With releases like Halo 4, Medal of Honor: Warfighter and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, I went into holiday season 2012 feeling as if every shooter released was going to be yet another linear and short game where my best friend would be a man with a follow icon above his head. I was pleasantly surprised, however, with Ubisoft Montreal’s Far Cry 3. In an industry where the term “FPS” has come to mean chest-high walls and testosterone filled super soldiers, Far Cry 3 shows how a FPS can be used for a great gameplay and a solid, if at times flawed, story.
On a skydiving trip around the Rook islands, California rich kid Jason Brody and his friends are captured by a group of blood-thirsty pirates who plan on selling them into slavery. After a failed escape attempt, ending with Jason falling into a river and passing out, Jason wakes up the next day and finds that he had been saved by the natives of the island, the Rakyat. With his friends and the Rakyat at risk, Jason joins the tribe and begins the change from man to warrior to save his friends from the pirate leader Vaas Montenegro.
The gameplay is smooth, with Jason choosing from his arsenal of weaponry with a push of a button, and performs kills and moves with style. The amount of options in destroying an enemy encampment can be overwhelming, but the planning makes it that much more awesome feeling. You could snipe from afar, do a full frontal assault with a machine gun, or unleash a cage filled with tigers to kill the pirates for you. Nothing felt more satisfying than jumping off the top of a mountain, parachuting into a base, stabbing a guy in the back, and then burning everything else down with a flame thrower. However, this can be a double sided sword. After spending 20 minutes marking the guards, remembering their patrol routes, and strategically placing yourself in a position to snipe them and detonate exploding barrels all with precise timing, you can feel a little disappointed when you realize that there was a cage full of bears that would have been happy to do the dirty work for if only you had shot their cage open.
Though the story is good overall and drives the game forward, it can be strange at times. Whenever something strange happens, it feels like the game uses the trump card of “it was all part of a warrior trial” or “island magic” too often. Also, there is only one real boss fight, and even that one is overly easy. Every other boss fight is a quick-time event, where you and the person you’re fighting are transported to a different place and slowly rotate around each other occasionally slicing each other with machetes while arguing over what is right and what is wrong.
Another one of the few bones to pick that I have with Far Cry 3 is the ending. I won’t give any spoilers, but all in all, after playing an entire game of choices and decisions, the ending is brought down to a scenario where you can press L2 for one ending, and R2 for the other, and both endings basically boil down to a hero who is emotionally torn but must still choose to do what is right, or being a complete jerk. You could play through the game as evil as possible, burning friendly villagers and kicking puppies at every turn, and you can still be given the good ending and be regarded as the god of all things right and righteous, even though you had just blown a man off a cliff with a rocket before entering the final showdown.
The game feels like it is trying to have a “moral compass aspect,” with its entire story being about becoming dark and insane, and how horrible it is, but doesn’t penalize you for being dark and evil. It feels like the game is saying, “you can burn down that village if you want, but if you do, we still won’t care.” This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, giving you more of a feeling of freedom and being able to do whatever you want
Overall, I liked Far Cry 3, and loved its beautiful open world and oversized arsenal, but knew it could have been so much more with a better story and endings that actually cared about what you had done. Still, it’s a great way to pass the time inside of the exotic world of the Rook Islands.
