Far Cry 3

The Rad

• A crafting system that’s actually pretty fun!
• The world’s incredibly open and full of a good variety of activities.
• The shooting is super satisfying

The Bad

• No particularly likable characters.
• Co-op is a stripped down version of the full game.

Better late than never I guess!

Finally wrapped up Far Cry 3.

I’ve still got a bunch of side activities to chip away at.

But I’ve wrapped up the story line at least.

And the narrative wasn’t particularly great, none of the characters particularly likable But they gave you decent enough justification for blowing crap the hell up. And that’s where the games strengths lie.

As far as these combat sandbox styled games go (Previous Far Cries, Crysis etc.) I’d say Far Cry 3 were the cream of the crop. And I’d say that were because of the feel of the shooting. It’s a tough thing to describe, but I’d say it were tighter than the aforementioned games. The aiming isn’t anywhere near as swimmy. It’s easy to be a super accurate, bow shootin’, folk stabbing killing machine.

There’s a couple of linear segments where you’ll be lead down a tunnel full of guys to shoot, as well as a few on rails turret sequences but for the most part the game is excellent about encouraging you to handle an encounter in whatever fashion you deem fit, whether stealthy or significantly less so.

I’ve found that the game check points really well, so you have a lot of freedom to experiment. If you botch a mission one way, you’ll be restarted pretty much right outside whatever area you were at so you can have another crack at it.

The game gives you a pretty large arsenal of weaponry, most of which can be customized at stores with money you’ve earn on side missions. Unlike most games where I found a few weapons that worked and stuck with them I actually found myself switching it up and I don’t think I ever had a weapon that wasn’t fun to use.

The bow is an obvious favorite, I preferred going the stealthy route when possible. But when the shit hit the proverbial fan I’d switch to something more appropriate and gunning guys down with heavier firepower proved fun too.

I even found myself setting traps with mines and C4 on occasion, which in most games was just a thing I found tedious but here I just found it super satisfying when you’d get it right and just a good way to kick off a rad firefight when it went wrong.

Shooting aside I think a large part of the appeal here is a good sense of movement. Just getting around in a combat encounter is great fun. Movement has a great tactile feel to it. Running from cover to cover, sliding up behind it. it just feels great.

And the game DOES have a cover system, though calling it a mechanic feels wrong because it just occurs so naturally. Simply aiming your weapon when sitting behind an appropriate object will cause you to aim over or around whatever your cover is. It’s a thing I’d like to see other first person shooters rip off, cause I don’t think I’ve seen first person cover done as well anywhere else.

The only REAL issue I take with the game is the narrative, not gonna go into spoiler territory but I don’t feel like it reaches a satisfying collusion and there were only two cool characters in the game for my money and they were both villains. The protagonist and all his buddies were just incredible douche bags. You almost WANT them to get killed.

That being said when the action is as good as it is in Far Cry 3, personally I don’t care so much about the other details. It’s a great game, maybe even one of the best shooters I’ve played in years - certainly the best as far as open world shooters are concerned, at least.