Have You Played... Far Cry 4?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every weekday of the year, perhaps for all time.

Far Cry 2 is the cool Far Cry game to like, and it's certainly the most interesting and coherent, but if we're measuring in pure silly joy then Far Cry 4 beats it every time.

You will not be pinned, back to the wall, with a jammed gun, an approaching wildfire, a flaring malaria infection and a grenade rolling back down a hill towards you. But you will be infiltrating umpteen neatly designed outposts using gyrocopters, bow and arrows, or magical animal powers. You will be wingsuiting from beautiful mountaintops and riding on the backs of friendly charging elephants. You can and should be doing all of these things in co-op, which integrates seamlessly with the same open world as the singelplayer.

Far Cry 4 suffers from many of the same plot and story delivery problems as its predecessor Far Cry 3, but it hardly matters. Your co-op partner can hang from the bottom of your gyrocopter on a rope, which is useful to no one but entertaining to all. That same rope can be used to scale cliffsides, in a process you'd expect to be linear or scripted but which is in fact physically simulated, allowing you to swing and kick off from the rock face like a bounding buffoon. There's little that's original here, but what's new is delightful. It's hard to begrudge.