LogFAQs > #914886254

Far Cry 4 for Xbox One

Far Cry 2 is probably in my Top 10 favorite games, Far Cry 3 was in my Top 10 games from last gen as well, and Blood Dragon is up there too. I'm clearly a Far Cry fan. Overall, I think that this is a great game, but I am a little disappointed.

Exploration is huge in Far Cry, and while I love Kyrat, how vertical it is lowers its ceiling some, no pun intended. I would liken it to Skyrim. Both have huge worlds that are a blast to explore 80% of the time, but that other 20% is hard-to-reach areas that have maybe one or two ways to get there and are a chore to figure out how and do. FC4 has these flying vehicles, Buzzards, but the game has a phantom invisible ceiling that causes it to go haywire if you go too high by their standards. Unfortunately, this makes a large number of secret areas and collectibles only accessible via grappling points. Good luck finding them sometimes though. They can be far away from the collectible/area in question, be obscured by trees, rocks, and buildings, and they are hard to discern at night.

Far Cry is also known for its insane randomness. You can come across some crazy shit every five minutes or less if you are observant. My all-time favorite VG moment was something of the sort in FC2, but I also remember in FC3 where I stared down an enemy and were both startled by a noise coming up from the hill above us. Whatever happened, a single flaming tire came careening down the hill. I just stared as it eventually crushed said enemy to death once it reached the bottom. I also have fond memories in FC3 of freeing an animal in a cage and have it free an outpost (or whatever they were called in FC3) all on its own as I watched it through my binoculars. FC4 still has some great random events. I was riding an elephant to a mission and was surrounded by three or so jeeps full of enemies. Out came a random rhinoceros who obliterated everyone and sent many off the nearby cliff. However, they seemed to have scaled back from previous entries in the series. I think the cutbacks were the price of adding in these karma events. There are like ten different types of partially-scripted events (such as a predator terrorizing civilians or a soldier pushing a hostage along) that reward you with karma XP (that nets you rewards eventually) for intervening. Also, releasing animals from cages in outposts doesn't come close to securing the outpost anymore. They can kill just a few soldiers before being gunned down themselves.

I don't put a huge emphasis on story in video games since it is one of the weakest mediums to do so, but this one took a long time to get going. Being unable to skip cutscenes, which I wanted to do most of the time, didn't help matters. The saving grace was Pagan Min, the sort-of-but-also-not antagonist. Pagan Min was one of maybe three characters that I found to be interesting and the only one that I can say that I liked. I didn't like either of the Golden Path leaders with Amita not really caring about people and aspiring to run a drug empire and Sabal narrow-minded, and believing in collectivism and that if you aren't with him, you must be against him. It took awhile to get things going, as is the nature of open-world games really, but I wasn't truly invested in the plot until the very, very end when revelations were revealed that led me to spare Pagan Min and finally feel that I accomplished something.

I own Primal and 5, but I like to space things out, so I probably won't get to them until late 2019 at the earliest.
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KCF can't actually be a real person but he is - greengravy
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