I think this is a better Far Cry 3 with a slightly less interesting villain. Almost everything from Far Cry 3 was improved from a technical perspective. The map is fantastic. I liked it better than Far Cry 3. I couldn’t say if it is larger in size, but there is a lot to explore. Graphics fidelity is excellent. Playing this game in 2026, twelve years after the original’s release, is still a great experience. I played this on a 3080 Ti and a 5080 at 3440x1440 resolution, and it worked without any issues.
Beautiful visuals
The story is boring. Pagan Min and Longinus are the only interesting characters in the game for me. Pagan Min is a memorable character because of Troy Baker’s wonderful voice acting. I did not pay any attention to the story after the first few cutscenes because the basic premise of the plot was too weak to begin with. An American goes to a war-torn country to scatter his mother’s ashes, and somehow gets invested in the cause of the rebels and gets dragged into a civil war? Not convincing. If the writers want me to be invested in the story, they should create something that is at least a little bit plausible. Ajay never tries to leave the country, which would be the natural reaction to the events of the game. The start of the game was pretty interesting, but the story got boring quickly. The moment Amita and Sabal show up, I lost interest in the plot. The choices between the two are somewhat interesting though, but the payoff at the end was underwhelming.
Pagan Min
Longinus is the only other character that I paid any attention to. His dialogue is great, and he is just an interesting character to watch. Very animated, loves guns, quotes the Bible effortlessly, speaks with a Caribbean accent. Very well done.
Guns!
Back in 2014, the Ubisoft open world formula is not quite the meme it is today. It was still considered somewhat innovative. Playing this in 2026, it’s very obvious that Ubisoft was laying the foundation for what is to become the quantity over quality template that inspired everything from Watch Dogs to Assassin’s Creed. Even back then, I did not think this was a lot of fun. There are so many activities in the game, outposts, karma events, Shangri-La missions, and so on. If you are interested, you could easily sink about 50 hours into the game. I didn’t spend too much time doing side quests or liberating outposts. You liberate one outpost, you liberate them all. It felt like a lot of gameplay padding. Enemy AI is also not great. It’s very basic. They go from being super dumb to having ESP. You could miss one suppressed sniper shot, and everyone on the map will know your exact location.
Most of the mechanics in the game feel like they are designed by a committee. Crafting, skills, and loot are all poorly implemented. Far Cry 2 did a better job at this. Some of the skills do not make any sense. How can you acquire a skill that will make vehicles take more damage? It makes no sense. It was done for the sake of having a skill tree. It’s this kind of gameplay design that I find irritating. They want you to suspend disbelief, and then create something that takes you right out of the game.
Nonsensical skills
The game tries to add level variety by making you play hallucination missions which are tedious. I did not like them in Far Cry 3 and I did not like them here. There are also annoying missions where you lose access to your weapons. I always thought this was a dumb idea in video games. I spent time and effort acquiring these weapons only for the game to take them away from me for arbitrary reasons.
I enjoyed Far Cry 4. I am quite certain I got this for free. I recommend picking this game up on sale.