Following the death of his mother Ishwari, Ajay Ghale returns to his home country of Kyrat to carry out her final wish by scattering her ashes at a place called Lakshmana. No sooner has intro to the game started that Ajay’s bus is attacked by the army and he and his guide are taken prisoner by Pagan Min, the country’s mental ruler who has a garish dress sense and the mad hatter personality that seems to be the go to setting for Far Cry bad guys. You are taken to Pagan’s mountain top fortress and treated to another sequence that involves Pagan detailing his knowledge of Ajay’s family as well as demonstrating again how utterly bonkers he really is. Once this scene is over you are off, dropped smack bang in the middle of civil war that until your arrival wasn’t going too well for the rebels.
The prologue to FC4 gives you the run through of how to run, jump and shoot, the usual stuff, but it was during this tutorial that I discovered my first problem with the game. Ubisoft decided that as well as mapping your weapon select wheel to the L1 button on the PS4 controller they figured it would a be a good idea to also map the touch pad with the same function. I have man-sized hands, and the PS4 controller doesn’t usually pose an issue but with this feature enabled it caused numerous problems. The slightest brush off the touch pad would result in the weapons wheel popping up rendering all other controls useless, leaving Ajay wandering in a straight line while soldiers riddle him with bullets.
Even when the touch pad is disabled once you exit the game and then load it back up the touch pad is re-enabled, even thought the settings have it set to off. I battled on regardless and rendezvoused with the rebel group The Golden Path and following another cut scene the world of Kyrat was opened up for me to wander around freely and explore, and believe me when I tell you this world is absolutely huge, but during my first play through this is where I had to stop, not because I was called away to tend to something, nope, I was transported back to the main menu of the game and then prompted with an “Installing 95%” which proceeded to sit there for twenty minutes while the game finished installing itself. I have never experienced this before with any other game I have played. When it eventually finished setting itself up I jumped back in. So far I’ve racked up around ten to twelve hours of gameplay. There is a lot to do in the sandbox that is Kyrat, that is one thing I have to give Ubisoft props for, loads of secret locations, missions aplenty and loads of bad guys to shoot.
The main storyline sees you performing missions for the rebel group the Golden Path, this group has two NPC leaders Amita and Sabal. Each are vying for your help in their fight against Pagan Min, and each have their own way of doing things. Amita is all about getting the job done consequences be damned, while Sabal is all about protecting the people and fighting the good fight. You must choose which path to take. The more missions you do for Sabal the more his influence over the Golden path grows, do more missions for Amita and the more her influence grows, all very straight forward.
There are also other characters in the game you can perform tasks for, and each of these missions carry their own type of reward. You will meet the Machine Gun preacher Leonidas, who will send you to liberate outposts, collect dropped packages so on and so forth. In return you will receive new weapons. These missions keep the game play going at a steady pace, that is unless you get distracted by the odd Karma mission that pop up sporadically as you traipse around the mountainous land of Kyrat. One of the first under takings you should do in this game is to free the radio towers as it will open up the map and unveil hidden locations, the best way to do this is to hop in a buzz copter and zip around, otherwise you will spend most of your time trying to dodge the random and extremely angry local wildlife as well as Pagan Min’s loyalist army who shoot on sight. The downside to using the buzz copter to free up the towers is that it becomes a tedious task quite quickly. The reward for undertaking and completing this type of mission is access to certain weapons so if you get it done early in the game you will be well equipped to take on whatever comes your way pretty early on.
The game looks beautiful. I did find myself admiring the scenery on more than one occasion, but I didn’t get to admire it for too long thanks to the ninja like skills of the local wildlife, which brings me to my second gripe with this game. The overly aggressive wildlife. I have played all four installments of the Far cry series, my favourite being the fantastic Far Cry 3, and in FC3 there was wildlife, and yes it did attack you, but none of the wildlife was as aggressive, random and goddamn bulletproof as the wildlife in FC4. I completely understand the role of the wildlife in this game, but when it starts to become something that frustrates the player rather than enhances the game play then for me its an issue. On several occasions while planning an assault on an outpost or trying to complete a mission for the golden path I was set upon out of nowhere by some wild animal right in the middle of a vital part of the mission. The worst culprits so far have been the clouded leopards and the eagles. Check out the video below if you think I’m joking, also take note of how many bullets it takes to down a leopard.
