Overdue Reviews is an occasional series in which I pretend to be a videogame journalist. This week: Far Cry 4 on PC.
I picture the designers of Far Cry 4, watching in mounting horror as the potential of their carefully planned open world shooter slowly dies beneath layers of poor menu design, bad network code and corporate nonsense.
Far Cry 4 and I did not get off to a good start. I bought it for multiplayer, only to find that I had to play through a significant portion of the single player campaign in order to 'unlock' the co-op mode. Discovering this non-obvious feature took a frustrating journey through many unskippable cutscenes, badly designed menus and internet searches. I could complain about that for many pages.
But I'm not going to do that. I'm also not going to complain about the colossal stupidity of Ubisoft's game platform and how difficult it makes even the simplest of tasks. Instead, I'm going to explain how Far Cry 4's flaws make it entertaining in a way the developers never intended.
Basically, it's a bit broken. There's something wrong with the networking code, which means that players sometimes see different things, even when they're looking at the same thing. There's also bugs aplenty with the AI, logic issues to do with simulating reality, and plenty of just bizarre game design, all of which adds to the entertainment.
Some examples.
One time I was standing near a river and there was an elephant swimming in it. As I watched, a motor boat with two men in it drove down the river and into the elephant. Then they went around a corner and disappeared. Then they came back and ran the elephant over again. This continued until the elephant died, after which they drove their boat into a big rock, where it sank.
One time my friend and I were climbing a cliff face but when we got to the top his player model got stuck in the 'character climbing a wall' animation, and spent the next five minutes running around waving his arms and legs in the air.
One time we had a mission to protect a group of people from tiger attack. At least four tigers came to attack us and each one proved surprisingly hard to kill. I emptied an entire clip from an automatic rifle at point blank range into the spine of one tiger and it still managed to maul me nearly to death.
One time I suggested we get into a truck by the roadside but my friend couldn't see it. I got into the truck and drove up and down the road to prove the truck existed, but they still couldn't see it, all they could see was me hovering in a seated position several feet above the ground. I then ran over a dog, but all they saw was the dog suddenly catapulting away from my feet for no apparent reason.
One time my friend fell off a tower and landed on a sloped roof but couldn't move, with their model stuck in the fall animation with their arms flailing. Eventually the only way to free them was to deliberately kill them with a grenade to force a respawn.
In short, Far Cry 4 is so bad it's funny. I have genuinely laughed out loud at it, but not through anything the developers did deliberately. There's probably a good game in there somewhere, but you might have to dig for it. I imagine it's far less entertaining without a friend to laugh with at how ridiculous it can be.
Further notes
I mentioned unskippable cutscenes. You can skip the ones that appear when the game starts, at least. I really don't know why things like that still exist. I have never loaded a game and thought "hey, I should buy a different graphics card". Whizzy 3D animations haven't been impressive for a long time now. Can someone tell Nvidia?
