This speaks to its fondness for connected progression systems, an insistence on emblazoning its geography with scores of content, and meaningful improvements to the blueprint laid out by Far Cry 3. It’s the latter that gives Far Cry 4 the most trouble, a sense of déjà vu permeates an otherwise honest artifice, but it keeps a straight face amid its more prominent transgressions.
For returning players, it’s impossible to play Far Cry 4 without constantly being reminded of Far Cry 3. This is sort of natural. In the videogame world of 2014 it’s both financially irresponsible and critically perilous to deviate from a generally revered formula, but it also leads to frequent suspicions of content seeking re-employment. Far Cry 4, much like Far Cry 3, deposits its protagonist in a fictional dilapidated paradise and tasks him with systematically taking over enemy outposts, pits him against an eccentric villain, and outlines dozens of vaguely related activities ripe for instant gratification.
The shift in endearment is actually a sliding scale measured by how well one might perceive the changes made from Far Cry 3 to Far Cry 4. At its best, Far Cry 4 is an incredible anecdote generator ripe with chaotic systems primed to take advantage of player-authored circumstances (this paradigm was actually pushed to its limit with Far Cry 2, but smoothed over and granted greater accessibility with Far Cry 3). At its worst, Far Cry 4 is marginal improvement upon its predecessor, adding a few systems, reproducing others, and learning absolutely nothing from its narrative shortcomings.
Far Cry 4 opens with an impressive call to adventure. Ajay Ghale is returning to the fictional Nepalese/Himalayan land of Kyrat to spread his mother’s ashes. His parents were revolutionaries, of sorts, founding the Golden Path movement against a ruthless dictator named Pagan Min. Min, as it happens, intercepts Ajay upon his arrival. Draped in an outrageous purple suit and sporting one of the dumbest haircuts in documented humanity, Pagan executes one of his henchmen, looks Ajay directly in the eye, and screams, “You and I are going to fuck shit up,” with zeal that would impress Glengarry Glen Ross era Al Pacino. It’s a great scene, and one that paints Pagan somewhere between a calculated Bond villain and hapless cartoon mastermind.
Unfortunately the rest of Far Cry 4’s narrative is undermined by a lack of meaningful agency and character-focused content. Ajay quickly hooks up with the Golden Path, but finds them divided between two opposing points of view. Sabal wants to maintain established traditions on the path to revolution, while Amita seeks to dispose of any perceived limitation in preparation for a viable and enduring future. Occasionally Far Cry 4 will break down its story-driven missions down into different objectives, depending on whose cause Ajay chooses to champion. All of this actually builds to a relatively harrowing conclusion, albeit one that won’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention.
While Far Cry 4’s premise is plausible and plight identifiable, it’s broken without its two most important characters. Ajay, ostensibly the player-character, is a shallow husk human being. His personality, or lack thereof, might be a response to Far Cry 3’s troupe of irritating douchebags, but it leaves Ajay as a functionless void. Without any meaningful insight it’s totally fair to assume Ajay is some sort of unconscious deity instantly recognized as the savior of Kyrat. One who heals by summoning shrapnel into his hands, biting and spitting out that shrapnel, and repeating the process to gain more health. Or maybe Ajay leads by example, propelling a revolution by maintaining an insatiable bloodlust. Far Cry 4 is a videogame and has to default to requisite suspensions of disbelief – but there’s nothing to believe in Ajay in the first place. He’s your typical pot smoking Shangri-La vision questing, skin-regenerating instant warlord incapable of verbal feedback who also occasionally brandishes his mom’s ashes in vain attempts to justify his existence.
Ajay would have been a wash had Pagan Min made good on his bombastic debut. Far Cry 3’s lovable maniac Voss was extinguished one act too early, sending a clear message about the proper timing and place of a good villain. Far Cry 4 responds by providing Pagan with a scant amount of on screen time, mostly bookending him to the beginning and end of the game – with a brief cameo in the middle for good measure. He spends the rest of the time inexplicably pestering Ajay over the radio, turning over Golden Path harassment duties to an escalating series of boring lackeys. This is technically progress, Pagan doesn’t have Voss’ charisma but he’s (at least) more interesting, even if he’s poison to conveying any sort of meaningful narrative.
