If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. Learn more.
Note: The following review does contain spoilers for Far Cry 3. Reviewed for Xbox 360.
There is a point when you've played enough video games to be able to come to a snap decision about a game, ten minutes into playing it. While this sometimes backfires, generally your first gut reaction to a game is the right reaction. Yes, some games have longer introductions than ten minutes, though many hop right into the game. I'm not very patient. I want to play a game, not watch a movie. This is probably why I don't review too many games. Yet, while Far Cry 3 seemed to be starting off slow, I was soon running through the jungle, bullets on my heels.
I reluctantly accepted a late review copy of Far Cry 3 from Ubisoft, not having particularly enjoyed Far Cry 2 which was lacking in several departments as far as I was concerned. The second installment had some good minute gameplay details, like having to stave off malaria and using tall grass as cover, but overall the game didn't immerse me as I thought it would. Far Cry 3 did a much better job of this immersion, by creating a world just as lush as the previous game, but with more of those details (and more sunshine and weather) to make it that much more real for a first person open world game. Yet at the same time, so much of the narrative of the game was forced down my throat that by the second half of the game, I just wanted to move on, but didn't.
The narrative is thus: you play Jason Brody, a collar popped white beta male on vacation with your brothers, a stoner and a couple girls. You all are skydiving and get off course over Rook Island. I'll get into the conflicting genealogy of the island itself in a moment. You wake up in a cage with your older brother, being lectured by the main bad guy (for half the game), Vaas. Welcome to the slave trade. Long story short, you escape, your brother dies and you are taken in by the rebels on the island. The story is cliched and has been done a million times before, yet, what is different? Oh, that's right, you are a beta male. You are scared. You express this trepidation and fear. You suck at shooting. You don't want to kill, but you do if you want to save your friends. This is where the game has two choices. Either let you, the player decide the mental state of the character through his questionable actions, or tell you exactly how to feel through cut scenes and dialogue. Sadly, the game takes the second route.
Lead writer Jeffrey Yohalem told Penny Arcade Report that "the story is itself something that can be solved, like a riddle. What makes me sad is that people don't engage with playing the riddle, trying to solve the riddle. It's like a scavenger hunt where people aren't collecting the first clue." Yes, he quotes Alice in Wonderland numerous times, the island is called "Rook" and the character slowly gets better at killing and starts to enjoy it. Gee, thanks for clearing all that up. Unlike my entry for game of the year, Spec Ops: The Line, Far Cry 3 makes no real effort to be mysterious and psychologically troubling. Instead, you are told that "gee Jason, you sure have changed. Yup!"
The article cited above says that Jason's trip down the rabbit hole "won’t be obvious to players unless they try to actively hunt for clues and pay attention." I'm not sure if the reviewer even played the game with that statement. Not only is it painfully obvious what is happening, but the game literally tells you at certain points, through interactions with other characters, what is happening.
There is a point when you return to the cave where the girls are hidden, near the middle of the game. Your girlfriend takes you aside and calmly tells you that she's worried about you, the game once again telling you how to feel through character interactions rather than your actions defining you. The emotion holds no weight, as she basically gives you an "atta boy" on the cheek and sends you back out into the wild, to possibly die. Or perhaps she knows you can just restart at the latest save point. Either way, instead of showing terror, fear and horror at the hell she's going though, it's "now go back out there and get 'em" not "please don't go, I don't want you to die!" She does make note of Jason's magical tattoos, I just have to wonder if he's still got his polo tucked in.
So that's the story in a nutshell, Jason has got to save his friends, in the meantime changing from beta male to alpha male and meeting one crazy person after another. As mentioned, the bad guy for the first half of the game is Vaas, a truly mad island dweller running a small army and ferrying drugs. He's nuts, and this character is well fleshed out and fun to watch. The interactions are forced though, as they have to be, since he can never seem to just shoot you in the head, well, fatally at least. The rebels, the Rakyat, are conveniently led by Vaas' sister Citra who seduces Jason to be a great warrior for the clan by plying him with hallucinogenic drugs and boobies.
Here's what the game designers must have been thinking about Vaas, who was a great character but totally wasted. So let's have him capture Jason, several times and instead of just putting a bullet in his head, attempt to kill him in some indirect fashion. That way, Vaas can be in more scenes later in the game, repeating the same type of action, which is the definition of insanity - thinking the outcome will be different. Of course, the game would end if Vaas would just carry out this task with any level of competence, but then Vaas is a much more engaging and creative character than Jason. After Vaas is dispatched halfway through the game, he is replaced with a CIA agent, who is on your side but has lost it; a crazy Australian who has purchased one of your friends (I couldn't wait to kill this guy) and eventually Vaas' boss, who is doing a bad Tony Montana impression.
