Far Cry 3 review
Far Cry 3 combines elements of open-world games like Skyrim and Ubisoft's own Assassin's Creed with the first-person shooting of Crytek's original entry in the series. In between scripted story missions, you can explore Rook Island, do sidequests, hunt animals to craft upgrades, scavenge for collectibles or whittle away at the enemy presence on the island by taking over outposts scattered across the map.These elements don't always cohere into a satisfying whole, though.
The story initially sees you looking for your friends, who have been captured by pirates lead by the charismatically unhinged Vaas. The game seems to try its hardest to make you not care about any of the characters in it by portraying them as typical privileged white kids who came straight out of MTV's The Real World. While the voice actors and facial animations do a lot to humanize them, your relationship with them is never developed to the point where you actually care about them. And the protagonist is maybe the worst of all of them, as he goes from scared shitless and out of his depth to murderous killing machine (who starts to enjoy the killing, which may or may not be taken as a commentary on you, the player) in the space of about 30 minutes of game time, talking in a supremely whiny Canadian-California accent the whole time.
As a first-person shooter/stealth game, Far Cry 3 gives the player a lot of options to tackle objectives, though most of these involve shooting or stabbing men. It's at its best and most free-form when you're taking down outposts, camps filled with enemies that can be approached from any direction. You can go in guns blazing, which will lead to enemies sounding the alarm and calling for reinforcements, or you can sneak around, disable the alarm and kill everyone without them ever seeing you coming, which will net you a hefty experience point bonus. Or if you like, you can throw so many molotov cocktails that the entire camp is set ablaze by fire that spreads somewhat realistically.
As you progress through the story, you'll unlock more abilities that you can buy with experience points, but for my liking these were trickled down far too slowly. I did a decent chunk of optional content between story missions and found myself with an excess of skill points at several points, just waiting to be used. Some of the most fun skills won't be available until you're about halfway through the game. This provides a decent carrot on a stick, but on the flip side, it's all too easy to max out the entire skill tree about two-thirds through the game, at which point experience bonuses become meaningless and sneaking around loses its incentive, as simply shooting everyone is quicker, albeit less satisfying. The best abilities let you chain knife takedowns on unwary foes, or stab a guy, then pull out his pistol and headshot everyone around you.
As a straight-up first-persoon shooter, Far Cry 3 is pretty unremarkable, fire tech notwithstanding. As a stealth game, it's more satisfying and more interesting, as each outpost can be treated like a sort of puzzle to solve. But as the game goes on and story missions force you into shooting more often than not, the game starts outstaying its welcome. It's simply too long. This is compounded by the fact that the story loses all its momentum about halfway through, and what little personal stake you may have had in it is swept away and replaced with something far more generic and less interesting. The writers make vague gestures towards there being something metatextual going on by flinging Alice in Wonderland quotes at you every now and then, but it's just posturing. They never follow through and as such, the story must be taken at face value, and I'm forced to conclude it's typical video game power fantasy nonsense. One could even go as far as to call it racist, but the story is so dumb that I have to assume any of its racist tropes are the result of simple ignorance rather than malice.
It's also too easy. Health items are practically limitless, as long as you collect all the green flowers you come across, you can craft as many as you like. Going into crafting mid-combat is as easy as going into a few menus, but it sucks all the momentum out of what you're doing. Being able to craft anywhere removes all of the challenge, and towards the end you can craft straight-up invincibility potions. The other side of crafting is hunting, which you're required to do to increase your carrying capacity for weapons and several types of ammo, as well as your loot backpack. Managing loot is such a hassle that you'll want to get the biggest backpack as soon as you can, just so you don't have to go through yet more menus to painstakingly dump individual items one by one when your pack is full. Also, you can only carry two guns by default, with the maximum being four once you've upgraded your holster. The game almost forces you to ignore the story and spend the first few hours hunting so you can craft whatever capacity upgrades you require, just so you don't have to worry about that stuff later on. It's a pretty onerous design choice. Once you've crafted your upgrades, there's no reason to hunt ever again and you'll be glad of it, too. It just feels like busywork, as if Ubisoft felt they simply had to attach some mechanics to hunting to justify its existence, so they hamstring the player at the start to make them want to hunt.
Rook Island is fairly large, though nowhere near Skyrim's size, and fast travel is made easy. It's quite a lovely place to behold too, though a bit samey. Given its size, you'd hope there would be a bit more variety, but much of the island is green hills, beaches, dense jungle and not-so-dense jungle. There's a whole second island that unlocks about halfway through, and getting there only to find out it looks identical to the first one apart from a small mangrove area is somewhat disappointing. Uncovering the foggy map is done by climbing radio towers and surveying the land, Assassin's Creed-style, after which you can zipline off of it and rush to the nearest outpost for more sneaking and stabbing, if you're anything like me.
It's the sneaking and stabbing that's the highlight of Far Cry 3. The island isn't that interesting to explore by itself, the shooting is merely average and the story is bad. But chaining stealth takedowns and outwitting the AI is quite a bit of fun. Once you've gotten all the interesting skills and you're on to the second island, there simply isn't any life left in the game anymore. The story missions discourage stealth or make it entirely impossible, and you'll just want the damn thing to end already. I enjoyed Far Cry 3 for about a dozen hours, inventory management notwithstanding, but after that it just slowly fizzles out over the course of another dozen or so hours. It becomes repetitive, rote and familiar. There's fun to be had here, but it's empty calories.
