthrough.
⏰ TL;DR: This is a lengthy and all around good action rpg game, with a cliche story but memorable characters. If the jungle environment and the basic RPG principle of doing all kinds of missions in any playstyle you like appeals to you, then go for it!