Far Cry 4 Review

Kyrat is the reason to be here. The Himalayan setting gives Far Cry its first genuinely vertical map, the gyrocopter and the grapple turn an approach route into a real decision, and the light on the snow line still holds up. Every system is sharper than it was a game ago: better vehicles, better animal encounters, a fortress structure that scales with how much groundwork you have done, and two player drop in co-op across the open world outside the story missions.

Pagan Min is the best villain Ubisoft has written, and the opening dinner is famous for good reason, including the alternate ending you get by simply staying in your seat. Then he vanishes for most of the campaign. The two Golden Path leaders who replace him are a tedious pair of ideologues, the liberation checklist repeats the previous entry almost beat for beat, and by the final third the map has stopped surprising anyone.

Reviewers kept reaching for the same comparison and did not mean it kindly. What you get is a polished, generous, occasionally spectacular open world shooter that declines to be anything except the last one with better weather, and the grade reflects a game whose craft outruns its reason for existing.