Far Cry 4’s first major chunk of DLC was released earlier this week in the form of ‘Escape from Durgesh Prison’. After thoroughly enjoying the main game after its release last year, I’ve been able to sink some time into this expansion. However, it’s tough to put a score on it, as you’ll soon see, so rather than write up a formal review consider this quick feature a way to get a handle on what ‘Escape from Durgesh Prison’ is all about, and whether you’ll enjoy it or not.

For starters, the DLC does not offer a new area, new villains or a great deal of new story content. It’s better to describe it as a remix of the existing campaign. Confined to the north of the original campaign’s map, you don’t actually escape from Durgesh Prison at all, despite what the title implies. The DLC’s thin story places you after your actual escape in the main game, as you are somehow captured by Pagan Min (once again voiced with aplomb by Troy Baker), in an alternate version of events. He places you on top of a radio tower, stripped of upgrades, EXP and weapons, with only 30 minutes to reach the heavily guarded extraction point on the map where rebel forces will pick you up. One more thing – checkpoints are gone and death will reset you back to the tower.

So, you could essentially consider this ‘hard mode’ Far Cry 4. Since your progress is reset back to the stone age, you have to scavenge for equipment, hunt for resources to craft with and undertake missions to unlock gyrocopters, elephants and other necessities for taking on the army waiting for you at the extraction point. A glance at the map reveals that points of interest and missions have all been reset, and most of them are rated at a ‘hard’ difficulty.

Completing missions or karma-related tasks like tearing down posters will net you a time bonus, so if you’re good enough you could work your way around the map in a single play session, gathering up enough equipment and skill to take on the extraction point’s forces within the time limit. However, despite death resetting your mission progress and your position back to the tower, you retain weapons and equipment gained. This makes tackling the challenge significantly easier if you’re up for a grind – as long as you’re OK with playing the same stretch of gameplay over and over again, then anyone can take down the final army eventually.

The best way to play ‘Escape from Durgesh Prison’, however, is obviously trying to take on the challenge in earnest. Playing carefully but swiftly, choosing your targets wisely and prioritising which upgrades you need to be able to take on the extraction point’s forces is a cool idea, but it does make for a significant challenge, unless you rely on progress built up from previous playthroughs.

At AU $11.95, I’m not sure a challenge mode and some new dialogue from Troy Baker justify the price. But then, I’m not the kind of person who relishes challenging games like Dark Souls, or setting limitations on myself for multiple playthroughs. If you’ve beaten Far Cry 4 and think you could do with a challenge, then ‘Escape from Durgesh Prison’ may appeal to you. If you’ve already bought into the Season Pass, then you can ignore all this, as you’ll be getting it anyway. Since this isn’t really a significant content update to the game, but more of a remix to appeal to a certain player base, I don’t think I can give this pack a score, but hopefully this brief rundown will help some of you decide either way whether to head back to Kyrat and check it out.