If it were any other game, I'd be pissed off.

Far Cry 4 is not Far Cry 4. I mean, yes, it's called that on the box, but that's not what it is, not really. It's Far Cry 3 Service Pack 1. Perhaps Far Cry 3.5. It is a warmed over version of the same game, fixing some of the less pleasing aspects, tweaking some mechanics to refine them, adding spit and polish. But it's the same game.

And I couldn't care less. While Dota 2 naturally has the top spot as my personal GOTY pick for the second year running, Far Cry 4 is, I think, my number two. In spite of it being a rehash of Far Cry 3. Perhaps even because of it being a rehash of Far Cry 3.

To enjoy Far Cry 4 you have to be the kind of person who enjoys Ubisoft's previous open world first person shooters. Ubi has a particular formula here: sprawling, gorgeous environments, an exotic setting, and a range of tasks to perform within this world. Some of these are structured, such as capturing outposts to enable fast travel or climbing towers to provide map vision. Others are endlessly replayable minigames, such as fighting against waves of enemies in an arena or time trial quad bike racing. There's a variety of unstructured goals, with six or seven kinds of collectable ones to accumulate as you explore.

And tying the whole thing together are the campaign missions, providing a narrative thread to motivate exploration.

I enjoyed Far Cry 2. I enjoyed Far Cry 3. And I enjoyed the hell out of Far Cry 4.

The exotic setting

To make it a "new" game, some of the details of Far Cry 3 are of course changed. The setting is no longer the fictional Rook Islands. We're now in the fictional mountain kingdom of Kyrat. Kyrat is, functionally, Nepal, both in geography—a small nation in the Himalayas, bordered by India and China—and in history—undergoing a civil war between the monarchy on the one hand and an insurgency on the other hand.

On the side of the monarchy, we have the villain of the piece. Far Cry 3 got good mileage out of one of its villains, the lunatic Vaas Montenegro, and with Far Cry 4's villain, Pagan Min, Ubi has recreated much of the same interest. Min—a Chinese drug dealer who has installed himself as king of Kyrat—is a colorful fellow, dressed in a metallic pink suit with a shock of bleached blond hair and a taste for crab rangoon.

On the side of the Golden Path rebels, we have Amita and Sabal. In another universe, these two could themselves be the opposing forces in a civil war. Sabal is a religious extremist who wants to preserve Kyrat's traditions of child brides and domestic abuse. Amita rejects the Kyrati religion and wants to modernize the nation, but due to a lack of natural resources, she wishes to fund this modernization by continuing the heroin trade that Pagan Min oversees.

With our setting and conflict established, we need a protagonist. The protagonist is Ajay Ghale, son of Mohan Ghale, founder of the Golden Path, whose mother Ishwari fled to the US when he was but a child. His mother, now dead, requested that he return her ashes to be with Lakshmana. We join the Golden Path and take arms against Pagan Min.

Staking territorial claims

Almost every aspect of the game can be described as "like Far Cry 3 but slightly better." Capturing outposts to gain access to their fast travel sites and weapon shops, for example, has been made a little more challenging and interesting through a couple of new systems. One of the joys of Far Cry 3 was luring a wild animal into an outpost and watching from afar as it munched its way through enemy soldiers without you having to lift a finger. This is a little smarter in Far Cry 4, as we can now throw bait to lure predators into the places we want them to be.

Countering this is a new type of enemy, the Hunter. While other enemies can all be spotted and tracked, any tracking on a Hunter fades after a few seconds. Hunters communicate in whistles, making it hard to pinpoint their whereabouts, and can tame predators and use them to attack.

Taking this a stage further, captured outposts can be overrun by enemies and occasionally have to be defended against large attack forces. These attacks can be prevented by capturing four fortresses, three fortresses belonging to Pagan Min's henchpeople, the fourth to Min himself. Fortresses serve as bigger, better protected outposts.

Where Far Cry 3 had Jason scaling radio towers to gain map vision, Far Cry 4 has Ajay climbing bell towers to do the same. In Far Cry 3 these included some extraordinarily frustrating jump puzzles where sequences of high precision jumps had to be put together. This remains a poor fit for a first person shooter, where proprioception is non-existent and spacial awareness is greatly diminished. Far Cry 4's bell towers are considerably more forgiving and much less annoying to scale as a result. The same mechanism; just refined.

Getting around

Driving around has been enhanced with an autodrive capability. Pick a waypoint and vehicles will travel along roads to get as close to the waypoint as possible, leaving you to do other things—principally, shoot stuff from your moving vehicle. The driving in Far Cry 4 is still a little ropey—these games aren't in any sense driving simulators. Autodrive is an improvement of sorts, although it still exposes some AI behaviors that are perhaps left best unexposed. Kyrati drivers apparently think nothing of driving headlong into another vehicle and are apparently entirely indifferent toward running over anyone who should happen to get in their way.

We get a couple of major new vehicles to play with, two. The Buzzer autogyro lets us fly around and shoot people from the sky; this is very useful for travelling long distances or reaching hard-to-explore spots. And elephants let us charge around trunk-punching bad guys and generally wreak havoc. They come highly recommended.

While the autodrive was useful on occasion, I still found myself playing 4 in much the way I did 3; fast travel to my intended destination, then travel on foot in as close an approximation to a straight line as the terrain would permit. This was less frustrating than the driving and also enabled plenty of serendipitous discovery of new locations and treasures as I went on my way. It's easier to notice these things when you're on foot rather than in a car.

The damn wildlife

This approach does have one downside, however; animal attacks. Snakes remain hard to see and liable to pounce on you without notice. We also discover two categories of animal that frankly I'd like to make extinct. The first are honey badgers, who are hard as nails and aggressive little bastards. Everything you ever learned about honey badgers? It's all true.

The second are eagles, who unbeknown to me are in fact the dicks of the animal kingdom. They will swoop down out of nowhere and peck you to death. More excitingly, from time to time they'll swoop down on a pig and fly him off to be eaten. It is, as they say, the meat of kings.

The primary purpose of animals is for crafting, and regrettably, this is one rough part of Far Cry 3 that isn't much changed. You can collect various kinds of skin to make different items; a bigger wallet to hold more money, various kinds of ammo pouch, and so on. And I hate it. I hate killing tigers and leopards and rhinos. It makes me feel completely gross. The game does sort of handwave this away, saying that Pagan Min established breeding programs for endangered species that have been so successful that the various animals have practically overrun the country, but I don't care. I don't like it.