Far Cry 4

I'll start with the story. You play as Ajay Ghale who has been asked by his late mother to spread her ashes in Kyrat. As you approach your destination your bus is stopped by a few soldiers. They capture you and take you to Pagan Min's palace (he's the one in the Pink Suit). Min, who was romantically involved with your mother a long time ago, is nothing but cordial. Your quickly faced with a decision to play nice or to fight your way out of the palace. Fight your way out of the palace and you're looking at 14 hours of shooting bliss. Stay seated and the game literally ends in 15 minutes total. Anyway, if you fight out of the palace you then encounter the Golden Path, a rebel group fighting to take down the evil dictator. The rest of the game revolves around you making decisions on who to follow, Sabal or Amita (both of whom would like to run the Golden Path). They send you on various missions to further their cause. If you side with Sabal you will most likely be murdering Pagan men while if you side with Amita you focus more on stealth. Anyway, based on these decisions, you impact the ending. Turns out I got the "bad ending," but I was able to find the other endings on YouTube so now I don't have to play this game like four more times (although I wouldn't mind at least one more play through). Anyway, the story was pretty good, but there's just so much else to do in Kyrat.

I've never played a Far Cry before so I really didn't quite know what to expect or even what to do. Unfortunately, I think that hurt my enjoyment of the game in its early stages. Unlike most shooters, there is a robust upgrade system, both for your abilities and for your guns. Moreover, this game doesn't do the best job of helping you learn what you need to do in order to be effective in the campaign missions. While I should have spent the first couple hours just roaming the vast world of Kyrat (this place is huge) and upgrading my character so I wasn't so underpowered, I instead went straight into the campaign and brute forced my way through the first half of the game. It was not fun. I died a ton and was frustrated the whole time. However, in that time, I was slowly improving my character. While I started with two bars of health and the ability to hold just one gun, through in-game experience and a decent amount of hunting, I ended with four gun slots and six bars of health. Don't ask me why I need four Honey Badger skins to hold another gun. Those goddamn Honey Badgers weren't easy to kill with my machete.

With my newfound abilities and a better understanding of how to actually play the game, I took on sixteen missions that were incredibly fun. In fact, the back half of this game was some of the most fun I've ever had with a shooter. I had better guns, more ammo and a much better chance at not dying.

There are a few things I wish Far Cry 4 did better, but this is an awesome open world to explore. Traveling is annoying thanks mostly to the Himalayan Mountains. My path was constantly cut off. There wasn't an easy way to climb the mountains so I had to drive all the way around some mountains over and over again. That resulted in me having to take about 5-10 mins to travel to the next campaign mission. There weren't a ton of vehicles to choose from so it got old fast. The health system is terrible. You have bars of health. You can hold triangle to regain a bar of health at a time. However, when you are being shot at it becomes very difficult. On the surface it's intriguing, but as you do it over and over again, it becomes super repetitive. Granted, if I had just beefed up my character before going into the missions this probably wouldn't have been an issue. The bigger issue here, however, involves full-health-restoring syringes. If you try to heal at all when you have syringes you use them no matter what. If I have 5/6 health bars there is no way for me to heal just one. I have to use the entire syringe. I wasted so many because of that.

Overall, this is a great game. I recommend to everyone. I just wish I didn't have so many other games to play. I could see myself putting 40+ hours into this. There is so much more content to explore, but I have to move on. My backlog is too big.