This is the premier shooter of the year. Open world junkies should take note. This is my GOTY
Hells to the no.
This game distinguishes itself among all other shooters from the moment the single player game starts. The game starts with a lovely juxtaposition between the characters' introduction via a series of films of their hijinks and ridiculous antics on a trip around the world, and the fact that you are actually watching that intro on a mobile phone held by the game's unbelievably terrifying antagonist, Vaas. He torments you, and he goads you. He is a slaver, and you and all your friends were captured by Vaas and his slaver group. As it goes, they are going to ransom you and your friends, and then sell you into slavery anyway once they get the money. They're a bad bunch, and that setup alone is all the motivation you need to hate these guys. After a short tutorial that sees you and your brother attempt to escape the compound only to be discovered, the game forces you into survival mode quickly. Vaas tells you to run. So run. What follows is one of the most pulse-pounding action rides of a introduction in gaming history. You run through the woods, dodging all manner of wildlife, gunshots ringing around you chopping through the brush. Helicopters flying overhead, casting shafts of light through the trees, all while you are in very real danger. While crossing a rope bridge and attempting to escape, a helicopter cuts the rope bridge with gunfire, and you plunge into the water below, certainly dead. The screen goes black. Then those words appear: "Ubisoft Montreal Presents." Dear god, what a fantastic intro.
What follows is possibly the greatest open world shooter experience to date. The island itself is the star of the show, although Ubisoft definitely stepped up their storytelling in this one. Aside from Vaas being a compelling and amazingly fleshed-out character in his own right, there are a number of other great and memorable characters as well. There's Dr. Earnhardt, the botanist who sells (and uses) powerful drugs and narcotics. Then there's Buck, the sicko who buys one of your friends as a sex slave and forces you to do a series of tasks for him in order to get your buddy back. And there's the absurd CIA agent who feels like he has one foot in the 1960's and another in a different world entirely. They all feel memorable. They're voiced very well, although Vaas is by far the most undeniably brilliantly animated and voiced by a longshot. Interestingly enough, the protagonist, your Jason Brody, is also a fantastic character. What's impressive about Jason is that he starts the game as kind of a whiner who feels victimized by his circumstances. By the end of the game, he is a confident and somewhat detached killer who has become cold and numb to all the killing. He actually progresses in a believable way, and it's refreshing to see a character change in such a way. There are a couple moments where he shrugs off some pretty disturbing trauma that would mentally cripple any normal person. One could easily explain it away by saying that he has become numb to his emotions, but when he says that it was harder than he expected, it can feel a little shallow, like the emotional impact was supposed to jar the player, but those moments can detach you from the experience a tad. Granted, it's difficult to engineer true emotional involvement in a video game, especially a shooter, but the game is largely successful in this endeavor, with only a few slip-ups.
Ok so then there's the graphics. This game has graphics. While perhaps not quite as impressive as Crysis 2's particle effects and density, FarCry 3 is every bit as wondrous as anything I have ever seen, console or otherwise. The PC version has a painful tendency to hitch and stutter, but that appears to be an optimization problem, rather than a problem with the game itself. I'm running with a Phenom ii X4 955 Black edition and a Sapphre HD 7850 Overclock Edition GPU. My rig should be able to handle this game better than it is, but with new drivers and patches coming soon, I am not all that worried about optimization in the future. The experience as a whole is enhanced to absurd levels by the graphical immersion. Even with the technical hitches, the PC version is vastly superior to the console ports. I have had occasion to play the Xbox 360 version of the game as well, and while the experience from a mechanical perspective is identical, the 30FPS maximum and lack of any DX11 support on consoles leads to a somewhat truncated visual experience. The console version is still a must-play if it's your only option, but those with a decent rig should grab it for PC. Even on lower settings, this game is dressed to impress, and you will constantly find little things that continue to surprise you even forty hours into the game. Story sections that involve underground temples will send your jaw toward the ground. Yes, it's that good.
