Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Worth playing"

I thoroughly enjoyed playing this game. Centred around a tropical archipelago filled with drug runners, slave traders and angry natives who have all had a large dose of insanity added to them.

The main character, Jason Brody, is a very empty character as far as they go in these kind of stories. He's a 20(ish) year old man who seems to not fit in with the society at home and takes part in extreme sports for the adrenaline rush in an attempt to feel at place. This gives the character a lot of aspects for the player to fill in themselves. In most cases, this works if the character takes a less part in the narrative in the story, simply put, it works better if they keep their mouth shut.

Jason and his friends had gone this tropical island to have fun, basically. Instead, they get caught but Vaas and his cronies and almost sold on the black market as slaves, after being ransomed of course. However, Jason escapes and joins the natives in the fight against the pirates and that takes up the majority of the game.

The graphics are stunning and while I own the console version which has been toned down to adapt to the console's capabilities, it's barely noticeable. There are a number of features that was in the previous game, Far Cry 2 set in the African Savannah, like the way once you've bought a weapon, you have it for the rest of the game.

I'm glad to see that the stealth mechanic has been fixed and improved which makes the game much more enjoyable on the stealthy side. The new knife take down feature is brilliant, makes being stealthy much easier but sometimes it makes Jason seem too powerful. The Driving has also improved with the addition of the vehicle being able to slide. Hang gliders are back although there are helicopters present and it's a shame you can't fly one of them.

One of my favourite features is the fully interactive ecosystem that they've put into the game where you can watch predators such as tigers and dogs hunt buffalo and deer or even the player. It's really fun stalking prey and hunting in the dense jungle foliage.

My main gripe is that nearly everything that was advertised for the game happened in the first half. All the interesting characters that were shown appeared in the game much less than they seemed to imply. However, this doesn't distract from the fun of the game and it's a good game to play.

I will finish with a few words on the co-op (I've not got Gold so no multiplayer). The missions are very basic and have almost no story to them. Each of the six missions take about an hour to go through. Each player is only given a choice of four pre-determined classes which seems very limiting considering the freedom of customisation in the single player. Bullets seem to do significantly less damage also. I remember putting 50 bullets into a basic enemy before he died whereas in the single player 3 would have been enough. After a while, the missions get a bit repetitive. Every single level has a "carry the explosives to this location" and a "defend the engine thingy". By the end you're just wanting to finish and be done with it. However, they were still fun but are nothing compared to the single player.