Archive Update: Far Cry 3

FAIR WARNING: Spoilers are abundant within, in the hopes that a real discussion of the game's subject matter may follow. If you have not played the game yet but still plan to, do not read this post.

Far Cry 3 is a first person shooter set on a tropical Asian island. Fun fact: Rook Island is located somewhat close to another fictional tropical gaming island, Panau from Just Cause 2. I haven't played Far Cry 2, and didn't get into the first game so much, so I didn't go into Far Cry 3 with the highest of expectations. Fortunately for people in my situation, there isn't any real plot tied to previous games, so there's no confusion going in. Far Cry 3's story revolves around a group of well off Americans being abducted by pirates and held for ransom before being sold in human trafficking. Players control Jason Brody as he fights to win the hearts and minds of the native Rakyat warriors and rescue his friends and family from the clutches of the pirates. Over time, Jason becomes addicted to his murderous lifestyle on the island, and eventually has to choose between the life he once led, and the life the island will allow him.

Now, I don't have the desire to try and write out a review like everyone else does, so I'm instead going to bring up a few points that I made a note of while playing the game.

Radio towers feel like Assassin's Creed's viewpoint towers. FC3 doesn't take place in the Italian Renaissance; there's no reason why Jason couldn't have simply bought a map up front to use in navigation. Radio towers also unlock certain weapons from merchants all around the island so Jason can use them for free. Ammo and accessories still cost money, but the guns themselves become free. This also doesn't make any sense to me. Merchants offer the free weapons because Jason is fighting Vaas, so why wouldn't they want to give him the better weapons earlier to promote his success? They say it's because those weapons are unavailable, but you can purchase them for a fee, so I call bullshit on that idea. And while we're talking about stores, I find the concept of vending machines with weapons to be really lazy on the part of the developer, and it makes no sense why a vending machine on an outpost that I JUST conquered knows which weapons to charge me for and which ones are free, and what accessories I've ever attached to my weapons.

Dr. Earnhart came off as really creepy early on, and I fully expected that he would cross a line with Daisy. It was really disappointing to see the doctor mellow out into a typical stoner after that first scene he was in.
Hunting is fun if you know how to spice it up. Case and point: I hunted all of the sharks I needed in the game by running them over on a jet ski. How often are sharks road kill? Pretty fucking often on Rook Island.
The game features snap aiming similar to Call Of Duty, but it's basically useless because every enemy I ever used it on immediately juked off the crosshairs and the aiming did not follow them. Often times it would snap to an enemy that I did not intend to target, and sometimes the one it chose to focus on was further away than my target.
I found it really off-putting when I was trying to be stealthy and sneak into the prison to rescue Liza and then Jason starts screaming, "I'm coming Liza!" at the top of his lungs. I thought this would tip off every guard in the area, so I go guns blazing like I didn't want to, only to discover that they didn't react to Jason's shouting at all.

The second time that Jason is taken prisoner by Vaas (the time with Liza), I found it particularly strange that Vaas didn't think to take away any of Jason's weapons. He did the next time, and even took the camera and phone away when Jason was initially captured. But that second time, I guess Vaas forgot.
The optional drug flashbacks to the earlier points of Jason's vacation were a nice touch. Seeing Jason interact with his friends when life was grand and seeing how they came to the island in the first place really helped develop his character.
The first time I saw Citra, I knew that she and Jason were going to bang. Saw it coming way early. Don't you just hate it when that happens?

I did not register for Uplay, and I did not allow any Co-op in my game. I haven't ever touched any of the online features of the game in fact. Despite this, the game at one point froze and locked me on an error message in the middle of a single player mission because my Wi-Fi crapped out and lost its connection. Why the fuck is this DRM bullshit on my console? I actually had to exit the game and start the mission over because of this, but fortunately it only happened the one time.

The Rakyat warriors are useless. It's no wonder that Jason had to come along and do EVERYTHING by himself to take over the island for them. I'm actually amazed they were able to hold outposts without losing them. It felt like they should have either needed to call Jason from time to time to help defend one, or allowed Jason to call them for support in trying to take one over. But as they were, they are completely useless.
I like how none of the cars on the entire island require keys, and nobody gives a shit when you randomly drive a car you stumble across and wreck it. Insurance premiums must be SUPER low on Rook Island.
I find it odd that enemies living on an island tend to drown when knee deep in water.
During the drug field burning mission, the terrible music almost made me rage quit the game. I'm serious, it was fucking awful.
Why does Vaas have the ancient dagger that Buck makes Jason run around the island to find when Jason finally gets to kill Vaas? Wasn't the dagger given to Citra at that point?

Playing "Flight Of The Valkyries" while blowing shit up in a helicopter was done before in Just Cause 2, which as I mentioned before is a game from 2010 which also takes place on a fictional Asian island where the main character has to shoot his way around outposts and take them over.
After saving Riley, the bad ending doesn't make any sense. Why would Jason choose to murder his friends and family after literally just getting finished with rescuing Riley? I get the rest of it, and it makes perfect sense that Citra would kill him, but I just don't see how Jason could make that decision at that point. Maybe if they'd given him a day to put the rescue behind him, but if I literally just spent my whole day saving my brother's life against impossible odds, I'm not going to undo it all by killing him in the evening.
And while we're talking about the ending, why the hell would Citra try to have Jason kill his loved ones when HE'S ALREADY ABOUT TO SEND THEM AWAY FROM THE ISLAND? I get the sever all ties angle, but it feels like this was a decision that the player should have had before Jason learned that Riley was alive, at the moment where Jason told Liza and the others that he was staying on the island.

On the more positive side of things, the weapon selection is nice. Using the bow gives you a nice atmosphere of being the underdog against assault rifles. But my weapon of choice once it became available was easily the .50cal Sniper rifle, outfitted with a silencer. Oh, you say you're wearing armor that reduces damage enough that I'll need two headshots from most weapons? Well, this isn't most weapons.
I chuckled when the Buck character was first mentioned, and Jason did the Kill Bill reference. I totally had the same thought in my head when I found out the guy's name. And then the reference became even more appropriate, making me reflect on Jason's joke from before and reassess. To Jason, this isn't a vacation or a fun time playing games; he just found out that one of his friends was just SOLD to some guy, and the first reaction he has was to make a joke about Buck liking to fuck. That's kind of sick.
There's a lot to do on the island, but most of it's repetitive as hell. Even the assassination contracts (bounties, whatever) all require you to kill with your knife. I would have liked it if they'd given different conditions or weapons at least to spice things up rather than have 25 of these missions be identical.
It's an easy enough platinum. I was able to get all of the single player trophies in one run through, and the co-op trophies are only about finishing the story. So all I need is to find someone who wants to play through it with me now, and I'll have that platinum. I do have to give some credit to Ubisoft on this subject as well. Multiplayer requires the Uplay pass, but there are no multiplayer trophies. Online co-op is available to all without a pass, so it has trophies. I appreciate that they didn't require the pass to platinum.

All in all, I enjoyed Far Cry 3. That may seem odd with so many things said above, but I really did. Rook Island got its hooks in me, and I enjoyed the ride to the end even on my second playthru. There weren't any really bad technical issues to speak of, and the voice acting was, for the most part, good. I'm going to give it a B.

What about you guys? Did you enjoy or hate FC3? Do you want to discuss any of the point I brought up in this post? Sound off below.

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