That’s amazing in and of itself, but rather than a one-off Easter egg, this dedication to telling Ajay and antagonist Pagan Min’s mutual journey drives the core of the journey. Yet somehow, it’s equally a game where you can skip the entire conflict by being patient, discovering a secret ending that turns the entire game into a brilliant 10-minute short story about an Americanized immigrant coming to his home country for the first time. This is a game where you can fire a handheld grenade launcher while charging into an enemy camp with a war elephant as a friend flies in via a gyrocopter in co-op. It’s stunning just how effectively Far Cry 4 balances subtlety amid a hailfire of explosions. While far from a perfect game, Far Cry 4 might just be the perfect Ubisoft game. What’s key to Far Cry 4’s success though is that it uses these familiar elements to elevate its strong points rather than relying on them to compensate for personality. It’s also intensely political without overtly stating a conservative or liberal worldview. It’s obsessed with search towers and sandbox gameplay. It stars a relatively blank-slate male lead, Ajay Ghale, returning to his fictional home country of Kyrat after spending his whole adult life as an American. In many ways, Far Cry 4 is the prototypical Ubisoft game. Yet out of all Ubisoft’s many hits and misses, none quite compares to Far Cry 4.
The Tom Clancy brand tried to somehow take military fiction and not be political.
Rainbow Six Siege was almost a dud, only to turn itself around into a hit. Assassin’s Creed is practically unrecognizable. Many studios have had impressive highs and terrifyingly bleak lows, with few boasting as many of each as Ubisoft. We’re well into the first months of the 9th console generation, and with it the closing years of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.