Way back in the year when I completed Far Cry 4 and was talking about how I generally enjoyed it quite a lot, a few people told me of their disappointment. Apparently, the argument against it was that it didn't change up enough from Far Cry 3, and while it was still enjoyable, it was basically the same game.
I went backwards, but now that I've played Far Cry 3, I totally see what they were talking about. It's not so much that the newer game doesn't improve some things; it's just that it plays virtually the same. Most of the elements of 4 were core mechanics of 3. Perhaps judging which one is better depends completely on the order in which you've played them. In my case, I like 4 better, but I also played it first. For others, they prefer 3 and played it when it released originally.
All in all, it plays virtually the same way. Players run around an open world doing side quests or story missions. The things I found most enjoyable here were the same things I enjoyed most in Far Cry 4: running from outpost to outpost and radio tower to radio tower and liberating them. In fact, here more than 4, I enjoyed just exploring more than the story and side missions.
Side missions are recycled in the later game. Here, you will hunt special animals to upgrade your equipment. You will try to kill enemy captains with a knife. You will race medical supplies to specific locations. And you will run favors for a few villagers. It's pretty much the same stuff. That was always the bit I didn't care too much about in 4, and I cared just as much about it here.
The setting is different, but it isn't too much crazier. Instead of the Indian-like environment of 4, players can explore a Pacific island area. There isn't too much of a different, really. You'll still run into leopards and tigers and bears. There will also be sharks and komodo dragons though, and those guys are the worst! While not all that different, it's still different enough that preference between 3 and 4 might also just come down to which place you like more. (In my case, I liked Kyrat better than the Rook Islands.)
As for the story, it's fine. When you watch videos or see commercials for a Far Cry game, you maybe don't expect as much weird mysticism as you get. It could potentially be off putting to those unfamiliar, but it's usually pretty interesting. Players control Jason Brody, who must transform himself into a hardened warrior in order to save his friends after they are taken prisoner by local pirates, to be sold off as slaves. There's a little bit of cheesy melodrama among the friends, but the main story of Jason is fairly interesting. As he gets more involved with the native people and their effort to fight the pirates, he becomes increasingly comfortable with his role as a soldier. It makes him feel meaningful and powerful. It's pretty meta.
However, I would argue that the villains here are less interesting. They do that sort of "bait and switch" thing that I typically don't like. For the first half of the game, the Big Bad is Vaas - a crazy guy who doesn't seem to have much method to his madness. It's just madness. He's also not that great at making sure people are dead after he thinks he's killed them. After you take care of him, you move onto the "true Bad Guy," in Hoyt. He's the kingpin of everything, apparently. The problem with this is that Hoyt is behind the scenes for the majority of the game, that is, just until you have to seek him out. Vaas, meanwhile, maintains some presence in the world until you kill him. Either way, both guys are just evil, crazy people.
By and large, Pagan Min is a better, more interesting, and more compelling villain. It doesn't hurt either that 4 plays with a few more complexities to the situation (that you're fighting a crazy dictator while also one step away from splitting the resistance into two competing groups makes that story substantially more compelling). The tough choice to make here is whether you embrace your warrior transformation - which you can only do by killing your friends - or try to recover from the trauma by leaving the island with your friends all in one piece. For a mission called "Hard Choices," it really, really wasn't. If the choice had been to abandon your friends - who you just spent the entire game trying to reunite with - while they leave the island and you stay, that would have been one thing. Instead, you are expected to murder them. Far Cry doesn't give you a breakdown of choices made by the public the way that some choice-based episodic games do, but it's hard to imagine that too many people picked "Kill friends!" It's just too much of an unreasonable option. Killing them would render most of the game pointless, but it also doesn't speak to the nature of Jason's evolution to the ultimate warrior. His friends were his motivation and why he became such a fearsome soldier. How exactly would killing his friends make him even more powerful? Just seemed like a forced option that wasn't really tough at all.
Far Cry 3 is apparently a much bigger leap from its predecessor than Far Cry 4 was - and to be sure, it's a really fun game! - but for my money, Far Cry 4 has just enough improvements and is just a bit cleaner that I'd argue that's the superior game. Both are worth playing.
And if you haven't played either, it might be worth it to play Far Cry 3 first.
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