Right now I'm playing D:OS 2 and cleaning my backlog with Far Cry 4, the Far Cry series after Ubisoft took over suffer of one of the worst cases of "Man this could be so great, it is a pity that it isn't.". I have no doubt that Ubisoft has really talented artists, sound designers, writers and gameplay designers, it is just a pity that the management has other priorities than actually to make a truly great game.
Of all things wrong with this game, the shooting model take the top of the list, the weapons have almost no recoil and the weapons shoot with pin point accuracy, both yours as the enemy. This actually is old news, everybody knows that console shooters can't hold a candle to PC exclusive ones because the inferior controlling method of consoles means the necessity of a simpler shooting model and slower movement speeds, however, this is made even worse by Far Cry open enviroments.
Far Cry 4 has a system where the closer you get to the Ai, the higher is the DPS it can deliver, it is a standard system on shooters with hitscan weapons as it isn't fun to be one shot killed from the other side of the map by any random mook, the problem is that this doesn't apply to you, your basic SMGs and rifles have obscene precision and damage. So, the end result is that any competent FPS player can mow down enemies before they can react, I was killed more times by wild life attacking me by surprise and falls than I did by enemy fire.
The designers could have, in part, compensate this by just overwhelming the player with numbers and attacks from multiple directions but the game refuses to escalate the fights, I dunno if it is because it would be ridiculous to kill an entire battalion or because of an engine limitation but boy, you really need to be incompetent or like me, don't giving much of a fuck about what is happening anyway to actually die.
So why I keep playing this game? Because of what I just said, the art, the sound design, the writing, the lore and world design of Not-Nepal or as the game calls it, Kyrat, is pretty entertaining and you see the potential in it. There is something fun of shooting the driver of an enemy pickup, stealing it, then turn around to be throw in the air still inside the vehicle by an angry rhino or just walk around and see little ambient storytelling moments like an executed family inside their house that refused to grow poppy to produce heroin or just walk around on the forests and see wolves running after deers or two bears fighting for domination then just find a huge southeast asian looking statue... it is fun when you aren't walking on huge but empty sections of the map.
There is a huge potential to truly fun emergent gameplay as it is truly fun on the rare occasion it happens but the game lacks the systems and content to properly support it and as the Ubisoft overlords need to produce a game like this every year to make shareholders happy, this won't change any time soon. Buy it at 75% off like I did, this is the price that Ubisoft low effort truly deserves.
