Far Cry 4 Review The Best Far Cry Yet
This is how crazy Far Cry 4 can get I'm droning just above the treetops in a ramshackle gyrocopter, scouting for macaques, when I spy a trio of the pale-furred primates loping near the edge of a precipice. I descend slowly through stands of firs, my rotors audibly clipping branches, preparing to leap out, when I hear the telltale tattoo of machine guns talkingthe country's militia trading gunfire with insurgents. Bullets suddenly smack into my body, thump-thump-thump. My vision narrows. I jab a greenish syringe into my arm and bail out of the copterstill hovering at the lip of the cliffspreading my arms and legs and arcing in a wingsuit toward the terrain below like a fired missile. With seconds to land, I deploy my parachute and tumble into more trees, rocks, snarled undergrowthand the sights of one pissed honey badger, which growls like it definitely cares, then leaps at me, cobra-like, to eat my face off. Surviving Far Cry 4 often feels like that, abrupt and slightly mad and sequentially unhinged. It's you in a jam band, an improvisatory celebration of net-less oneupmanship versus your own best performances as you vector from mission to mission. The experience is somewhat like being a pinball, lured off course by too-cool-to-ignore distractions, bounding into bedlam with the fleet-footedness of a huntsman by way of an exuberant toddler. MORE Sweden Considers Special Labels for Sexist Video Games, And lo, what distractions in this brave new world of drivable elephants, scalable summits, sartorial safaris and literal B-movie stunt quests. As named, the Far Cry games are about hurling you into slight caricatures of otherworldly milieus full of both serious and utterly frivolous things to do. The first and third entries in the series were staged in sultry equatorial spaces the former eventually turning full-on Island of Dr. Moreau, while the second channeled Kurtzian jungles and savannah through a lens Anton Chigurah. Think part first-person shooter, part Lonely Planet, part Tarantino abattoir.