Outposts, or more specifically the player’s chosen means of taking over outposts, remain the beating heart of the Far Cry experience. Yes, there are dozens of structured missions and incalculable vaguely related diversions, but the game is constructed around the myriad of ways a player can systematically dismantle and conquer the collection of outposts sprinkled across Kyrat. Dying is always a consequence, but there’s no real way to fail completing this task. You have a plan, and you execute upon it – until it all blows up in your face and trained reactions are in place to deal with almost any potential outcome.
Reconnaissance, for example, can either be integral to taking over an outpost, or disregarded completely. On a first approach I would pull out my camera and encircle the outpost’s borders, getting a read on any of its armed inhabitants and marking the location of alarms I needed to shut off. I would then proceed to find a closer location, observe enemy patterns, equip out my bow, and go to work. Inevitably I would make a careless mistake, notify the enemy squad of my presence, and all hell would break loose. Initially I would just take out a grenade and eat it, easily restoring me to a pre-chaos checkpoint, but soon I began to fall in love with chaos management. Perfection is desirable, but it’s not essentially to victory – or having fun inside of Far Cry 4’s variable systems.
Far Cry 4 even one-ups itself by offering supremely outfitted versions of its own outposts. Called forts and ostensibly maintained by Pagan’s lieutenants, they’re effective in their mission of offering slightly different and harder challenge. They’re either populated with an absurd number of radar-evading hunters or outfitted with excessive hordes of bad guys, but they’re all, geographically, imposing sights. Fort’s challenge can be mitigated by toppling their leader through the narrative or by bringing a buddy along for cooperative play, but their function as a harder, better outpost is paramount to Far Cry 4’s declared mission; find a way in, and do the best you can with whatever happens.
It’s in these situations where Far Cry 4 transforms into a personal anecdote generator. The idea of riding elephants, which essentially function as biological tanks, into an outpost and wrecking shop is both hilarious and effective. As is creating car bombs with C4 or going in guns blazing and making use of impromptu cover points. Wildlife, either personally freed from a nearby cage or wandering in from the surrounding jungles, also presents a constant wildcard. You’ve never really seen it all until a bloodthirsty honey badger busts in and wastes two dogs and a guard on his way to oblivion.
One such instance entrenched itself into my fondest gaming memories. An assault on a three-alarm outpost had (sigh) gone awry, leaving me short on ammunition for my trusty assault rifle. I withdrew temporarily before assaulting a guard with a weak silenced pistol. I wound up stabbing him to death, which left me with a paltry fifteen bullets to take care of the remaining outpost squad. The unmistakable whine of a helicopter buzzed overhead, and I remembered I had a grenade launcher on my person. I fired a single shot, a direct hit, and watched two bodies spill out of the helicopter as it came crashing down to earth. That helicopter, by the way, landed directly on top of all but one of the remaining guards in that outpost, instantly killing all of them. In the end, a last-second, desperation move resulted in an unassuming victory (and, because we live in the future, I captured that clip and uploaded it to YouTube).
As entertaining as its centralized feature is, there’s plenty more to do in Far Cry 4. Ajay can undertake assassination missions, tasking you with silently infiltrating a base and killing a commander with a specific weapon (with bonuses supplied upon properly getting rid of the body). Similar missions arrive with wild game hunts, tasking the player with eliminating an unnaturally powerful variant of the local wildlife. New to Far Cry 4 are Propaganda Center quests, provided by the local DJ and charging Ajay with infiltrating a base and destroying all of its broadcasting equipment, Just Cause 2-style. There are also several types of races, time-attacks to recover airdrops, convoy-hijacking, a battle arena, hostage rescues, and more collectables than you’ll ever have time for.
Far Cry 4 almost goes out of its way to include virtually every type of open-world tasking mechanic in existence. A karma system, composed largely of spontaneous events, governs Ajay’s behavior (karma is lost if you kill innocents, for example) and tries to connect him with the plight of the local populace. You’ll stumble upon people about to be executed, or an outpost in desperate need of Ajay’s direct application of ultraviolence. Karma transitions to a few new abilities, but largely remains outside the lines of Far Cry 4’s narrative.
