Far Cry 4 review: such great heights

"It’s just more Far Cry 3!" Well, yes, in a way, you're right. No wheels have been reinvented here: Kyrat, a mountain nation nestled in the Himalayas, is a sprawling piece of land for you to hunt, kill and climb your way through. There are outposts to conquer, towers to climb, a near-infinite supply of valuables to filch.

But this convenient yet misguided shorthand becomes instantly less useful once you actually find yourself submerged in Far Cry 4: This is a bigger, better, braver version of an already fantastic thing and that’s awesome.

So what's new, different and better? A lot of it tracks back to Ajay Ghale, the young man making his first journey home to Kyrat, which he fled as a child during a civil war.

Far Cry 3 got a lot of heat for its reliance on the problematic "white savior" trope, but I found myself far more distracted by the fact that Jason Brody was sort of a chuckleheaded dipshit. Ajay isn't. He's got ties to this land — his father founded the rebel group The Golden Path, which attempts to overthrow despotic king Pagan Min — and he's returned with the noble goal of spreading his mother’s ashes in the country she loved.

Perhaps the best thing about Ajay (and this shouldn't be such a rare compliment in a game made in 2014) is that he actually sounds like a human being. That extends to all of Far Cry 4's characters actually; I cannot tell you what a relief it is to hear lines being delivered in a naturalistic fashion that don't sound like they were squeezed out right before the recording engineer took his union-mandated break. Some superlative performance capture also helps Kyrat's inhabitants feel like real, actual people.

The gadgets and gizmos aplenty are, of course, ostensibly provided to help you take down Pagan Min, and the missions that form the path to that point are excellent. What they lack in the open world's flexibility, they make up for with variety and pyrotechnics. One minute, you’re scrounging for oxygen tanks in the Himalayas as you hide from enemy soldiers in a blizzard, the next you’re stunting an ATV off an airstrip so you can soar into a plane with your wingsuit.

Straying from the critical path a little provides even more outlandish scenarios for Ajay, like a series of drug-fueled hallucinations with loquacious stoners Yogi and Reggie, or traveling to Shangri-La to inhabit the body of an ancient warrior who bids a spirit tiger do his killing for him. Far Cry 4 is many things, but it is never boring.

If anything, there’s perhaps too much to do. Beyond the missions and side missions, there are side-side missions like destroying Pagan Min's propaganda centers for pirate DJ Rabi Ray and hunting rare animal skins for flirtatious clothing designer Mumu Chiffon.

Then there are more generic side-side-side missions where the people of Kyrat beg you to avenge a family member, rescue a friend or deliver supplies. These are distinct from à la carte objectives like outpost takedowns (excellent) or liberating radio towers (fun, but more mechanical).

The funny thing about it is that Far Cry 4 doesn't need to artificially inject its world with diversion; it's organically being created all around you. Perhaps the most captivating, yet least obvious evolution from its predecessor is the way Far Cry 4 uses roaming soldiers and wild beasts to make the world feel alive. Who needs to go poster-hunting when a tiger and a bear just got into a fight 10 feet in front of you?

These unpredictable threats can be frustrating, like when you turn from your comfy sniping perch to find a pack of wolves ready to tear your throat out. But even when it turned a perfect plan sideways, Far Cry 4's unpredictability did a fantastic job of drawing me in.

It's a world I was delighted to lose myself in and moments after my last confrontation with Min, I was eager to hop right back in and finish all those side, side-side and side-side-side missions I had left hanging.