Once in a Lifetime

The game starts in a similar way to Far Cry 3, in that you’re a young guy with no military or survival training who gets captured by the forces of an oppressive regime. Not one to let a lack of experience or training hold him back, he quickly finds that he’s a natural at killing everything in his path. Unfortunately he never quite realises that he has no god-damn brains or social nous, so he’s exploited by everyone around him.

This becomes apparent right at the start of the game when we are first introduced to our ‘ally’ Sabal. Sabal and is one of the leaders of the Golden Path, a military outfit attacking the forces of Pagan Min, this game’s antagonist. He’s really excited to meet your character, because it turns out that he’s the son of the previous leader of the Golden Path. It’s immediately obvious that he’s excited because he can see a way to exploit the player’s character.

So we’ve got some really ham-fisted plot clichés right out the door here, and things really don’t improve at all. The plot in this game is appallingly shallow for both the budget and the quality found in other areas of the game. The characters are mostly badly-written and unlikable, although all are well-animated and voiced.

Pagan Min, the antagonist of the game, is clearly an attempt to recreate some of that Vaz magic from Far Cry 3; a charismatic lunatic with superb voice acting. I actually think Pagan Min is better than Vaz, although I may be the only person to think so. Pagan’s voice work is excellent and the character is compelling. His motives are shrouded in mystery, and you spend much of the game with him making genuinely friendly comments through your radio, even when you kill his body double. This culminates in a scene at the end when he finally reveals his reasons: he had a baby with the protagonist’s mother, whom he loved, that was murdered by your father, who Pagan killed in turn.

It’s a character with interesting motives, and it almost doesn’t belong in a game that manages to get so many other things wrong.

Burning Down the House

Amita and Sabal are the lead members of the Golden Path. Sabal wants a return to tradition once Min’s regime is toppled. He acts pious, but it’s never clear if he genuinely believes any of it or just sees it as a way to control the masses. He views the war as one of hearts and minds, and goes out of his way to preserve religious sites and temples. He’s found a young girl that he is grooming to be the next religious leader of Kyrat, but his motives in relation to her are never quite clear, and could be much darker.

Amita wants a secular society, and has no interest in preserving any traditions or religious artefacts. She particularly hates that Sabal is grooming this girl and makes her opinions known. She’s intelligent and seems to spend a great deal of time pouring over intelligence briefings, and is initially presented as the tactician of the two.

Of the two you would immediately think that Amita sounds like the future of Kyrat, and I sided with her for the first mission, choosing intelligence over rescuing soldiers with Sabal. But she quickly reveals that she’s willing to sacrifice anything to win the war, repeatedly trying to get you to preserve Min’s heroin empire so she can use it to ‘rebuild the country’. After destroying the heroin with Sabal, you get treated to a lecture about how there’s no other way to build an economy after the war ends. She’s insufferable, and it gets worse as the game goes on; soon she’s instructing you to destroy temples and return anything valuable to be melted down. It’s exactly the type of cultural looting that Pagan Min is doing all throughout the game.

In the end, you are forced to choose one over the other. Although I disliked Sabal immensely, I chose him. He immediately sets up his child goddess in a temple and sends me to kill Amita, which I refused to do.

I hated both of these characters, and it’s clear we’re meant to. I think this is what big-budget developers think is a difficult decision, but it doesn’t work in practice. The player came to this war-torn part of the world to scatter his mother’s ashes, and gets pulled into this war because of his heritage. It’s not hard to believe that he could develop a deep sense of belonging in this world, but it’s very hard to believe he could develop such feelings and hand his homeland over to either of these unfit people.

After failing to kill Amita, I faced down Pagan Min himself. Again given the choice to shoot him, I elected not to. The truth revealed, he admits that he intended to hand over Kyrat to me all along, and escapes in a helicopter. I believe he meant it, as he could have escaped at any time beforehand. He waited to tell me this, then made his escape. I turned around, looking forward to finally taking out that scumbag Sabal, and the game ends. No-one wins.

Road to Nowhere

The game is filled with collectibles and side-quests. In general I don’t like collectibles in games and ignore them. I see them as worthless padding. That said, I did get interested in some of the side quests and collectibles because they had some interesting characters, plotlines and locations to explore. Unfortunately, all the quests that I saw through to the end let me down in a major way.

