The map is roughly the size of FC3’s Rook Island but far more densely packed with far larger elevation differences.
Luckily, there are lots of gameplay reason to play Far Cry 4, especially if you liked Far Cry 3 since they are basically the same. There is a lot of unearned subtext in Ajay’s dealings with Pagan Min’s four top advisors and that’s disappointing to me because they’re superficially very interesting. They don’t even get enough screen time and often it seems like story content relating to them was cut for some reason. Their performances are compelling but their motivations are less interesting that Pagan’s and Ajay’s. He’s definitely not what you think of when you think of “Central Asian monarch.” The rebel leaders, Sabal and Amita, don’t fare as well. He’s definitely memorable, but his shock of platinum hair and pink suit accomplished that back when the game was first announced. That equals funny, crazy, and compelling in my book.
I will talk about the characters, starting with Pagan Min who is in full Vaas mode for most of the game. To talk about it anymore might get too far into spoiler territory. Ajay escapes from Pagan before things get too weird and soon enough hooks back up with the Golden Path and finds himself in a fight against Pagan Min. He also implies a romantic relationship with Ajay’s mother from long in the past. Pagan Min is the king of Kyrat and he knows who Ajay is and why he’s in the country. Why is revealed soon enough when a helicopter lands and Pagan Min steps out to whisk him away from the growing battle. Ajay knows none of this, so when he travels to Kyrat to scatter his mother’s ashes and his bus is waylaid by soldiers he has no idea why. They founded the Kyrati rebel organization known as the Golden Path, then his mother fled with him to America. He is the fully Americanized son of Mohan and Ishwari Ghale. So who is Ajay Ghale? He’s no trust fund baby, that’s for sure.
Some even require protagonist Ajay Ghale to find an oxygen mask and collect filters for it like in Metro series (don’t worry, it’s not an intrusive or obnoxious gameplay element). Also, several missions take place in areas simply called “The Himalayas.” These are high in the mountains and feature terrain like you’d expect, namely snow and wind. It comes in 3 loosely defined districts: the lowlands, the midlands, and the highlands. The Himalayan nation of Kyrat is densely packed with stuff and it all looks gorgeous. It’s the third iteration of the, what I’m going to call, “setting first” Far Cry games, and it’s coming on the heels of my favorite FPS of that entire console generation.įirst of all, let’s just get it out of the way: Far Cry 4’s setting is as wonderful as it appeared like it might be when it was first announced. That game’s protagonist, trust fund brat Jason Brody, even managed to find a character arc which is a rare achievement for a videogame. He was a man whose specific brand of insanity was so compelling you couldn’t look away whenever he was on the screen. Rook island was a fantastic setting with real personality, full of interesting things to do. The setting was the star of the show, but the gameplay never quite achieved the same degree of quality.įar Cry 3 pulled it off, however. There was a functioning ecosystem, day/night cycle, and varying weather. What we got from that was a game with many possible protagonists an attempt at a socially conscious story involving African genocide, arms dealing, and blood diamonds and a wonderfully atmospheric African setting. However, in Far Cry 2, Ubisoft decided that the real star of the game should be its setting. He had a dark ex-military past, his goal was to rescue a damsel in distress, and the islands where he plied his trade existed solely to serve the the relatively novel for the time open-world structure of the missions. He was a game protagonist from an earlier time. The Far Cry series has come a long way since the days of Jack Carver and genetically engineered monsters.