I have two major gripes with this game. The first is that it is very similar to Far Cry 3. this is both good and bad I suppose, Far Cry 3 was a fantastic game a vast improvement over the very boring Far Cry 2, but the fourth installment in this series feels more like a re-skin of the third game, which I found a little hard to swallow. Asking the consumer to shell out €70 for a game that isn’t that much of a leap forward from its last outing is a cheat in my eyes and in this regard Ubisoft seem to have taken a leaf out of Activisions Call of Duty playbook, yes Far Cry 4 has some new bits, improved graphics, the wildlife is more vicious the AI on the NPCs is improved, and yes you get to ride Elephants into battle, but overall the meat of Far Cry 4 is essentially the same as Far Cry 3.
The second major problem I have with this game is the Map Editor. The Map Editor in FC4 has four different game types, Assault, Hunt, Outpost and Extraction, but there is a problem. The one shining jewel that both Far Cry Instincts and Far Cry 2 was the ability to create your own multiplayer maps so that you and your friends could enjoy. Both of these games boasted two of the best map editors ever, Unfortunately since Far Cry 3 the option to create your own multiplayer maps has been left out of the editor, which means you can only create maps and then populate them with NPC bots to shoot at. This function was a HUGE selling point for myself and nearly all of my game plying friends, and since it has been left out of the last two titles none of my friends picked up FC3 or FC4. Ubisoft hinted that it would return for FC4 but nope no sign of it yet.
FC4’s creative director Alex Hutchinson tweeted “I direct the game but I don’t set budgets or timelines. We always squeeze in as much as we can, but we’re always prioritizing.” This, for me, is a cop-out. I am not willing to shell out for a full price game with the hope that a wanted feature may or may not be added later. This seems to be a growing problem at Ubisoft. Releasing games that are not 100% done, with promises that they may be updated following their release, with FC4 and the much lambasted Assassin’s Creed Unity Ubisoft have found themselves being heavily criticised for their need to meet release dates rather than giving the gaming public a fully finished and glitch free title. I did try the online multiplayer for FC4, but only briefly because the servers were either constantly kicking me out of games and falling over, or the in-game lag was so bad that everyone involved looked like they were imbued with a teleport ability and were using it to is fullest.
Far Cry 4 has some interesting features, like the keys to Kyrat that allows you to send a friend who doesn’t own the game an invite into it that will give them two hours of gameplay along side yourself. A great idea, it’s a shame that none of my friends are interested in playing a glitchy half realized title when they have better games to choose from. That being said the full co-op feature in FC4 is more well-rounded than FC3, this time giving you the whole game to explore instead of just a sliver of the story and missions. I said earlier in my review I have only played 10 to 12 hours of this title, there maybe a turning point I have yet to reach that will make me want to give this game a chance, but if I’m honest if you haven’t grabbed me after 10 hours of gameplay then I don’t think the game has done its job. Far Cry 4 is easily one of the most frustrating games I have ever played.
No game should be this hard to enjoy. A game that on the outside promises immersive chaos and gameplay where you as the player get to adventure through an amazing sandbox, instead you find yourself fending off bulletproof honey badgers while you are trying to liberate the most inept bunch of rebels in revolutionary history. All in all Ubisoft have tried to repackage the greatness of Far Cry 3 added a few extras that in the long run don’t add a hell of a lot. I think its time that Ubisoft need to realise that folks aren’t willing to pay full price for a game that isn’t finished, it reeks of laziness on their part and a very bad approach to game production. Although this type of development practice is not just unique to Ubisoft they have bared the brunt of the criticism recently due to the fact that both of their tent pole titles have suffered from day one issues. This title received a patch on the day of release, then another patch three days later. Maybe next time they could invest more into play testing so that on day one Far Cry 5 will be a more stable and exciting title with more to offer the player.
A re-skin and slight upgrade of what has come before. 5/10
