Far Cry 4 Review
Added: 17.11.2014 17:27 | 1 views | 0 comments
Pagan Min is a nasty piece of work. He is the vain and arrogant despot that welcomes you to the fictional Himalayan nation of Kyrat with a depraved display of violence. Min is a horrific man, and you are meant to despise him--or at least, it would seem so until he ends his tirade by inviting you to "tear shit up" while The Clash takes over the soundtrack, preparing you for a power fantasy just seconds after the game has purposefully turned your stomach. Afterwards, Min covers your head with a sack and escorts you to his opulent residence. There, in sight of a bowl of monkey heads ready to be cracked open and engorged upon, He again demonstrates his ruthlessness by plunging a fork into the back of your local guide and forcing him to wail out the window for help. Far Cry 4 is loaded with such tonal shifts, so many that you might suspect the game is trying to make a point with them. The writing takes rare turns into the self-aware; one character, for instance, calls out the hypocrisy of an American intruding on the affairs of a foreign state, pointing guns and splattering blood in the name of "doing the right thing." But if Far Cry 4 was meant to parody the violent themes it depicts, it does a poor job of it. You are Ajay Ghale, an American who has come to Kyrat to scatter your departed mother's ashes per her wishes, though it isn't long before you have taken up the cause of The Golden Path, the same separatist group your mother helped found. Where matters of the rebellion are concerned, Far Cry 4 keeps things serious, often forcing you to choose between the wishes of the current Golden Path co-leaders, and locking yourself into one mission while foregoing its counterpart. These leaders--Amita and Sabal--both have good intentions, seeking only the best for their impoverished nation, though Sabal's insistence at one point that Amita is using her gender as a manipulation tactic makes it clear that he, and the game itself, don't always represent meaningful progress. It's impossible to be invested in these characters, however, not after a pseudo-serious speech is followed by a confrontation with two embarrassing stoners who blow smoke in your face while embodying every possible drug-culture caricature. The story's best asset, its villain, disappears for most of the story, leaving more dialogue to a local radio personality who fantasizes about becoming a serial killer who smears feces on his victims as a calling card. Far Cry 4 does not improve upon Real-life companions are even better. A buddy (or stranger) can join you on your adventure, and the two of you become a kind of madcap duo, wreaking even more havoc on Kyrat's struggling economy by ruining and pillaging everything in sight. It's fun to get around in Far Cry 4's dinky gyrocopters, but the real joy is grappling to it and swinging to and fro as your comrade rises into the air. Should an enemy helicopter whir into view, it's tempting to take it out with a rocket, but you could always have your friend swing you into range, and blast the copter's pilot with a shotgun to the face. Should a pack of dholes (wild dogs, that is) attack, it's nice to shoot and skin them with a pal at your side. There's a pleasant sense of camaraderie to it, the two of you tromping through a creek on elephants like a gray, wrinkly caravan. Far Cry 4 isn't content to simply provide a map loaded with icons to chase: it parades activities in front of you as if it's afraid you'll not notice just how much stuff there is to do. You liberate an outpost and drive away, and you're bombarded in ten seconds by notifications that it is already under attack. Should you return and provide support, your next departure might be met with the same instructions; should you drive off, Far Cry 4 informs you of your failure to protect the outpost. I'm grateful for the game's imperfect but helpful auto-drive feature, which allows you to hand over the wheel to the AI if you want to focus on firing your pistol at pursuing ATVs. I'm not so grateful for Far Cry 4's habit of moving the waypoint icon to nearby outposts under attack on my behalf, thus causing my vehicle to drive where the game wants, not where I want. Why is such a massive sandbox so eager to lure me away from my own adventure? Why would a game whose best story is the one I make for myself keep thrusting some other story in front of me, making me eat my broccoli before I'm allowed to have dessert? It's a problematic campaign, certainly, forcing you to restart an entire mission from scratch if you arrive at your destination and realize you'd like a different loadout, and making you reach for the radio dial so you don't have to listen to the worst radio personality this side of the Great Wall of China. It's when you circumvent Far Cry 4's major thematic flaws, inconsistent missions, and incessant nagging that you find the game you came looking for, breathing easy and enjoying the mountains that rise in the distance and the valleys that stretch beneath you. Like the terrain if depicts, Far Cry 4 travels both high and low, representing the good, the bad, and ugly of video games all at once. It's awesome and messy and dumb and fun and annoying and gross and beautiful. Take any given adjective in your vocabulary, and chances are, it will in some way describe Far Cry 4.
From:
www.gamespot.com
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