The worst offender is hunting The Goat. A serial killer is using the war as cover, and every time he kills he leaves a horrible little mask behind, terrorising the population. The ‘collectible’ here is to destroy all the masks. The reason this sucked me in is that in each mask location, the environment tells a story. Sometimes the victim is at the side of the road, sometimes deep in the forest or a cave. Sometimes in their own home. Most of the time you’ll also find that the murderer left a note, which is how you learn he calls himself The Goat. You don’t find these in chronological order, but over time you can piece together the picture. Essentially, he’s a lunatic killing whenever he thinks his god whispers into his ear. At some point the murderer figures out you’re destroying the masks, and starts leaving comments in his letters. In one he even suggests the only reason he hasn’t killed you is that the god hasn’t whispered your name. There are 55 masks in total, so there’s a lot of opportunity to develop this ‘relationship’. It really feels like it is building up to something, like a grand confrontation. But when you get that last mask… nothing. That’s it. The identity of the Goat remains a secret, and you get a generic ‘unlimited tokens’ type of reward.

Looking for answers online revealed that after collecting one specific mask a random character will spawn and attack you. Depending on what actions you’ve taken in the game, a different character will spawn. There’s theory that this character might be intended to be The Goat, but it’s just another generic enemy, so I didn’t even notice.

Another side-quest has you grabbing ‘supplies’ for the army. It’s immediately clear that this is someone taking advantage of you, but the protagonist is literally too stupid to figure it out. Finally after several missions you find he has abandoned his little cave. There’s a body inside and some notes, but it’s not really clear what’s going on with it, so there’s no satisfactory conclusion. This one was infuriating, pushing the dramatic irony to such an extreme level that you end up hating the main character for being unable to figure it out.

Longinus’ quests are the only ones that I really felt were good, frequently taking you outside of the game map to the Himalayas. These are more constrained, semi-linear levels that test your skills. Unfortunately there aren’t many of them. Longinus’ other quests have you trailing smugglers then killing your way in and out of a bunker. All quests have the same objective: gather blood diamonds, which he uses to buy arms for the Golden Path. His character is clearly insane, but is probably the most interesting character after Pagan Min. He’s also one of the only characters who I feel isn’t intentionally taking advantage of Ajay. When his mission wraps up, he gives you a big gun and tells you his work here is done. That’s as good as it gets in this game.

This Must Be the Place

Kyrat is a fictional place with a fictional culture that’s heavily influenced by Nepalese and Indian culture. This is, conceptually, an interesting setting, but clearly not interesting enough for the game’s developers. It’s clear in many cases that the setting has been altered to suit gameplay needs, which I don’t really disagree with in principle. The most obvious of this is that endangered and rare animals have been “bred” to be incredibly common, so you can kill or get killed by White Rhinos and Bengal Tigers like you’re playing a sequel to The Great Emu War.

This stuff doesn’t really bother me, but like many other things in the game it’s a bit ham-fisted. The real crime here is that this is a bit of a one-way street, as the game design doesn’t draw enough influence from the world’s lore.

I’m being a little unfair here. There are 5 levels in the game that take place inside Shangri-La, in which you play as a character from the game’s history. These levels have the best and most interesting level design in the game. They’re challenging too, as you are restricted to a single weapon and are much more vulnerable than usual. But they manage to be interesting, and add to the experience of being in a well-realised world.

This is something the rest of the game doesn’t really succeed with. There are occasional places where the environment or missions make good use of the world, but for the most part it might as well be a reskin of Far Cry 3. The temple is just a set piece and doesn’t pose any unique challenges. The same applies to the heroin factories, packaging plants, etc. It’s cookie-cutter. Each location has to have a high vantage point, a caged animal, a zip line and so on. The formula becomes obvious pretty quickly.

It might seem like I’m nitpicking here, and perhaps I am, but I want games to take me to interesting places and show me interesting things. Personally, I think that Sleeping Dogs was one of the best games to have done this, immersing me in the culture of a place alien to me. Far Cry 4 uses Kyrat as the primary attraction, but it’s not a deep and interesting culture that you get to explore. It feels sometimes like you’re passing through Kyrat on rails. You can see this wonderful setting through the window, but it’s beyond your reach. Instead of immersing yourself in the setting, you end ambling around the map killing man and beast alike. Shangri-La is the only notable exception.

Wild Wild Life

‘Worse than the sum of its parts’ is somewhat cruel, but I don’t know how else to describe Far Cry 4. Each part of the game individually is well-executed, but the stuff that binds it all together diminishes them in some way. There’s too much in here, and all of it has some sort of flaw that lets it down. But if you happened to be looking for a game that, as my friend put it, you could “turn of your brain and just play”, you could do a lot worse than Far Cry 4. On my part I enjoyed the initial escapism and world, but felt like I was promised more. As the game went on I found it never evolved into something deeper or more complex than it was in the starting area: it had already shown me everything it had.