The worst part about the character interactions though are the AI characters. Your Rakyat compadres are limited to about three different lines, which you get to hear over and over and over. Same for the bad guys, which shift from a gang army to privateers, both with different uniforms but the same behaviors. The AI does know how to use cover, and there are patterns but there was also a delightful randomness to the game as well. Many of the liberation missions (free the fort) required a bit of stealth (optional). Mark your targets, plan your attack, then watch through your sniper scope as a tiger comes out of nowhere and kills everyone. Only happened a couple times, and sometimes I was the one who got mauled to death, but totally worth it.
Similar to the type of open world environment presented in Just Cause 2 without all the ridiculousness and cities and giant bases... okay, just the lush jungles, Far Cry 3 offers up Rook island as a South Pacific island with tigers, bears, giant turtles, birds, komodo dragons, goats, old Japanese WWII installments and underground caves full of ancient Chinese relics. This island is an archeologist's dream. Pretty sure most of the species on the island wouldn't be on one island together, and pretty sure that with the population of the two armies you single-handedly destroy, they would be extinct on the island anyway. Oh, yeah, and you can totally shoot sharks. That was pretty awesome.
So you spend the first half of the game hunting to build better equipment (you have to skin animals to craft stronger backpacks and so on) and learning how to make magical syringes to give you health, hunting and fighting abilities and so on. I say and so on because out of the 10+ available syringes, I pretty much only used the health one. You earn skill points from completing missions, finding cool stuff littered across the island and killing bad guys via headshots and takedowns. When you get a skill point, you unlock a skill and get a new magical tattoo. Then you listen to another AI Rakyat warrior say "this is all me" after you just took out an outpost, by yourself. Between that and the Assassin's Creed type synchronization from the tops of radio towers, in which you see all the tin shacks and goat farms around - not as beautiful as the views in the AC series - I was rolling my eyes a bit.
The great thing is, by the middle of the game you've spent your time skill leveling up, crafting all your weapon holsters and larger wallets, unlocking all the weapons and making your magic super power syringes. Unlike many games, which start you out with all the shoulder muscles and power-ups you'll need, Far Cry 3 adds this tiny RPG element to really make it worth it getting to the second half of the game. Now with more health bars, a more specialized skill set and the most powerful weapons, you can spend the second half of the game punishing some fools for kidnapping your friends. You are the jungle. Or so the game wants you to think. As the game informs you through his psychotic laughter while burning bad guys during a mission, Jason begins to prefer - nay, enjoy - killing as you delve further into the game. Kind of like Carl.
Narrative aside though, this game was fun. The scenery was well done, specific and tropically delicious. The small details like emerging from a dark cave and watching your vision adjust to the light, or realizing that jumping from a cliff that is too high to jump from will kill you - change how you play the game. You tend to be a bit more careful, especially when it comes to run and gun tactics. This certainly doesn't work early on, and the enemies do get a tad harder as you progress. Killing them was fun though, because the game really made them deserve it. The scenes with Citra, where you had to fight your delusions, were a nice twist to the regularity of the missions, generally a series of connect the dots before getting to blast a bunch of bad guys.
The campaign sets you through jungles, beaches, underground caves and ancient temples. Travel is made easier through fast traveling to save points, and the mechanics of gun play (and especially bow and arrow play) are well constructed and clean. I didn't get a chance to check out the multiplayer, but I hear good things about it. This review is long enough as it is.
I wouldn't say the gameplay was flawless, with an open world FPS you never can. Driving was difficult, as you have no peripheral vision, but hell, at least it wasn't linear like Call of Duty. You didn't have to run to the next mission. You could hunt, go find some treasure, go climb a broken radio tower or go liberate a camp. The island seems deserted at first, but as you clear up the camps and do the side missions, the populace returns to their tin shacks and goat farms. Eventually, you, Jason Brody, polo shirt wearing savior of the island get to make a choice whether you stay with Citra and her penchant for public nudity or go with your idiot friends (who rebuilt, rather than stole a boat). I won't ruin that bit for you, since there are two endings to the game, but really, it doesn't matter. The game knows which one you are going to choose, because that's the one it led you to, like a tiger on a leash.
WIRED Great gameplay for an FPS. Lush open world full of places to explore and kill things.
TIRED A forced narrative and killing off the best character halfway through the game kind of lost me on the story.
Far Cry 3 is available now at Amazon.com
Images: Ubisoft
