There are some over-the-top lieutenants of Min’s to take down, slapstick sidequests, and two rival revolutionaries you can choose to support at various points in the story. It’s open-world and packed with fascists to shoot, animals to hunt, quirky sidequests to partake in, and a wacky main villain in the form of Troy Baker’s Pagan Min. To be perfectly clear, Far Cry 4 is without a doubt mechanically identical to Far Cry 3, if a tad tighter. That’s amazing in and of itself, but rather than a one-off Easter egg, this dedication to telling Ajay and antagonist Pagan Min’s mutual journey drives the core of the journey. Yet somehow, it’s equally a game where you can skip the entire conflict by being patient, discovering a secret ending that turns the entire game into a brilliant 10-minute short story about an Americanized immigrant coming to his home country for the first time. This is a game where you can fire a handheld grenade launcher while charging into an enemy camp with a war elephant as a friend flies in via a gyrocopter in co-op. It’s stunning just how effectively Far Cry 4 balances subtlety amid a hailfire of explosions. While far from a perfect game, Far Cry 4 might just be the perfect Ubisoft game. What’s key to Far Cry 4’s success though is that it uses these familiar elements to elevate its strong points rather than relying on them to compensate for personality. It’s also intensely political without overtly stating a conservative or liberal worldview. It’s obsessed with search towers and sandbox gameplay. It stars a relatively blank-slate male lead, Ajay Ghale, returning to his fictional home country of Kyrat after spending his whole adult life as an American. In many ways, Far Cry 4 is the prototypical Ubisoft game. Yet out of all Ubisoft’s many hits and misses, none quite compares to Far Cry 4. The Tom Clancy brand tried to somehow take military fiction and not be political. Rainbow Six Siege was almost a dud, only to turn itself around into a hit. Assassin’s Creed is practically unrecognizable. Many studios have had impressive highs and terrifyingly bleak lows, with few boasting as many of each as Ubisoft. Regardless, we're going to buy a copy of Far Cry 4, and get a review up as soon as possible.We’re well into the first months of the 9th console generation, and with it the closing years of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Meanwhile, several outlets received retail copies of Far Cry 4 earlier this week for both Xbox One and PS4.
Far cry 4 review update#
This build of the game did not function on our PS4 test kits, despite attempts to remedy the issue with both Ubisoft and a firmware update provided by Sony PR. Last week, we were sent a non-final "debug" version of the game for PlayStation 4. Unfortunately, we do not have a review prepared to publish at this time. This morning, the review embargo for Far Cry 4 expired at 9 a.m.
Far cry 4 review how to#
We do this so you, our audience, can make the most informed decisions about how to spend your time and money as possible. We push aggressively to secure copies as far in advance as possible to make sure we can have substantive, authoritative reviews up on the site by embargo - that is, the time that publishers determine press can post their final impressions based on pre-release access to their games. Ordinarily, I like to think that Polygon is pretty on top of the big, high-profile games with regards to reviews.