4) Gameplay (aka Shooting)
The crux then: just how good at the shooting part are they? That is, after all, what you’re going to be spending 99% of your time doing. Shooting people. Shooting animals. Shooting cars. Shooting at plain brick walls for no reason just before you turn the game off. It’s all about them guns, it is.
GTA V has a slight advantage in terms the sheer amount of weaponry your chosen character can carry at any one time – in that it’s absolutely all of the weapons on offer. Machine gun, rocket launcher, 5 ft. long sniper rifle… it all fits conveniently in your pocket. At the same time. No bad thing of course, because there’s plenty of cause to use it, and whether you’re shooting a policeman or a prostitute, the guns have a nice feedback and are just about diverse enough to hold your attention.
The first-person mode does show up the gun models to be slightly lacking something, but I’m not quite sure what it is. Certainly they’re plenty detailed, and the reload animations are perfectly serviceable, but there’s a hint of 10-year-old PC game about them that I can’t quite shake. The new view point does make it easier to aim at dogs, though.
Far Cry 4′s armory is bananas, with all sorts of weapons and modifications available to you. Unlike GTA, however, you’re limited to just how many you can carry at any one time by the amount of honey badgers that you’ve stabbed. It seems odd that those two things would be related, but they are.
You are free to swap at the great many outposts on offer though, and swap you should, because each gun is distinctly different and not always appropriate for the situation you’re currently in. Like many other games of its ilk, it does fall into the trap of thinking that a bow and arrow is the coolest weapon on the planet, but frankly, when you’ve got a giant harpoon gun and a leopard skin fanny-pack full of C4, a stick with some string tied to it should be the last thing on your mind.
Unfortunately, a bow is the only thing that will register as a “clean” kill when you’re hunting a dog.