Far Cry 4 Review
Hello everyone. So today we're taking a look at Far Cry 4
across all formats.
Now principly I've been playing this game on PC but of course
it's the same wherever you happen to be playing it. Now this is an
open world first-person shooter and so on consoles it is a 30 frames per second
presentation and Far Cry 4 Review
on PC well it's as high as you can get your PC to
cope with basically. But we found it very difficult to achieve a stable 60 frames
a second with this game
on PC at all in fact. Even on high-end quad core system Far Cry 4 Review
running a top-end Radeon GPU we found exactly the same problem.
Unfortunately at times this game really struggles to maintain that 60 frames a
second presentation.
But what a presentation it is. This is one of the most beautifully detailed
worlds
I think I've ever played in. The level of detail within the
trees and the foliage is absolutely exceptional. Far Cry 4 Review
The idea of having all of this wildlife running around as well
and the way that animation has been done for that wildlife with
the beautiful fur technique that is available on Nvidia GPUs
it just looks gorgeous in fact. So what's the plot?
Well you play Ajay Ghale, a young Kyrati
American which we generally think is around the Nepalese region of Nepal of
the world. Now the story is basically one of
well in some respects revenge and in other respects
liberation. The idea is you arrive
into this area which is being oppressed by a warlord.
Through your actions you will liberate this country
hopefully bringing the population back under
some kind of democracy. Far Cry 4 Review
Now it's all played out through really beautifully detailed
cuts cenes. These are really well animated and the voice acting is
exceptional as well. All this leads you on a
really interesting story, something that's actually quite
engaging. Maybe not gripping as such but those opportunities where you have to make
a decision between two different paths
create some of the most interesting moments in the game. I actually found myself going
back to an earlier saved file so I could play through
the other outcome just to see what would happen and that's always the great
hallmark of a game that's kind of hooked you in to its story
and made you feel like your decisions actually matter. Now the gun play here
is really solid Far Cry 4 Review
as well as we might expect from the fourth in the Far Cry series.
Now personally I was never a big fan of Far Cry 1 or 2 and 3
didn't really grab me in a particularly awesome way.
It always felt with Far Cry 3 that it was a great game but it was never quite reaching
the heights
of many other titles, the Battlefields, the Call of
Dutys. But with Far Cry 4 it really does feel like this game Far Cry 4 Review
is hitting for the stratosphere and surpassing
everything else we've had come out over this last year even my
most beloved Wolfenstein New Order feels in some ways
limited in comparison to Far Cry 4. But those guns,
the gunplay particularly, is really solid here. There's a wide variety of
different weaponry to suit every kind of playstyle from your assault
rifles to your SMG's to even hunting bows.
It's all here and including things like obviously
the rocket-propelled grenade. Now all of these weapons are really
meaty. They sound so solid and the animations are fantastic as well
when paired with big explosions which Far Cry 4 is very good at by the
way. It makes a game world which is not only beautiful to look at
but beautiful to destroy as well. Far Cry 4 Review
With such a large world map it's almost
overloaded to the point where you kind of think to yourself, ooh, there's
actually too much stuff here to do. It's a game that's very
deep and involving from that point of view, having to move across the map taking
checkpoints as well as
scouting out the towers so that you can get a better view of your surrounding area
and then multiple small missions that really add to the kind of texture of the
world but don't
necessarily drive the story forward. But it all adds to
well quite frankly a plethora of content here,
probably one of the most jam-packed games I've seen since Skyrim.
But with all that said it is
concerning that this game like many released in 2014
seem to be incapable of having a frame rate that is stable Far Cry 4 Review
above or around 60 frames a second. It does seem that PC gamers have been left out in
the cold this year
quite spectacularly really. We've been buying new GPUs which offer
a wide range of power and performance yet games just don't seem to be making use
of it properly.
They are badly optimised. If I was Nvidia or AMD I'd
be starting to get a little bit annoyed actually that the only way
that some of these games can be played is on a card
that doesn't even exist yet. Even cards like the Titan Far Cry 4 Review
cannot run some of these games released in 2014 at
a stable frame rate. Now for my mind that isn't
bad GPU or drivers, that's lazy game development.
Now Far Cry 4 suffers from this to a certain extent as well.
The level of detail within foliage and trees seems to be a major
drag down on the system performance. Whenever you wander off into the
wilderness for instance
it is more than common to see a ten or 15 frame per second drop Far Cry 4 Review
down into the 40s to 45's. It's not a game-breaker but it is a bit ugly
and at times when those kind of performance bottlenecks kick in
can sometimes be at the worst possible moment
as well. Now we've tried this game across a wide range of different PCs and GPU
combinations
from very high end cards that have been overclocked down to more modest mid-range cards.
We found the same performance bottleneck over and over again.
It just seems the level of detail is way too
high as a fill rate if you happen to be
in a wooded area. And this is obviously made more difficult when you happen to be
driving the vehicles. The vehicle's
moving very quickly and that fill buffer is filling up so quickly
unfortunately you get this well frame rate drop. Now unfortunately
or should I say fortunately this frame rate drop never goes under 30 frames per
second. It's as though there is a cap off Far Cry 4 Review
on the performance there, but it can't tear under 30. Obviously that is there for consoles but
it makes me wonder
if they could cap it off at 30 why couldn't they have optimised to cap off at 60 as well
for PC.
Time and time again at the moment PC gamers are getting screwed over and I
really do hope 2015
shows games developers that they need to provide optimisations for everyone and
that on PC
60 frames a second is our standard and is to be expected.
If you're going to release a game on PC and you can't on
mid range hardware on medium settings achieve 60 frames a second stable
maybe you should think about delaying the game and optimising it for PC Far Cry 4 Review
because guess what. You'll probably sell more copies. Now this
isn't a particular dig at Far Cry 4 which is actually one of the better optimised
games we've seen this year
but I think it's important to note that as an industry we seem to be seeing far
too many games that were
released too early unoptimised and just need a ridiculous number of patches to get
them
up to a basic quality. Far Cry 4 is certainly well worth picking up
as probably the best shooter of the year. Certainly I think it's a
very, very solid contender for all of those Game of the Year awards.
Wolfenstein New Order is a fantastic game but when you consider what Far Cry 4
offers Far Cry 4 Review
for the price point it is blown out of the
water. Far Cry 4 is the best shooter of the year
bar none. Thanks for watching
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