I nearly gave up on Far Cry 4. I recently recovered from that mistake.
Late last fall, faced with a stack of games to play, I gave Far Cry 4 just a couple of hours to impress me. My quick 2014 take: itâs too similar to the wonderful Far Cry 3, the tropical game about shooting hostile people and animals. Ubisoftâs 2012 action game had been vaulted into the Himalayas, a new grappling hook tossed in. It looked different, didnât play all that different.
Life is long enough to play greatly-improved sequels, but can we last enough revolutions around the sun to play the sequels that exhibit merely moderate improvement? Maybe not. I put Far Cry 4 aside.
Well, freeze my head, because I decided a few weeks ago to go back to Far Cry 4 and I can now say that one of my favorite games Iâve played in 2015 is this 2014 adventure. Time well spent!
Given the possibility that you may have skipped Far Cry 4 for some silly reason, I need to show you some sights and offer some tips.
The game is beautiful:
It plays well, too.
Like its predecessor, Far Cry 4 is pretty much all about killing. Thatâs most of what you do. It can be weird if you think hard about what that means for story and your potential interactions with the virtual people in the gameâs world. In terms of gameplay, though, the shooting and blowing of things up, the various means to attack each problem with guns, knives, arrows, vehicles or animalsâŠfrom the ground, from the air or from the shadowsâŠfeels really good. Weâre on the same page about this, right? Combat in video games is a means of interaction, as it is in checkers and football. Tune it well and youâve got something delightful to play, all about picking the right targets, surviving attacks, making the best moves.
This ghoulish sight is Far Cry 4 at its best. Amazing vista. Well-executed stealth chain kills, using abilities I earned playing through many quests:
What you see isnât new, which is what had bugged me last year. Bows and arrows. Stealth. Chain kills. All were in Far Cry 3, but as I played more, I did find some new stuff.
This sure wasnât in Far Cry 3:
What youâre seeing here is part of one of the main series of sidequests classified as Shangri-La missions. They transport you to another time, give you a magical tiger minion and, overall, are the coolest-looking missions of the game. Too bad the final Shangri-La mission isnât very good, but the rest? Theyâre a joy.
Hereâs me approaching one of the missions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLGbiB3FzUY
And hereâs me playing it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4YpkH1th3Y
There are pockets of Far Cry 4 like this that feel entirely new.
When youâre playing an iterative sequel, however, you encounter a lot of the familiar, hoping for tweaks. A good sequel such as Far Cry 4 gives you that. Far Cry 3 had some fun towers to climb, for example.
This next clip shows some damn good iteration and probably the most fun and challenging tower to climb in Far Cry 4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSwRwcNLWk0
Speaking of things Far Cry 4 took from 3 and tweaked, how about the new vehicle takedown?
You should go into any Far Cry game expecting a beautiful, violent playground, though that might be a hard pitch for some people. A great open-world game doesnât sell you its excellence on the strength of any one mission but on the satisfaction you find in your incremental exposure to its world. Youâve got to spend time in it, maybe go on a violent vacation in it. In this post, Iâm trying to get that across by giving you a smattering of my highlights trekking through Far Cry 4. Youâll trudge through a patch of the ordinary. Next thing you know, youâll be walking through some beautiful scenery and come upon a bear wrestling a yak:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjfEdqrMNcs
Youâll be walking around a building, spot a well and discover a small secret base. That wonderful nook is a treasure worth celebrating because it doesnât matter to the gameâs big story or big missions. Itâs just this little hand-crafted thing that some game designers put in there for you to find, a treasure just for you.
Really, finding that well was one of my favorite gaming experiences of the year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__sxzsFpsaQ
Far Cry 4 is overwhelming, though. Maybe itâs too large. Like, here it is when I decided I was âfinishedâ with the game a couple of weeks ago, with all of the main missions done, all the outposts liberated, all the towers climbed and all the sidequests complete. Still plenty more to explore:
I should warn you. If youâre compulsive about cleaning everything out of a game, youâve got very little chance with Far Cry 4. I mean, look at this:
Thatâs me feeling like I finished the game. Story was over. Map fully de-fogged. Lots of stuff complete.
And yetâŠ
There was moreâŠ
If I go back, though, it wonât simply be to collect stuff. Iâll go back because I like the enchanting weirdness hiding in the gameâs world, the other stories hinted at but not fully detailed. Scenes like this:
(Personal spoiler: I wonât be going back to Far Cry 4, because now Iâm neck-deep in Dying Light and really want to try some Witcher 3 and should finally get back to the last Mario & Luigi and was having fun with Splatoon and really should play Grim Fandango someday and Iâve surely got to spend some time on Bloodborne and I already miss keeping up with those new Streetpass games and the new Batman is coming out soon and Hand of Fateâs last PS4 patch seemed to resolve its framerate issues so I can go back to it and I really want to re-visit Assassinâs Creed Rogue and⊠etc etc etc)
If you go back to Far Cry 4, I have some suggestions about what to play and what to ignore.
Play the main campaign, because it has some fun missions that are more varied than those of FC3. Clear as many outposts as you can as you do so, and always try to do it stealthy without raising alarms. Thatâs the most rewarding approach.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRuHKHEr5TY
Do play the Shangri-La side missions. Theyâre the coolest-looking missions in the game.
Skip the Longinus missions if you feel like it. Theyâre forgettable. The Yogi & Reggie missions arenât that interesting in terms of gameplay, but given the premise that you are on drugs during them, they contort the world in interesting ways. Sometimes they change the gameâs colors for the better, which you can see in the image atop this post.
Do play the Hurk missions, if you grab that DLC. One of them is like the movie Speed and forces you to drive fast through Far Cryâs map. Another is one of the few missions of the game that pushes you to use an elephant in combat. (Side note: Iâve really been enjoying waiting until a gameâs DLC has been entirely been released before committing a lot of hours to it; you get a fuller spread of options of what to play that way. I did the same with Watch Dogs.)
Play the Syringe and Yak Farm missions, former pre-order and/or retailer-tied missions that might cost a couple of bucks extra. They are fun combat-heavy sequences set in the mountains, a setting the game otherwise doesnât do enough with. Hereâs some of that Yak Farm mission, which turns into one of the gameâs toughest shootouts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iakNaRMs9Fw
Regarding the gameâs expansions, Iâm not sold on the Escape from Durgesh Prison expansion, though I appreciate the experiment. It remixes the game so that youâre playing on a smaller map with a timer and start back from the beginning any time you dieâalbeit with any skills you earned during your last attempt to reach the expansionâs conclusion.
I am sold on the Valley of the Yetis, a several-hour semi-inversion of the game that has you upgrading and defending a base over the course of five simulated nights of increasingly aggressive soldier and yeti attacks. That expansion has a special subset of âmountaineeringâ quests that are the best climbing-and-grapple-hooking missions in the entire Far Cry 4 offering. I played through this expansion before I went back to the main game and had a great time with it.
Also, a general tip for the game: donât panic if you get set on fire.
As you play Far Cry 4, youâre not going to find anything radically experimental, nothing shockingly new. But youâll repeatedly find beauty in the gameâs world as you marshal some of the most satisfying first-person action mapped to a controller. Yeah, itâs a lot like Far Cry 3, but I finally got over that.
Play this game. The animals are waiting.
To contact the author of this post, write to [email protected] or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo.
