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Far Cry 3 Review!

 

 
Overview:
 

Systems: , ,
 
Graphics
 
 
 
 
 


 
Gameplay
 
 
 
 
 


 
Sound
 
 
 
 
 


 
Replayability
 
 
 
 
 


 
Total Score
 
 
 
 
 
4.5/ 5


User Rating
2 total ratings

 

Pros


Beautiful open world, excellent acting, a true survival experience.

Cons


Lackluster multiplayer, uninspired enemy soldiers, some minor bugs.


Prepare to lose yourself in a tropical paradise as you fight against both man and nature to save your friends from psychotic pirates. Hunt and forage for the tools you’ll need to place yourself at the top of the food chain in this open-world gaming utopia.

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Posted December 10, 2012 by

 
Full Article
 
 

I went into Far Cry 3 with strange expectations. I had been looking forward to the game as a huge fan of the series, but the recent advertising campaign had me worried. It relied on the popularity of other games to catch the player’s attention by comparing it to hits like Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption. There was a chance, I feared, that the game would try to mimic those titles without securing its own identity. I can now safely say that my fears were unfounded. Far Cry 3 is a completely unique experience that pushes the boundaries of first-person shooters as Half-Life and the original Crysis did while also setting a new standard for open-world games of any genre.

Story:

You play as Jason Brody, the son of a well-off family from California. While on vacation on a tropical island with your friends and brothers, your trip is cut short when you find yourselves the prisoners of a group of pirates led by a psychopath named Vaas. You alone eventually escape into the jungle and are found by a tribe of survivors and natives called the Rakyat, who have been at war with Vaas for some time. A man named Dennis welcomes you into the tribe and teaches you the way of the warrior and how to survive in the jungle so that you might find your friends and save the island from Vaas’ aggression.

The story, while giving you ample motivation to follow the assigned missions, is by and large one of the weaker aspects of Far Cry 3. If you’ve ever seen movies such as “Dances with Wolves”, “The Last Samurai”, or even “Avatar”, you will understand the basic premise of the plot: A naïve outsider is out of his element, brought into a tribe of noble natives, and quickly becomes their hero and savior. The worn-out plot is saved mainly by excellent acting from the main cast and fantastic motion-capture, which I’ll touch on more later on in this review. Either way, it’s easy to forget about the story as you will quickly get lost in the other aspects of Far Cry 3.

Gameplay:

While Far Cry 3 bills itself as a shooter, it is so much more than that. More than anything, it is a game about survival. While you never have to worry about necessities like food and water, Rook Island makes you earn every bit of progression. Nothing is handed to you; if you want to carry more items, you have to hunt the local wildlife and use their hides to make holsters and backpacks. You will never find pre-made health pick-ups, but you can mix various plants that you find to make a wide assortment of medicines that can heal you or give you increased perception. You can buy most of the weapons in the game early on with enough money, but you can also unlock them for free as you activate radio towers throughout the island, allowing shopkeepers to stock their shelves more easily. You’ll soon transform yourself into the perfect hunter of your own design, and you can take pride in that you earned every bit of equipment and gear that you see.

Speaking of your own design, Far Cry 3 has succeeded where many other games have failed; it has made it equally enjoyable to follow different gameplay paths without overtly punishing the player for making certain choices. Early on Jason is given a tattoo on his arm which serves as the skill system. Every time you level up, you can invest a point into one of 3 trees: the Herron (long-range sniping), the Shark (mid-range assault), or the Spider (Close-range stealth) and each additional skill received will cause Jason’s tattoo to become more intricate. While each tree is catered towards a specific play style, I never got the feeling that one was considerably better than the other, allowing the possibility of multiple playthroughs with focuses on different combat styles.

