The fourth cry

Review

Played on: PlayStation 4
Released: 2014

Sequels need to reintroduce themselves with new ideas to keep the franchise popular. Ubisoft did this, with excellent results, when they gave us FarCry 3 in 2012, read my review here. With it's large free roaming world, combined with some RPG elements, it was a first person shooter with a difference. Set on tropical islands with a cool story and a wacky bad guy to boot, things that really put it up there as one of the best I played in the genre. FarCry 4 follows this blueprint, but perhaps slightly too close.

FC4 continues the blueprint FC3 made: having a distinct, insane and power hungry main villain. While FC3 had the punk haired and completely wacko Vaas, FC4 introduces us to the seemingly calm and collected Pagan Mihn with a purple silk suit and bleached hair. I enjoyed that you actually meet him right at the beginning of the game and it gives you an insight into his temper and strange behaviour.

He's the dictator of the Himalayan, and fictive, country Kyrat. And yes, you guessed it, things turn ugly early on and you must fight your way through a huge map and free Kyrat from his dictatorship.



The layout is very similar to FC3, there are enemy strongholds throughout the map and radio towers scattered across mountain tops. Destroying these propaganda towers opens up the dark areas of the map. While taking down strongholds lets you slowly turn the map over to the good guys, the Golden Path. This is a group set on liberating the country from Pagan Minh.

The story focuses on two leaders of the Golden Path, which each have their own plan on how to free the country. This in turn gives the player choices along the way, to which side you will take, giving the player a set of two missions to choose in most main story missions. It's a nice touch and often puts you in a dilemma of what to do next.



At times FC4 can seem like Skyrim with guns, it has a lot of RPG elements with side missions, levelling, XP etc. Or maybe I just make the comparison because of the similar, pine tree, nature surrounding you! These RPG elements though, really add to the shooter genre and builds further upon what FC3 introduced us to. The game is about depicting a large and real world, with a strong focus on natural elements like forests, wild animals, huge mountains and lakes.

The game is visually stunning, I'm playing the current gen version on a PlayStation 4 by the way, with huge areas filled with lush forests, rivers, grassy fields for miles and incredible mountains surrounding it all. The game is literally jaw dropping at times and really is a huge leap forward from playing on last-gen consoles.

The vegetation is so dense, giving you the feeling of being in a real forest area. It really looks like you're walking through real nature. The distances is the game are insane, and even lets you get a birds eye view over how huge it is by letting the player ride small helicopters around!



FC4 is a fantastic sequel, however, there are some complaints I have. The most obvious, for people that have played a lot of FC3, is that the game follows it's predecessor a bit too much. It can almost feel like a re-skinning of FC3. If you never played FC3, then this will be no issue and can be ignored, but for players familiar with FC3 it's feels a little too similar regarding the structure of the game, the way they portrait the bad guy and the exact same weapons.

Other issues, is the over used hallucinogenic missions, that occur far too often and seem a rip-off of a single mission in FC3. I did enjoy the Shang-Ri-La levels though! I would also have liked a more presence of Pagan Minh, you simply meet him too few times to truly get the hatred or purpose to take him down.

At the end of the day I really enjoyed FC4. I loved how the game begins, but it quickly felt overwhelming to explore, however, as I overcame this, I ended up really enjoying my playthrough. I even enjoyed playing a bit of coop and it worked really well!

Perhaps not the game of the year I hoped for, but a strong sequel that could easily have become even better had it taken more new elements into the mix.