Far Cry 4

Playtime: 28.2 Hours

Finished 10 May 2025.

Played through the game on Steam without any DLC and on Normal difficulty, ending with 93.94% tracked completion. Other than one weapon that I couldn't buy (locked behind an arena grind) and a ton of collectibles that I didn't bother getting, I maxed out pretty much everything else in my playthrough. I finished all the major stuff: all campaign missions, Longinus, Shangri-La and Yogi/Reggie side missions, hijacked all towers, liberated all outposts, and stormed all of the fortresses. I also finished all of the tracked side activities, including all of the sidequest series, races, and convoy activities. As far as personal progression goes, I got all of the skills (including maxing out the multi-level ones in the Elephant tree), maxed out my Karma level, and found all vehicles. As mentioned above, I'm only missing one unlocked weapon - so 63/64. Completion is much lower for collectibles because they're really not worth getting -- traversal isn't that fun in this game. In any case, a more detailed list of statistics is in the screenshots.

I wasn't really paying much attention to the story or the characters since they're pretty standard fare for Far Cry - lots of "crazy" characters and no clear good & bad guy. I would've wanted to play beyond Pagan's meme ending, but that obviously isn't something you can actually do. Between Sabal & Amita, I initially preferred Sabal's approach to community but ended up siding with Amita later since Kyrat might actually have a future that way. Either way, given that the missions that you take for one character vs. the other tend to take you to the exact same place and end up having you do fairly similar tasks, I really feel like it makes little difference which route you take. It's not actually a huge storyline branch.

After the very positive reception of Far Cry 3, Ubisoft very predictably tried to establish a more consistent formula for the series that seems to have lasted all the way through Far Cry 6 (so far, anyway). Far Cry 4 was the first product of this iterative process, and as a result feels quite similar to FC3 with some small improvements here and there. In fact, in most ways mechanically, I would have similar things to say about every FC game I've played between 3 and 5; they aren't really different enough in my opinion to have clear ups and downs as far as basic game feel goes. There's no need to fix what isn't broken, I guess.

So straight out the gate, the combat and weapon mechanics are generally very solid in this game, and pretty much the entire reason why I stayed in the world as long as I did. When you're in direct combat, weapons feel powerful and engagements are fairly exciting. Some weapons are definitely better than others, which is also partially dependent on personal preference, but I never really felt like any particular weapon was completely unusable. As your arsenal evolves the further you get into the campaign, you start getting access to some absolutely ludicrous weaponry; being able to spam the Buzzsaw MG42 and instakill anything with a silenced 50cal trivialized so much of the endgame yet made you feel like a Juggernaut massacring the Royal Army. Really, when it comes to direct combat, I only have a couple of limited complaints: shotguns feel pretty weak and have some hipfire delay bugs, and the Flamethrower is kind of underwhelming as always since enemies die to anything else so much more quickly.

Unfortunately, a large portion of the game design is based around stealth - which I think is pretty bad in this game, as in the other FC games. There is one mechanic in particular which I think is very cool, which is that enemies will actually detect you very quickly if you keep shooting (even suppressed weapons) from the same location - I guess they extrapolate where you are from the angle of the gunshot wounds. However, for the most part, stealth involves a lot of boring crouching & walking around, occasionally pressing F to do an animated takedown cutscene. Even with the meager benefits that successfully stealthing various outposts or encounters gives you, it's almost never worth it since it takes so much time and can instantly be undone if some random guy sees you across the map (to be fair, I'm really bad at stealth). Some sections in the game go even further and force you to sneak around with only the knife or with no weaponry at all, which are absolutely miserable. Thankfully, by the end of the game it's very easy to just walk around with a silenced sniper rifle and just nuke everyone before they can see you with decent aim, making the takedowns irrelevant. I wouldn't have managed to complete the side objectives otherwise.