Far Cry 3 offers two multiplayer modes. Competitive multiplayer offers the usual game types along with two unique entries: firestorm and transmission. Firestorm tasks a team with setting two supply depots on fire before moving on to take the final base. Transmission, however, is very similar to domination mode, so much so that I didn’t see much of a difference unless I looked at the game-mode. There is also a co-operative mode, placing four players in the roles of workers on a cruise ship who have all fallen on hard times due to their own misdeeds. After the captain of the ship sells it and everyone on board to the pirates, the players must hunt him down through a roughly six-hour long campaign across Rook Island. While the players must work together to finish the story, the game also throws in some moments of competition, like challenging the players to see who can snipe the most targets in a specific segment. Both modes share a progressive leveling system that unlocks new equipment and abilities for the player, but there is little here to make the multiplayer any more than a diversion at best.

Graphics:

Rook Island is without a doubt one of the most stunning game environments that I have ever witnessed in a video game. While it lacks the variety of locales that Skyrim had, it makes up for it in spades with the sheer level of detail that the jungle possesses. Realistically lighting shines through tree branches and creates shadows that match the sunlight perfectly while the jungle branches sway in gentle breezes or thrash wildly about in torrential downpours. Even underground, water glistens off of stalactites and stalagmites, which you will witness often as you stumble through hidden caverns which will often be found by accident. Even far-away objects look decent, buoyed by a draw distance that spans the entire length of the island, a spectacle that you will witness early on as you climb your first radio tower.

While I was surprised at how amazing the island looked, I was even more floored by how the island interacts with itself. Every creature on Rook Island is given mostly realistic behaviors, albeit with increased aggression. Tigers will hunt packs of buffalo and deer while crocodiles will wait patiently in rivers for those foolish enough to wander too close. Even when viewed from a distance, creatures will interact with one another as one might expect and will even attack pirates if they cross one another. It creates a feeling that the world exists on its own with you as an unnecessary intruder, further amplifying the sense that you aren’t welcome on the island and that your survival is based solely on your own wits and skill.

Sound:

All of the sound effects compliment the graphics to bring Rook Island to life in a meaningful way. As you walk through brush, you’ll hear leaves and twigs crackle under your feet, and you’ll often hear animals before you see them. The gun effects are also impressive, mostly due to their effect on your surroundings; when you fire a gun, the bang is loud enough to cause an echo and either scare animals away or bring pirates in closer to investigate. You’ll quickly learn to choose your shots carefully, or invest in silent attachments or stealthier weapons like the recurve bow.

The voice acting is outstanding for the most part. Vaas is by far the best performance, convincing you early on that this is a man who has lost his grip on reality yet still maintains enough of his faculties to be a considerable threat. When you meet him, you’re always on edge because you don’t know what he’s going to do, thanks to his shifts from a soft conversational tone to full-blown screaming in your face without provocation. The other characters also perform well, from Jason Brody to Dennis to even your friends who you see very little of.

It’s a shame then that the characters you meet in passing are so well done while the pirates you come across constantly are so mediocre at best. I’m convinced that all of the pirates only have one voice-actor, and the lines feel kind of phoned in. Their writing doesn’t help either, as I’m pretty sure they only have two topics of conversation: How hot it is, and complaining about various STDs that they’ve picked up. By the end I was really nervous about picking up any weapons that they’ve touched. Their dialogue isn’t supposed to be important, but they do make up roughly 70% of the voice acting that you’ll hear throughout the game unless you simply rush through the story and don’t take the time to explore. The music is also fairly forgettable; it doesn’t do the game harm, but I never got lost in the music while I explored or fought, and I’m certainly not going to be purchasing the soundtrack that I keep seeing a advertised.

Verdict:

Far Cry 3 has been using an advertising campaign that compares it to other popular games. “Like Skyrim with guns” and “an echo of Red Dead Redemption” make for handy taglines, but they don’t really do the game justice. Far Cry 3 is its own unique beast, one that has completely changed the way I think about open-world games. It lets me build a character exactly the way I want and explore an incredibly detailed world fill with life to an extent that I have not seen before. It’s really a shame that Far Cry 3 came out when it did; a few weeks earlier and it would have been a serious contender for more Game of the Year awards. It certainly is one for me.

 

 

 


JGGiant

 
Avatar of JGGiant


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