Far Cry 3 has been my background game for a good couple of months now, and I can’t believe I’ve finally finished it. For the most, it was a pleasant experience, however on more than one occasion I’ve been tempted to simply delete it from my hard drive and call it quits
I guess a good place to start is the story. You play as Jason Brody, some rich kid who ends up on Rook Island with his mates. Rook Island is portrayed as a tropical paradise, however the inhabitants are a little…well mental, It seems everyone you meet wants to kill or torture you. Attempting to be spoiler free, in the early moments of the game, bad things happen, and you spend the rest of the game attempting to reunite with your friends, and going on a journey that puts you in contact with some very interesting characters.
Aside from the main story missions, there are loads of side missions to do. These include hunting missions, first aid missions, farming for herbs, taking over enemy bases and even the Ubisoft signature ‘take over the tower mission to reveal the map’. Non of the side quests need to be done, however if you do, they will make life a little easier for you. For example, revealing the map, will unhide potential treasures on the map, taking out enemy bases will give you a fast travel point and a vending machine to sell your loot you’ve picked up and top up your ammo. As for the hunting, killing the animals and skinning them will allow you to then craft larger ‘stuff’, allowing you to carry more ‘stuff’. One major annoyance I had at the beginning was my backpack space was only small, which meant I had hardly any room for anything, additionally my wallet was small, so ended up throwing away loot as I had too much cash. This then forced me to go hunting for specific animals so I could increase both these two to allow more storage, and more cash. As you advance you also increase specific ammo counts by upgrading other items. Collecting the flowers will allow you make various syringes, with the likes of heightened awareness, health potions and Animal replants.
The game rewards you to level up using XP, this is earned by doing missions, shooting people, with increased XP for getting headshots and stealth kills. As you level up you get to spend the level points in quite a large skill tree split into three categories The Heron, The Shark and The Spider. These equate to Long Range, Assault and Stealth. I burnt through the most of my points in Long Range and Stealth, as I found it amazingly satisfying to take out an enemy camp, without raising the alarm. My tactics would be (once I’d levelled up the weapons with silences), take out the alarm system from a distance, take out the snipers from a distance, if there was a caged animal in the camp, shoot off the lock from distance then clear up the remaining enemies with either the sniper, or get down there and do the deed with a knives. The only problem with this, is if you were detected, you normally got your arse handed to you.
As well as the main story, the side missions, there’s also a coop option, allowing you to play through a series of scenarios with up to three mates. It’s worth noting that any weapons, skills or well anything from the main campaign isn’t carried through to the coop experience, or do you get to take anything with you.
Ok, now my niggles with the game, to interact with pretty much anything, you had to hold down the square button for about half a second. There were a number of occasions I was killed from attempting to flee away in a vehicle, or attempting to grab hold of a gun turret, only to be shot down as I attempted to ‘hold the square button to interact’. A similar issue with looting, the focus seemed to be miles off. As you can imagine, I racked up quite a large body count while on the Island, and you can loot every body. I found it took at least a second or so to find the sweet spot on the body to allow me to loot, which I then had to ‘hold square to interact’. I understand that the square button was also the reload button, but holding the button became a pain. This was the same with the ‘hold triangle to heal’, last thing you wanted to do in the middle of a fire fight was holding your finger on the button for nearly a second, waiting for the animation delay, to then be healed….I ended up dead….. a lot. Finally, the story missions, majority of them were boring ‘protect quests’, and it seemed the person you were protecting were stupid and went playing in the cross fire resulting in far too many missions failed
Far Cry 3 as a whole was an enjoyable experience, the free roam, the driving, the base takeovers, the story, the characters were all pretty amazing, I just felt some of the poorer mission designs let the game down.
Approx Time taken to beat – 30 hours
Difficulty setting – Normal
Score – [Rating:4/5]
Games Trailer
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