A handout photo of Far Cry 4.
Genre: Open-world first-person shooter.
What it's about: Mysterious traveller Ajay Ghale returns to his native Himalayan country of Kyrat to disperse his mother's ashes, only to come in conflict with Pagan Min, a psychotic despot who has appointed himself king.
Why we should care: It's the follow-up to Far Cry 3, one of the best games of 2012.
What happens in the first hour: Our faceless protagonist Ajay is on a rickety bus entering Kyrat. It's great scene-setting: evidently this is a poor, isolated country without an airport.
The bus is intercepted by machine-gun-toting border guards and before we know it, they're shooting up the bus. A helicopter arrives and we meet Pagan Min, the real star of this show. He has a British accent, which is quickly becoming game developers' code for "bad guy" in video games.
Min proceeds to do all kinds of crazy things to demonstrate just how crazy he is, including stabbing one of his own minions with a pen. Then he takes a selfie with Ajay. He's wearing black leather gloves while he does so. They must be e-tips.
Ajay is taken hostage and the next thing we know, he's sitting at a lush dinner table at Min's mansion. Min is pontificating, as villainous madmen tend to do.
His phone sits next to him on the table. How does this isolated Himalayan kingdom have cell reception but no airport?
We're now 10 minutes in and we haven't actually done anything yet. The extended cutscene is starting to feel like a Metal Gear game. Twelve minutes in and we can finally move. Whew.
Somehow the Golden Path, the Kyrati resistance, has made it in to the mansion to rescue Ajay. It's curious that they can break in to spring a hostage, but not take out Min. It's also funny that Kyrati sounds like "karate."
Ajay is heavily armed and fighting off royal troops within minutes, which is where Far Cry 4 represents a big departure from its immediate predecessor. In Far Cry 3, protagonist Jason Brody was a clueless dude-bro on the run from a bunch of murderous slavers. His transformation from hunted into hunter was one of the key themes of the game. It's nice that isn't being completely redone here, but it does feel like a lost opportunity to further hook the gameplay into the theme.
We get to the Golden Path camp and are given our first mission: liberate a nearby bell tower, which Min is using to broadcast propaganda. Ah… memories of Far Cry 3 as the action begins.
The towers are wood this time, rather than the creaking metal of the previous game, but they're no less scary to climb. And the vistas of the surrounding mountains are absolutely breathtaking.
Back on the ground, we're heading off to our next mission. But wait, it's a crazed eagle attack! A giant bird swoops down out of nowhere and tries to maw our face. What the?!?
This is what the developers call the "anecdote factory," or those random unexpected events that differentiate every player's game from another. We get another eagle attack later while trying to liberate an enemy fortress and it throws the entire situation in chaos. It can be frustrating when it happens, but it's great stuff really because it keeps you on your toes.
We're back in the Golden Path camp where we learn that the resistance's leaders have disagreements over which… uh… path they should be following.
We have to choose to do missions for one or the other, which results in different branches of gameplay. Aha – a subplot designed to make you play the game through more than once!
Highlights: Jaw-dropping graphics, plus an open world that's jam-packed with fun things to do, from side missions to exploration to races to co-op adventures. Random encounters mean you never know what's going to happen next.
Lowlights: Min is too cartoonish a bad guy. It'd be nice to know a little more about Ajay right from the start as he seems a bit unidentifiable.
Time suck factor: Okay, here's the truth – I played this game for eight hours before writing this review, rather than the one hour required by the format. Even then, I felt like I'd barely scratched the surface. This is a giant game without even including the online multiplayer modes. It's a huge time suck, but also great value for the money.
Worth more than an hour: Time-pressed players may want to avoid this mammoth open world, but that would be a shame. This is one of our early choices for game of the year.