I am not a Far Cry fan. That doesn’t mean I dislike the series, it just means that I haven’t played the series. Far Cry 4 is my real introduction to the series. I do have the original and second in my Steam library with a total of 20 minutes spent between the two but other than that I went into this one completely ignorant of any storyline.

My initial impression of Far Cry 4 was good, I liked the way it started and it set the stage for me to want to know what is going on. But my exploration was short-lived since as soon as you gain control, you are thrust back into a cut scene and the story is laid out in front of you. The game actually lays out the story better than most other games at first. It’s a shame that after the first few story missions you are left thinking, “Why the hell am I doing any of this?”. The game also doesn’t do a great job of telling you that you HAVE to do some side missions to keep the story moving. I ran out of story missions and wandered around for over an hour before figuring that out.

The actual gameplay is quite fun. The weapons handle and sound fine. The vehicles take some getting used to. They don’t drive they way you would expect them to. Once I figured out how to not crash every other minute I realized why they made the vehicles drive like they do, but it’s still an annoyance. Like most modern games you can upgrade your stats and gear as the story moves along. It’s kind of a neat system where you upgrade certain bits of gear by hunting and skinning animals among other things to get material to craft. The annoying part is when you are trying to hunt certain animals and they are nowhere to be found.

The missions are short enough to be fun and most of them seem interesting. Pacing of the missions is only really broken when you encounter animals that appear to be virtual bullet sponges. Your enemies also seem to take a lot of punishment before going down. That’s a big irritant for me when playing a game.

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Ok, time to finish this “review”. I have been typing this thing for a few weeks and the reason I haven’t finished it is because I lost interest. And that sums up my experience with the game. I lost interest in this review because I lost interest in the game. I really, really want to like the game but it’s hard to do.

I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s just…meh. I will fire it up and play about 10 minutes, usually just enough time to make my way across the giant map to a mission, and I turn it off. It can’t keep me engaged for longer than that so finishing a mission seems like a chore to me.

So based off of that…