UbiSyndrome – This is a new term I’m coining – UbiSyndrome: A gaming narrative in which the core parts underwhelm the player but all optional content turns out to be entertaining and enjoyable. UbiSyndrome. Use it in a sentence? Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, Assassin’s Creed Liberation and Far Cry 4 are games afflicted by UbiSyndrome.
I think you see where I’m going with this. Far Cry 4 was a game where I had a hard time deciding if I had fun. Taking lead protagonist Ajay through the battle torn mountainous regions of Kyrat as he fought a war for a group of rebels called the Golden Path was full of ups and downs. One moment I’m using an electric helicopter to rain death on some Royal Guard enemies, flying it straight into the top of a tower, shooting an eagle out of the sky once I get there before liberating the area from the sounds of a dictator’s propaganda, the next I’m stuck in a boring, linear, story mission where I have to shoot wave after wave of enemy while being restricted to using a single gun.
For every highlight that includes using an elephant to send a truck crashing into a pack of wolves, there were missions like the one in the Himalayas where the air was poisonous, and I was being hunted by enemy snipers, a helicopter, wolves, eagles, leopards, and bears, and though it sounds awesome in theory the entire mission just felt way too over the top and on the uncomfortable side of hard.
The Himalayas, if you had to guess, was one of the main campaign missions. The same problem I’ve seen in other Ubisoft games that are just kind of rushed or incomplete is that the missions feel untested and manufacture difficulty by pounding at the player with way too much shit and then declaring it a challenge. For all the creative paths I was able to take while tackling the game’s optional content, the main story relegated me to “run here and shoot that guy, now run over there and shoot this other guy”. At best the campaign missions were as fun as my loadout, knocking around enemies with a shotgun or C4, crashing into them with the trucks they bring to the party, but far too often story missions just required a straight forward approach and demanded too much running from point A to point B to have fun with them the way I wanted to.
Don’t hate me because I like my weapons to look like paintball toys.
If you’re a gun nut, then Far Cry 4 has a nice arsenal for you to unlock and customize. Though sometimes getting guns and additional items presents itself in a very carrot and stick type form, destroy X amount of propaganda towers or do X amount of side missions to get this neat thing. The skill tree kind of leaves a lot to be desired, introducing abilities and syringes I simply never used, and only unlocked to get to something more useful such as auto-looting or a higher health bar. The junk Ajay collected had some amusing tool tips, such as advising you to use a maxi pad to stop bleeding (from wounds), but the same junk could also become burdensome as it took up precious slots for crafting reagents. Leatherworking was also problematic with each pack upgrade needing very specific animal skins, and leaving you gimped in your ability to carry items, weapons or cash if you couldn’t find what you needed. Occasionally the game tries to enforce stealth, even having at least one talent point on your skill tree tied to stealth success (what?) but I didn’t find hiding to be a firm requirement for completion of the game.
But for all my grievances with the game’s poor design choices and chore-like story missions, I had an absolute blast when I was stumbling about on my own. There’s the one time a rhino sent me and my truck tumbling down a cliff, so I took my revenge upon the rhino and its entire rhino family by baiting them into a C4 trap I’d set up. There was the time I wrestled a honey badger. The time I trampled an alligator with an elephant, killing both in the process. After skinning my elephant friend as I didn’t want his life to be for naught I would find myself zipping off in a hovercraft to save a hostage before boarding my absolute favoritist toy; the electric helicopter. As a pure sandbox it really, really works. It’s just a shame I couldn’t apply some more of the creative freedom the game allows to the campaign.
The cast of characters in Far Cry 3, you know, everyone who wasn’t dudebro protagonist Jason Brody, got the most interest and respect from fans. Far Cry 4 manages to hit lightning in a bottle twice with its well illustrated cast of characters. From simple background folks such as the messiah worshipping gun dealer Longinus who asks “What gun would Jesus use?” To the adorable, supposed deity in teenage girl form, Bhadra. Then of course you have your two pillars of karma, bleeding heart Sabal and bloody revolutionary Amita. Though no character stands out more than the series’ newest antagonist, Pagan Min.
Supervillain Selfies.
Min is perhaps the one moment of sheer brilliance in Far Cry 4. As a villain he is more than able to give Vaas of Far Cry 3 a run for his money. Voiced by the talented Mr. Troy Baker, Min is immediately engaging, endearing, and terrifying. A brutal dictator with pizzazz, Vlad the Impaler with a twist of Neil Patrick Harris. He is the self proclaimed king of Kyrat and has taken a keen interest in the protagonist as he was once in love with Ajay’s mother.
When you first meet King Min he garrotes one of his own soldiers with a pen for going slightly against orders, then takes a selfie with you. He invites you to enjoy some Crab ragoon with him while he tortures insurgents, and once you’ve run away he has the chef that made the crab Rangoon assassinated as he assumes you left because you didn’t like the food. He was a delight to watch and hear as he taunted you over the radio, and Pagan Min alone made the story worth watching. Which is a good thing because there wasn’t much else story-wise to keep me moving forward.
Now while the characters are certainly enjoyable the story itself is a bit problematic. Ubisoft only has a thin grasp on what makes a revolution, and where most revolts and rebellions go wrong. You’ll likely notice that the two insurgent leaders, Amita and Sabal, have some pretty fast policy turns that give them both the potential to be cruel dictators. How seriously you take the choices presented to you may change your overall feeling towards the game’s narrative. Eventually you’ll have to just realize you’re being employed by a sea of dicks, no one is really “right” and you just have to work towards what you believe is the least evil.
My little insurgent can’t be this cute.
Far Cry 4 gives us the illusion of choice. Once more divided by the doctrines of Amita and Sabal. Amita is guided by pragmatism and war strategy, while Sabal has human compassion and religious guidance. The most base way to think of it as Amita being the devil while Sabal is the angel (though as the game goes on this is incredibly arguable). In typical Ubisoft fashion however, the game likes to punish you for doing “bad” things. Amita missions just feel more difficult overall, while you get karma reductions for harming innocents even though this is frankly a game in which you’re going to end up installing a tyrant that victimizes the citizenship no matter what happens.
This little quirk in the design grew more annoying as the game went on as it felt restrictive in regards to all the toys the game gave you. It’s all too easy to hit a member of Golden Path while riding an elephant or using an explosive, and the game’s “autodrive” feature has a bad habit of hitting the civilians that like to jump right in your path due to the badly programmed AI. Each time you kill someone you get a karma reduction and an experience point hit. These kinds of restrictions are a bit backwards for a sandbox, especially one in which you’re unseating a dictator to install another tyrant. I could go along with Ubisoft’s bizarre approach to morality consequences in Assassin’s Creed, I could even go along with it (though far less so) as Aiden trying to do illegal deeds without cops noticing in Watch Dogs. However in Far Cry Ubisoft’s strong and very weird moral punishments for doing bad simply don’t fit. This is a game where you do a lot of shooting, a lot of killing, and whoever you back is the next Saddam Hussein or Robert Mugabe.
Killin’ some wolves, drinkin’ a bud.
Far Cry 4 is problematic for sure. Its main faults lie in the story and the related campaign missions, though there’s plenty of other imperfect mechanics as well. Still I can’t ignore the fact I really did have a good time just touring Kyrat on my own, picking and choosing what I did and how I approached it. Unlike most other Ubisoft games, the campaign missions in Far Cry 4 at least have far less of an impact on the overall Far Cry experience. The story moves fast and is pretty short, and at least shooting things is more action oriented than say, hacking cameras or tailing suspects. I won’t call this game a “must buy”, but for a nice little amusement park ride of a holiday experience it’s definitely up there.