Hell, Far Cry 4 even boasts a homestead Ajay can upgrade with any excess cash. Cosmetic and functional upgrades, like an on-site gun locker or running water for harvesting plants, beg to take your money away. For some reason, the game also felt it necessary to grant Ajay a wingsuit, which essentially (because this is a videogame) grants him the ability to fly. There’s a bit of gravity to pull Ajay down, but you can basically fly for a mile in any direction if he jumps off a high enough starting point.
I don’t really even know where to draw the line when it comes to pointing out the lengths of Far Cry 4’s content. Ajay can go to the Himalayas and undertake snowstorm missions that require Metro 2033 style oxygen. He can repeatedly meet up with two stoners and take drugs to explore a more psychedelic side of Kyrat. Oh, and let’s not forget the brief dalliances in Shangri-La, where Ajay inexplicably morphs into a tribal warrior capable of directing a mystical tiger at foes, or slowing down time with a multi-arrow longbow pulled right out of Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
Whereas other games would try to mask their extraneous content in some sort of contextually related levels, Far Cry 4 blissfully tosses out divergent sequences like candy. Going to Shangri-La and literally flying around like Superman or taking hallucinogenic drugs and engaging in god knows what has nothing to do with the base level of Far Cry 4, but everything to do with the development team finding some weird gameplay challenge and seeing it through to its logical conclusion. Maybe this was only possible through a weak narrative, but it all comes together in the grand scheme of Far Cry 4. Its unified mechanics and seek to entertain from every angle.
Far Cry 4’s swath of content is an embarrassment of riches, and if anything it’s too actively concerned with letting the player know about all of it. Looking at the map and seeing the insane amount of available mission icons can feel intimidating, and the constantly spawning content can appear overbearing. The game can’t even control itself mid-mission, absently spawning different, disparate directives at a moment’s notice. In one Golden Path mission I had to fight off aggressors in a poppy field before instantly being tasked to protect that field from fire-wielding reinforcements. Then I’m supposed to put out that fire with water tanks located…somewhere else. Any way it’s presented, Far Cry 4’s an impatient chef desperately wanting the player to eat everything on the menu at the same time.
All of this ties in to Far Cry 4’s considerably expansive skill and money economy. Every completed mission rewards the player with experience points, which can then be directly tied into various perk-like abilities. Being able to chain kills together or increase the effects of performance enhancing injections are just a few of the dozens of choices. Hunting animals and collecting their skins directly translates into inventory bonuses, including crafting a bigger wallet for more money or a larger ammo pouch for, well, more ammo. Money usually arrives hand-in-hand with experience, though is slightly less important since most weapons can be unlocked by climbing radio towers or pulling them from the opposition.
It’s also worth mentioning that Far Cry 4 supports complete campaign cooperative play, as well as a form of five-on-five competitive play. Unfortunately, at least on the PlayStation 4, engaging in any of this requires the player to sign into Ubisoft’s Uplay software (a facet it reminds you of every time you boot the game). If Uplay happens to be down for whatever reason, well, you don’t get to play Far Cry 4 with anyone. The three (3) times I attempted to do this, Uplay was down and I couldn’t access the game’s content. It called to mind the situation with Metal Gear Online six years ago where Konami required different logins for both its own service and Sony’s network. It was a terrible idea then, it’s a worse one now, and I have no idea why an unreliable service is tied into a console game with perfectly function framework. It certainly sounds nice, though.
The smooth clip at which Far Cry 4 operates is greatly appreciated. The game is loaded with menus and maps, and any perceived delay in accessing this content is primed to poison the experience it’s designed to enhance. Thankfully Far Cry 4’s menus operate with a deliberate snappy-ness, making accessibility one of its top priorities. With it’s a symptom of the previous generation of hardware or constantly playing games that don’t pay attention to the user experience, it was welcoming to see an AAA title consider the player’s time – even if that time is measured in microseconds.
In the end Far Cry 4 felt like the videogame equivalent of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. For those without the benefit of riding Disney Theme Park’s premier attraction, it’s something you swear is going to break at any second as it shuffles you off to surreal lands of wonder and terror. It’s also massively fun in spite of its dubious trappings, and loaded with ready-made anecdotes to entertain the uninformed. It all works, usually, although somewhat less effectively if you were on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride last time you were there.
