From the immersive story to the detailed tropical environment, Far Cry 3 definitely stands out in the first person shooting genre.
You play as Jason Brody, a twenty-something lad on a holiday on ‘Rook Island’ with his friends and two brothers. Jason, his brothers and his friends are all captured by pirates. The pirates’ leader, Vaas, is a ruthless SoB, but a fantastic character in terms of dialogue and appearance – he’ll be difficult to forget. The pirates aren’t the only faction on the island, albeit they do collaborate with the ‘Privateers’ in the entire drug smuggling and manufacturing even though they have different turfs. The leader of the privateer’s, a man named Hoyt, is another ruthless and intelligent criminal. The game starts off by you trying to find and save your friends, but eventually you get caught up the antics of the island that you fight to take down Vaas and Hoyt with the help of the Rakyat (the final faction on the island – the good guys, per say), and their leader, Citra.
Aside from the main storyline, there is a LOT you can do. There are side missions, supply drops, collectibles to be found, etc. As expected from an open-world game, the map is big. Really big. The map needs to be “unlocked” bit by bit by activating radio towers. There are 18 in total and after the 6th or 7th one, activating them gets a little repetitive and down-right frustrating at times. But, after you do activate all 18 of them, you have the entire beautiful world of Rook Island to explore. As mentioned, the map is really big and it can be tedious to navigate from one point to another. Fortunately, Far Cry has a feature of fast travelling to and from certain points. These points also need to be “unlocked” by stealthily taking over the bases of the bad guys spread across the island. Taking over the base without triggering the alarm is thrilling and very satisfying – and if by chance someone does spot you, just switch to Rambo and shoot a few small waves of enemies. Either way, it is a lot of fun.
The terrain of Rook Island is fairly mountainous and so more often than not, you’ll run into a steep slope that you just cannot walk up. This gets incredibly annoying because when you are trying to get to a location that’s really not that far away, but it’s atop a steep slope, you’ll have to navigate around the slope and find another way up. It gets pretty frustrating at times and especially because setting a waypoint does navigate you there with roads and paths and stuff, it just points you in the right direction and you got to find your own way there. But I think they’re fixing this is Far Cry 4 by adding a grappling hook, which would’ve been extremely useful here too.
Rook Island has a pretty impressive variety of animals residing there, animals that you’d expect to find in a tropical region and a few more. It’s up to you to hunt as much as you want, but the game pushes you to hunt and skin the animals to improve things like the amount of weapons, cash, loot, etc. you can hold, which I thought is a genius way of making the player explore the map, and the game, and improve the character in other ways than simply levelling up. The level up system is also really cool in my opinion, you gather skill points by performing various tasks and you spend them to learn new skills, such as; new takedowns, better health, etc. Each new skill learnt adds a ‘Tatau’ (tattoo) on your arm – the more tattoos, the better the Rakyat warrior you are. Learning all the tattoos is incredibly satisfying, looks cool and you get an achievement. What more do you want?
A couple of times during the course of the game, you’ll be drugged which leads you onto some sort of psychedelic self-realisation dream in which you have to walk down a path and scenes relevant to the story play in a unique manner around you. That’s probably the best explanation I can give for what that is, but only when you experience it do you realise how cool it actually is. And the wingsuit. Oh, the wingsuit. The amount of fun I’ve had climbing to the top of a mountain and jumping off to glide as far as I can before deploying a parachute and landing to safety (or not to safety, up to you), is ridiculous. The only problem is that you only get the wingsuit half way into the game, I probably would have spent a lot more time gliding around if I got it sooner.
Stealth is a massive part of the game, whether it is to take over an enemy base or you’re hunting for people/animals, you’ll find yourself kneeling and hiding in the bushes through a lot of the game. The people at Far Cry really did a great job to make the stealth parts of the game incredibly fun and extremely satisfying. The way the game shows you how easily you can be detected is very easy to understand and it is vital at certain points not to be seen, so this tool becomes very very useful. When performing a stealth mission, you have a camera to find and tag the enemies, so that they show up on your hub and you can see the direction in which they’re looking at – making it easier to move around with being seen. If, however, they are looking in your direction, you can throw a rock to distract them while you move into a more convenient position. Then, BAM! perform your takedown and/or combine them with other takedowns, combining takedowns is honestly one of my favourites parts of the game – it’s just too much fun.
There are a couple small annoyances in the game. For example, the weapons hub used to switch between weapons is not difficult, but it is a little awkward in terms of pointing the joystick the precise location of the weapon. A slight angle her or there seems to make the game think you’re pointing at another weapon. Maybe that’s just me, but I feel that the weapons’ hub can be improved upon. Also, when performing a stealth mission and you’re hiding in the bushes waiting for the right moment to attack, you’ll overhear conversations the bad guys are having with themselves or another bad guy. These dia/monologues get very repetitive and gets old very fast, but I guess it’s good in way to make you want to kill them more quickly and aggressively.
I just want to touch on the co-op part of the game to say how ridiculously hard it is. Basically the co-op is an entirely separate entity from the main campaign in which you and up to three others fight your way through waves and waves of enemies to complete a series of missions. They get very repetitive and are extremely tough sue to the sheer number of enemies that sometimes attack. It would be a lot better if you could change the difficulty of the co-op levels, and maybe have a better story with the characters on that end.
The superb story backed by unorthodox but perfectly suited background music really puts the game at the top of everybody’s charts. You’ll be caught up for hours on end trying to exact revenge on Vaas and kill Hoyt. I tried not to give too much away in the review, because everyone should buy it, play it and experience it without knowing too much beforehand. It’s one hell of a game.
Gameplay: 9/10
Story: 9/10
Music: 9/10
Overall: 9/10