Outside of the improved arsenal that slowly trickles in throughout the game, progress and upgrades are kind of underwhelming and bare in this game. There are a ton of weapons but only a small subset of them are really useful at all (and many of them feel like clones of others). The sidearm grenade launcher is hilariously overpowered due to its utility and essentially makes all the other explosive weapons pointless, and there aren't really any meaningful choices for weapon upgrades either - you can only really attach a silencer, extended magazines, and your choice of a few sights at most. The skill tree kind of sucks, given that more than half of the tree is dedicated to useless takedown abilities and largely pointless syringe abilities. Actual weapon/combat upgrades that are useful mostly fall into QoL that I wish was part of the game naturally. Crafting was fine in this game; I don't really like hunting very much but I didn't have to spend too much time on it to get all the skins I needed, though I think it's a bit sad that the entire mechanic is effectively unused otherwise (skins & bait are all but useless).

Probably my biggest criticism of the game is directed towards the world itself: despite the fact that it's well-populated and rife with activity, it somehow still feels kind of lifeless. Or maybe it actually feels particularly lifeless because (not in spite) of that fact; the game's systems are so perpetually afraid that you might not have something to do to the point that it continuously shoves activities and events so far up your nose that you almost have no choice but to do them. I legitimately do not think I've ever had an unbroken period of more than 15-20 seconds of traversal in the game without some kind of Karma event, hostile enemy encounter, or wildlife spawning in my face, and it's an almost 50-50 chance that an outpost will be attacked literally within 5 seconds of you leaving the immediate vicinity. I don't know if this is configurable at all, or if it was intentional, but rather than making the game more exciting, I felt like it just made it insufferable at times.

To continue on my train of thought - even though there is plenty to do on the surface, it's all just the same thing over and over again. The side activities are all just series of the same basic activity several times across the world map; they almost feel like they're procedurally generated. Due to the open nature of the world, there's a general lack of detail for specific individual locations, meaning that side activity encounters never really feel exciting - just another mob of dudes around another small shack or farmhouse. Unlike most RPGs, there isn't any context given around the "sidequests" either, which makes it extremely obvious that these are just items that the player can cross off a massive checklist. While I kept playing since I enjoyed the gunplay, there is little to no motivation to do any of the content for its own sake. The "actual" sidequest stories aren't really any better - aside from the Shangri-La missions which I didn't really care about for other reasons, the Longinus and Yogi missions are just more series of boring activities, this time with some short nonsensical cutscenes that don't actually give any context to what you're doing. Longinus just says some dumb religious shit, then you get a generic chase quest, and Yogi injects you with some drug, then you get to sprint across the map in straight lines for a few minutes.

To talk about the game's environment and characters -- I feel like there is a very real charm about the game being set in a fictional Himalayan country, which is a very rare setting in bigger AAA games like this. Hearing the characters actually speaking Hindi is very cool too, though of course most of the speech is in accented English for understandability, which is totally sensible and fine by me. Graphically and aesthetically, the game was gorgeous for its time and still holds up very well today; and it helps that performance was rock solid as well. As far as the writing and characters go, however, I think it's a bit of a mixed bag in this one. Pagan Min is an icon of this era of games for a good reason, and I also really like his character, but the other Lieutenants basically do not exist at all in the story. Furthermore, the Golden Path leaders (Sabal & Amita) aren't particularly present in the game as the campaign missions are a fairly small part of what you do. As this is another Ubisoft checklist game, you amusingly spend just about as much time talking to some side characters (like Chiffon) as you do the leaders of the rebellion. Overall, with the obvious sole exception, none of the characters in this game are memorable.

I think the overall package of this game is a decent bit better than Far Cry 5, which I played last year. This game at least features one interesting character and an interesting setting. The background of the story simply being the story of a rebellion against a tyrant is far more grounded than either 3 or 5 which have some dumb mumbo-jumbo injected into the mix for no reason; I know that Shangri-La and the Rakshasas exist here in FC4 as well but they play a very minor part in the actual storyline. From a mechanical standpoint though, as I mentioned at the start, I think most of my above comments about gunplay, stealth, upgrades, and the checklist-heavy nature of the game apply equally to the other entries in the series. The predictability is a double-edged sword in my view; while it's nice to know that Ubisoft will always give you lots of things to do in a decent package, it also means I have almost no motivation to buy the same experience over and over again. Having played through several of these myself, I think it's time to lay this series to rest at the highest (literally, heh) peak it's ever reached in Kyrat.