Far Cry 4

This is an odd one to review because I played it out of order. I played Far Cry 1, 2, and 3 around when they each came out. Then I skipped 4 and played 5 and then New Dawn around the time that New Dawn came out.

Overall it's certainly an improvement on 3 in a lot of ways but also maybe a step backwards? It's an improvement in that there's more, more, more. Bigger map, more stuff to do, you can fly helicopters and there's more guns and more ways to customize them and on and on. But ultimately a lot of that stuff is the padding that we've come to complain about in Ubisoft games so it ends up being busywork I really don't care about.

The core loop of exploring and climbing towers and taking over outputs is a blast. But the actual main story missions are often incredibly tedious affairs where if you do the wrong thing for even a moment you get kicked back to some save point. The whole sequence in the prison where they take away all your weapons and you have to sneak around is awful. Sneaking is something you can choose to do in Far Cry games normally and if you do you're often rewarded but in this situation it's either sneak or you die and reload the tedious sequence again.

It also does the same thing as the later games where they add tedious enemies to fight. I found that after a certain point certain guns I had just stopped working and I forced to use the more recent unlocks I had. You can see where they hinted at the inevitable terrible zenith of this path in New Dawn where it becomes a vague RPG with bullet sponge-y enemies and tiers of weapons. Ugh.

One thing I will shout out is the villain. I mean these games have great villains. But Pagan Min might actually be my favorite. Unlock some of the other characters who are basically just unhinged Pagan actually makes sense by the end of the game. Him offering to sit down and dinner with him at the end and then just leaving the country to you because he values his life more than being a dictator is really cool. Especially wild when you read that apparently if you just sit at the table in the beginning of the game and don't leave he gives you the keys to the country and you basically win the game with 0 effort. Incredible.