On a Friday night, just after Christmas 2014, I was surrounded by the usual gang – Jenny, Erika, and Jeff. The pangs to acquire a PS4 were getting to Jenny, and with much coercion from Jeff, I was finally dogged into taking the leap. That week, Best Buy was running a significant deal on the console, one that included a digital game. Jeff, a team member (ugh) at Target coerced me with the temptations of his substantial discounts, on top of their price matching. Needless to say, we walked away with the system and a couple of games. With Jenny and I being massive fans of Far Cry 3, the choice of a digital game was easy as there was no choice – it was Far Cry 4 all the way.

Once again developed by Ubisoft Montreal, this game is strikingly similar to its predecessor. That didn’t make it a bad game; it was just a less surprising one. As usual, the setting was a lush, sprawling, wide-open game world that offered many distractions. All together it took me about twenty hours to get its platinum trophy, so yeah it was expansive as far as single-player first-person shooters are considered and… there were multiplayer modes – enough said. Finally, the story and cast were anchored by an outrageous villain that gave Vaas a run for his money. The developers took the formula from the previous game, changed the superficial portions, got it running on the new generation of consoles and probably thought “that’ll do.” And it does.