Far Cry 4 on PC DVD – The DVDfever Review

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Far Cry 4‘s basic plot sees you, as Ajay Ghale, returning back to your home country of Kyrat to scatter your late mother’s ashes. Of course, if that was the only objective in this game then you’d feel rather short-changed for your money, so it’s a good job that sharp-suited music maestro Martin Fry from 1980s pop group ABC stops your bus in its tracks… (pardon? What? It’s not him? Who is it?…. Pagin Min? He wasn’t in ABC. Oh, he’s an evil government overlord? Oh, that’s okay then)

So, I’ve just been informed that apparently it’s not Martin Fry, but actually… oh, you heard. Okay, well, while he seems to be all sweetness and light to begin with, he soon turns out to be a bit of a fruit-loop, bumping people off without a second thought. He’s the King of Kyrat and he leads with an iron fist and a sarcastic and murderous glint in his eye.

Before too long, your travelling companion Darpan is captured, you meet up with Sabal, a member of the Golden Path faction, and you find yourself going off with them, your presence welcome because they were founded by your father, Mohan Ghale. The destination, is Lakshmana, in Northern Kyrat, with the intention of scattering the ashes, along with dispatching of any baddies you come across in the meantime.

Far Cry 4 Example gameplay – Propaganda Machine (1080p HD)

Far Cry 4 follows on two years from the release of Far Cry 3, but I have to say the only one in the series I’ve played before is the original title, and on Xbox 360, so it’s been a while. I opted for this one on PC and while it is available on the PS3 and Xbox 360, it’s clear that it really excels when you have the full 1080p HD graphics on display. Given my rather aging PC, I couldn’t run the game on High or Ultra, so had to settle for Medium, hence the gameplay footage is a little choppy but the quality of the visuals still shines through, especially on my 50″ plasma and makes it quite a joy to zoom round the jungle on a quad bike amongst other vehicles – well, it’s faster than walking.

In fact, given the recent comparisons online between the next-gen versions of Grand Theft Auto V, which showed how the PS4 version superior and the Xbox One is quite lacking, I came across one for Far Cry 4 (below) and while there are sometimes small, and sometimes large differences between the two consoles, the PC version wins out tops every time, particularly with some stunning misty effects across the Himalayan-like mountains. There were still some oddities, however, such as the time I knocked a box full of beer bottles over and they still stayed in the crate, even though in real life they’d spill out all over the place and/or smash.

As for the audio? Either baddies are shouting at you or you’re all firing at each other. It’s crash/bang/wallop and it’s fantastic.

Far Cry 4 – PC vs. PS4 vs. Xbox One Next-Gen Comparison (1080p HD) – Candyland

Good things about the game:

  • There’s a great wealth of missions – 30 main ones in all, plus a number of side missions, so you’ll definitely get great value for money out of Far Cry 4.

  • Ascending up cliffs via ropes and grapples is quite intuitive, and a good way to get away from the baddies.

  • With baddies rampaging across the land, and having to free the captives at times, it’s great fun to sneak up on the enemy, kill them and take their weapons to kill their colleagues, which also has the benefit of plenty of ammo lying around! Talk about adding insult to injury! 😉

  • I’m not hugely adept at playing PC games as I generally go for console versions, but by upping the level of the mouse’s sensitivity, I was able to turn quickly with it. I know this probably isn’t news to most PC gamers, but I was impressed.

  • I was also impressed by the enemy AI. I shot a man who was carrying explosives, he blew up into fire and was burning alive, but still had some explosives left, ran over to me and blew them up on his arrival!

Far Cry 4 – Getting away from the baddies (1080p HD)

Some not-so-good moments:

  • While you can set the vehicles to autodrive, occasionally, you get the response, “autodrive – no signal”… which doesn’t help when I have a wolf on my tail!! HELP!

  • Also, oddly, I found that once I’d shot one of them, I can’t always take my arrow out of a dead wolf. Generally, just walking over the carcass will collect them up again.

  • This game has the ol’ “locked door sydrome”, so if you’re not meant to walk into the area behind it, then it won’t allow you to open it.

  • It’s a bit odd that sometimes you can go from a regular mission to a side mission, but if you die during the latter, or quit out of the game when you’d have assumed it had saved, you end up back on the regular ones again and you can’t get back to the side mission. This is shown in the example gameplay footage below, where I actually completed a level without me looking completely terrible at it, and at the end I’m in a hut about to attempt what I thought was the next mission – since I’d completed this one, and then quit out of the game overnight. The next day, there was no hut. I’d ended up seemingly somewhere else entirely, about to start the next mission.

  • It needs more checkpoints as I played through part of one level, making it to what you would naturally assume to be a checkpoint, then went back to it the next day only to find that that was nothing of the sort, and that I had to replay a fairly large section of the level again 🙁

  • Also, there are some game-crashing bugs. In this level, I first climbed all the way to the top of a tower to disable a radio. I was attacked by an eagle for the third time and then I just couldn’t move! Couldn’t even quit out of the game properly! What on Earth? Major bug! The second time I was able to climb up there without interference until I reached the goal. I also had a game-crashing moment when I simply reloaded the game in after I died.

And, before I sign off, check out the footage below from a bizarre moment when someone on my side was hanging out the car…. pardon?

Overall, Far Cry 4 is a great game and well worth a purchase in advance of Christmas. Also, my copy is the special edition which features Hurk’s Redemption: Limited Edition, in which you can save Hurk from imprisonment in 3 action-packed missions, and also eliminate your enemies with a harpoon gun!

Note: My PC is an i7 860 @ 2.80Ghz, Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, 8Gb RAM, nVidia GeForce GTX 650

Far Cry 4 is available now for the formats below, and click on the packshot for the full-size version.

There’s more info available at FarCryGame.com

Far Cry 4 – Is he in or out of the car (1080p HD)

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