As with any game, all of this would be meaningless if the game weren't fun to play. Well, it is. The gameplay is one part Skyrim, two parts Call of Duty, and a healthy dose of the FarCry you know and love. The gunplay is fluid and the controls are tight. I am playing with an Xbox 360 controller (as I do for most PC games), and the controls map perfectly (they're identical to the console versions). You're not going to have any problem playing, whether you are a mouse-and-keyboard player or you prefer the sticks. The game uses all of the shooter standby elements like aiming down your sights, lobbing grenades, and silent takedowns from behind. But the perks system and skill tree feels lifted right from an RPG. This is a huge boon to gameplay. I am more of a stealth player (I use mostly silenced weapons), so I take most of my perks from the Spider skill tree. There are lots of good perks to choose, like moving faster while crouched, gaining more health slots, or even using the knife of the hapless soul you just killed to kill another unsuspecting baddie, to even being able to drag bodies immediately after performing a stealth takedown. They're all great, and the progression makes sense within the game. You start as a clumsy nobody with no combat experience, but as you get better at killing, you will be reloading faster and moving quicker, and getting better. In a story of personal development like this, I am glad that there was care and thought put into this system. Once again, the island proves to be a standout for gameplay as well as aesthetics. Like the FarCry you know and love, skulking through the forests is usually preferable to walking along the roads, as slavers patrol their territories very carefully. But the forest is just as dangerous. A Komodo dragon, tiger, or even a bear may be lurking behind a tree or in the tall grass. They're easy enough to take down from a distance, but up close they can be a bit tough to manage. This really lends a sense of danger to the wilderness. There is an entire ecology on the island, and a lot of it is quite dangerous. But those animals are as much a threat to your enemies, and in more ways than one. There is a crafting system in the game, and while it is quite basic, it's satisfying a surprisingly believable. In order to craft syringes that restore health or boost your hunting and survivability, you have to collect plants that grow around the island. That's easy enough. But to craft new backpacks and weapon holsters that allow you to carry increasingly more items and weapons, you need to kill and skin specific animals. It's a cool mechanic, even if it's not all that believable. I'm pretty sure that I could just use tapir leather for just about everything, but the mechanic is there to encourage exploration. You can unlock more weapons at shops by climbing radio towers scattered across the island a-la-Assassin's Creed, and doing so will populate areas of your map. You can also liberate outposts by killing all the slavers at the outpost and that brings it under rebel control, which makes the area around that outpost much safer, with fewer slavers patrolling the area. In contested areas, you can even stumble upon firefights in progress, and you can jump in and assist or continue on your way. You can participate in racing leagues, poker games, and side quests that involve hunting rare animals in specific locations, or killing specific pirates with your knife. There's plenty to do, regardless of your taste.
On the gameplay side of things, not everything is lovely in paradise. One of the most glaring gameplay issues is the boss fights. They take place in these odd, trippy environments with floating TV screens and a pinkish-purple color palette. The boss fights themselves are heavily-scripted quicktime events that look spectacular, but ultimately disappoint. The fights are over quickly, and they don't have the impact they could have. Also, by zooming in with a rifle scope or your camera, you can tag enemies and see them through walls or obstacles. It feels a bit out of place, although it does let you plan ambushes accordingly. Despite these shortcomings, the gameplay works out very well, and is surprisingly well-balanced.
FarCry 3 is my nominee for game of the year. Not just because the gameplay is tight and solid, or because the graphics are intoxicating and visually stunning, and not even just because the story is relatable with genuinely interesting characters. No. It's not because of any one of those things. It is because it does all of them, with the experience honed to such a fine edge that you will be left wanting more and more each time you play. And with the promise of optimization and updates for the near future, as well as DLC on the way, this is one that will give you significant bang for your buck. Aside from just value, the game itself is an experience that was clearly a labor of love, and succeeds where the single-player experience is concerned. I cannot recommend this experience enough. Whatever your console of choice, this is the premier game for the holiday season, and deserves to be played and replayed.