Far Cry 4 preview: I'm not good at sneaking

I had a lot of fun playing Far Cry 3. It’s basically my favorite kind of shooter; the open world gives you the opportunity to approach situations however you choose. I’ll give the Call of Duty series some credit for its excellent set pieces and snappy controls, but I don’t like being funneled.

Naturally, I was excited to get a chance to take Far Cry 4 for a spin at PAX. The Ubisoft shooter, which will be available this November, is set in a fictional part of the Himalayas, and the demo I played was took place around a mountainside fortress that had traces of Indian, Tibetan, and Nepalese architecture.

A Himalayan adventure

At the beginning of the demo, I was given a choice: did I want to go in guns blazing on the back of an elephant, attack from the sky in one of the game’s gyrocopters, or try to sneak my way in using the game’s new crossbow and a silenced sniper rifle. I chose sneaking. I always choose sneaking.

Once I’d selected my loadout and sat through a surprisingly-long loading time, I was dropped in front of the fortress. I immediately moved behind some cover, zoomed in with my sniper rifle, and picked off a guard I could see on the fortress’s elevated wall. He went down silently, and no alarms were raised. Success!

I pressed on, but the walls were too high to climb, and the front door was sealed. So I climbed across massive boulders along the fortress’s right side, looking for an access point. When I got to the back, I found one: a small crack in the back gate was left ajar. Bingo.

I pulled out the crossbow and started silently sniping people through the gap. It went well at first, but I got cocky and tried to take out two soldiers sitting on a bench opposite me in quick succession. The second one was wearing body armor, and survived my first arrow. I killed him with a quick follow-up, but not before he raised the alarm.

(See: The hidden message in Far Cry 4′s cover art?)

In Far Cry 4, as in Far Cry 3, enemies who spot you will call for reinforcements. I was now up against half the base, an incoming squad of new enemies with a jeep and a mounted machine gun, and a helicopter. Abandoning all pretense of stealth, I rushed into the fortress, going Rambo on a few guards with my crossbow before tossing it in favor of a dead guard’s machine gun.

With the help of the machine gun (and some very manly cowering in a shed while desperately healing myself), I was able to clear out the foot soldiers, but the helicopter was another story. It circled the base relentlessly, and I didn’t seem to be able to do much damage to it with my machine gun. Eventually, I tried to take it down with the mounted machine gun on the enemy jeep, but that left me too exposed. My Himalayan adventure, alas, ended in the game over screen.

Conclusions