With the release of Halo 4 and Black Ops 2, you’d think that would be it for gaming in 2012, you’d be wrong because then you would miss out on, not only the best shooter of the year, but one of the years best games period!
Far Cry 3 is the perfect way to end 2012 with a bang, it delivers on all of its promises and then some, despite some mediocre multiplayer bringing it down, it is worth every penny of its 60 dollar price.
With that little intro out of the way, let’s go continue on to the review!
STORY
Despite being the third game in the franchise, the story has no ties to any of the previous entries and is entirely self contained, so you don’t need to have played any of the Far Cries to enjoy this one.
The story follows a group of young, rich, trust fund baby douche bags as they party it up in fictional setting of RookIsland, a tropical paradise in every sense of the word, perfect for wasting some cash and having some fun.
You play as Jason Brody, one of the said rich douche bags who goes to the Rook Island with his friends, brother and girlfriend to enjoy it all, from jumping out of an airplane, to getting high on 30 types of drugs, all seems right with the world…. until you all get kidnapped by pirates.
This is where you meet Vaas, the games main antagonist and one of the greatest characters in video game history, the only way I could describe Vaas is that he IS the Heath Ledgers Joker of the video game industry.
He is so evil, merciless and bat shit insane you can’t help but love every second he’s on screen, even when he’s burning down a village or shooting your brother in the neck and talking smack about you as you try to keep him from bleeding to death, you will love Vaas by the end of the game.
Jason the protagonist does start out as a whiny guy, but that’s because he isn’t come cyborg in a 40 trillion dollar super suit or a Tier 1 super soldier, he’s basically a regular guy who gets caught up in this mess and has to become a killer to save his friends and get off the island.
By the end of the game Jason becomes a badass in his own right and the evolution of his character from whinny cry baby to hero is done rather well.
What makes the story great, besides Vaas of course is how it explores the themes of insanity, this question is constantly brought up and there are a few parts where you’re high as a kite and just see all sorts of things that don’t make any sense.
You actually feel like you are going crazy along with Jason and the game makes you think about what insanity really is and what it means to be crazy.
All in all the story is full of twists and turns, interesting thought provoking themes and ideas and has the Heath Ledgers Joker of the video game industry, what more could you want?
GAMEPLAY
Far Cry 3 is a massive open world FPS in every sense of the word, theRook Island is a massive place filled to the brim with all sorts of pirates to kill, animals to skin and ruins to uncover.
It will take you any where between 20 to 35 hours to complete the game depending on your skill, difficulty and how much of the side activities you partake in, that alone is impressive, especially for a shooter in 2012.
What really blew me away personally was the crafting system, now I despise crafting in games, I find it a chore and I never know WTF am I supposed to get to make an item without going on a wiki or something, not in Far Cry 3.
The crafting is necessary because you NEED to skin animals to get better equipment, by skinning animals you can craft bigger ammo packs, wallets for more ammo and loot and holsters to hold more weapons.
If you ignore skinning animals, you will basically be stuck with one gun and next to no room for ammo or money throughout the entire game.
This sounds like a chore however hunting animals is so much fun, the animals are actually a challenge to fight and track, it takes really skill to take down the likes of a Komodo dragon out, but once you do it, you will be rewarded with some sweet skins.
This also applies to gathering plants, see in this game your health is divided into sections, once a section is completely empty, it doesn’t regenerate, and since most enemies can kill you with 4 or 5 shoots, you will need loads of medical syringes to keep you alive.
What’s great about this is that the games tells you what you need to make a better medical syringe or a better holster, so you can just mark a boar territory on your map, go there, skin some boars and BOOM, you got yourself an extra weapon space.
Another big plus for the game is that it’s actually difficult and this couldn’t be done if the A.I. was bad, and it’s actually pretty good, your enemies will constantly try to come at you from all directions and they will use all sorts of strategies to try and take you out.
However depending on how you play, this can be either easier or harder, run and gun players should not play Far Cry 3, this is a game where you have to wait and observe the enemy from a distance and carefully prepare a strategy to take them out.
Stealth is the way to go and there are so many options to kill guys using it, you can mark enemy positions with your binoculars so you can keep track of them on your mini map (they don’t show up on it if you don’t mark them) and if you disable the alarms, you can keep them from calling in back up.
The bow was particularly fun to use and there are a few trick arrows that you can make to further expand your killing options, hell you can even release animals from their cages so they kill your enemies for you.
If there’s a fault with the gameplay then it’s the first person driving, it isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just too unresponsive at points and when you’re being chased down by 6 enemy jeeps, you need good and precise driving controls or you’re dead.
All in all the gameplay is near flawless, it’s incredibly satisfying and the amount of options you are given just really impressed me.
Oh and I have to mention the PC support here, there are tons of graphical options that you can tweek around but the biggest advantage the PC version has is the map editor, you can literally make an entire new island from scratch with your own story, objectives, factions and so on, I cannot wait to see what the modding community can cook up.
PRESENTATION
Far Cry 3 is an amazing look gaming, particularly on the PC, the characters are so detailed and the facial animations are on the level of L.A. Noire.
When you climb ahigh pointand just look at the surrounding area, you can’t help but be in awe of the games sheer beauty, everything from the biggest military base to the dirt that you walk all looks fantastic.
This is the most beautiful, detailed jungle open world that has been made in a game yet, yes even better than Crysis 1.
There weren’t any memorable songs per say; however sound does play an important role in the gameplay, to track an animal you have to listen closely as they will hide from you when they sense you coming.
You need to listen to every little sound of the jungle and if you do it right, it makes your latest kill all the more satisfying.
The voice acting is all top notch, but again Vaas steals the show as his voice actor perfectly captures the characters insane and murderous personality.
MULTIPLAYER
Here’s where the game falls extremely short, I really don’t see what’s the point of having a multiplayer component in a 20 to 30+ hour single player game like this, especially since its painfully mediocre and brings the whole products quality down.
There are two types of multiplayer, competitive and co-op.
Competitive multiplayer is basically Call of Duty light….. That’s it, you just kill stuff, do objectives, get points, unlock new gear and guns to kill more stuff and do more objectives, its as generic as you can get.
Co-op is a little better but I feel that it would have been leaps and bounds better if it had campaign co-op, the story is a prequel to the main game and has you play a bunch of generic characters that got their stuff stolen by the pirates, now they want pay back.
I mean co-op is a nice distraction, but its really, really buggy, there were times when I fell through the floor, or when my team couldn’t hear me or anything for that matter, and the game crashed my entire PC twice.
So the multiplayer is as I said before painfully mediocre and completely unnecessary in a great single player game like this.
BOTTOM LINE
Far Cry 3 is the best shooter of this year and one of the best games of the year, the campaign is full of content that rivals even the biggest of RPGs, the story is fun, dark and thought provoking and the emphasis on player choice as to how you play just makes it that much better.
And yet, I wish there wasn’t any multiplayer so that I could give this game the complete, glowing recommendation that it deservers, but I just cant and I hope Ubisoft does away with the MP in Far Cry 4 so that we can get a true, 100% perfect Far Cry game.
FINAL VERDICT: A-
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