Far Cry 3

"Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity?"

This game was sitting in my HDD for a long LONG time, finally got around to playing it. And I friggin loved it.

Far Cry 3 is an immense open world/sandbox style FPS game taking place in a tropical island. The premise is that a group of friends, while on vacation, are kidnapped on this island by pirates. The protagonist, Jason, gets free of their hold and now must try to save them all.

The story didn't interest me at first. Just felt like something tacked on to get you into the island and explore stuff. But after a while, it picked up the pace and got good. At one side, you had this quest to rescue your friends while on the other, you were fighting a psychological battle. In both ways, there was this satisfying presence of evolution and the more you played, the more apparent it became and more development the protagonist got.

The friends remained uninteresting throughout though. Would have liked it a lot if they got better development because we ARE trying to save them after all, more motivation would have been nice. It was the other side characters that help you along the way that made the story interesting. Most of them had great voice acting. Also, the villain(s) were great. I'll admit that I was disappointed in seeing that Vaas didn't had that many scenes in the game considering he was advertised like hell throughout. But whenever he appeared, he owned the scene.

Now, the island was VAST. And really dense. There was tons and tons of stuff to do around every corner. It felt really alive as well. Every where you go, you would encounter different animals going about their business. Predators hunting their preys. Pirates patrolling here and there, often fighting with the locals or other animals. This all made exploring the island a lot more fun. The side quests do get boring after a while though. It was all just, kill that pirate, hunt that animal, deliver those goods etc.

Doing missions and fighting enemies gave you experience points, which were used for upgrading your skills and making you a more proficient killing machine. You could craft syringes for various temporary boosts and for health since the game featured health bars. Different pouches could be upgraded to hold more items, ammo, etc via hunting and collecting various animal's skins. This I really liked and it compelled me to hunt A LOT early on since I found it annoying having less items on me. Also, in Ubisoft's fashion, you have to remove jammers from radio towers to unveil the map and unlock more items at the shop. And pirates controlled territories could be cleared to make places safer, which also acted as fast travel points.

Great thing about this game was that you had mostly full freedom to deal with enemies. Some times I used stealth, sometimes natural elements, sometimes I just rushed it guns blazing. Always kept experimenting with different stuff. One really annoying thing though was that enemy A.I kept firing at me even if there is a smoke/fire in between and I cannot see them. This often made me to not use fire. And speaking of fire, it was pretty dynamic. Lighting one thing could very well put the whole place on fire.

There were some true breakthrough points in the game. Two of my favourites were burning weed farm while listening to 'Skrillex' and riding a chopper with 'Flight of the valkyrie' being played. Truly awesome moments.

Graphically, the game looked good and surely had its moments. Tropical setting made for some awesome sightings. The draw distance wasn't too shabby either. Climbing a tower and just looking around always felt mesmerizing.

Soundtrack was great. It varied a lot too. Somber, sad and/or personal scenes had beautiful similar score while fighting/action scenes had fast paced adrenaline pumping music.

A great open world FPS experience. Had a lot of fun with it. Definitely a must for ever gamer.

8.8/10

An amazing game, featuring stunning visuals and game play.. Far Cry 3 is an exceptional FPS with fun mechanics and excellent characterization.. The freedom and power is intoxicating.. A new standard for the genre.. In Far Cry 3, you find yourself stranded on a tropical island, a lawless place ruled by piracy and human misery. You dictate how the story unfolds, from the battles you choose to fight down to the allies or enemies you make along the way. There are 18 radio towers to scale as you make your way through the game, each of which highlights new objectives on your map and opens up new weapons to buy at local shops, and each tower is a unique first-person climbing challenge - a peaceful ascent through a creaking spiral of steel that's fraying at the edges, revealing beautiful panoramic views before sending you back down to earth on a thrilling zip line .

I'm an old man who's new to video gaming. I wanted to see what the state of the art and all the hype is about. It ends up that I purchase 3 or 4 games for every one that I truly enjoy. I have abandoned many very popular, highly-rated games after less than an hour of play.

The Very Good: The main story is set in the present. That means: no stretches into unrealistic Sci-Fi worlds. I can enjoy Sci-Fi games, Deus Ex Human Revolution is one example, but the interminable popularity of the "Star Wars" series seems to dictate that we must endure comically-voiced robots in every futuristic game. Please.

With a very good story and superb voice acting, this game comes the closest I've found to dramatic realism -- like a good movie -- only interactive. It's still a "first person, shoot 'em up" game and requires a very high level of suspension of disbelief -- more than I would like and greater than most cinema requires -- but this is getting closer to a quality of dramatic storytelling in a game.

There exist fewer gaming clichés here. Gamers seem to hold past clichés as icons, dearly, with expectation, and here I think the developers felt a need to satisfy expectations. Fantasy/Sci-Fi seems the rule in gaming. However the very good aspects of this game demonstrate that the writers/developers were not limited by imagination or expertise. BTW, when I say the voice acting is superb I really do mean superb, at least in the main story line and among the primary and most supporting characters. Allow me repeat: Superb.

The Mediocre: The original, incidental music is mostly percussion and synth, is often repetitive and droning and is just fair overall. The licensed songs (real pre-existing songs used in the game) are generally better. That licensed music plays over certain quests or sequences and whenever you are driving a vehicle. The game takes place on a tropical island and so the licensed music gave a very good sense of location. In that vein however, I, for one, kept wanting to hear "Israelites," the 1968 Top 40 reggae hit by Desmond Dekker. One particular licensed song that makes its way into the game is a truly inspired placement though.

The Bad: For such a good game, the thought put into the side quests seems lazy, like an afterthought. Even the superb voice acting is diminished in the side quests, as though the main quest and the side quests were written by different teams or were hurried. I know, the development time and budget would have cost xx% more to integrate them more closely and realistically into the main quest. Even among all the video games I truly enjoy the lazy side quests are always apparent and sadly there is little exception here.

With that said, there is an ongoing public debate concerning "can a video game be art?" It is these things like the worn-out clichés and poor integration of side quests that will continue to make the skeptics say "No." I very much want that answer to deserve to be "yes." Soon graphics technology will advance to permit a true confluence of games and movies allowing a new and true interactive cinema. Will the game writers and developers be up to the story task? Based on the evidence so far the answer is "no" but Far Cry 3 is as good as it gets. The best motion pictures, throughout the history of cinema for example, never compromised at all but video games compromise too easily and too frequently. That is the difference between games and art and is something I wish game producers would learn.

The Bugs: Even on my 4 core, 16GB, Win7x64 PC with 1GB graphics there exist too many bugs and glitches to list. Outright crashes occur occasionally. Numerous glitches occur that require a restart from the beginning of a quest or at the most recent checkpoint. The system of one saving one's own progress is the worst I have yet encountered, nonsensical, nonexistent. The game auto saves checkpoints well enough and the game is enjoyable enough so that, although annoying, I can dismiss them. It's worth it.

Perversion: so, so many video games, especially FPSs are violent but I have trouble gauging whether the more perverse aspects of Far Cry 3 are gratuitous or not. For the most part they advance the story and create a heightened sense of dread so I'm inclined to say 'no' but this is very definitely adult material. I was somewhat taken aback at a few points and so I felt it is worth mentioning: Adult Material.

Conclusion: The cliché-ridden "Half-Life 2" is often held up as the contemporary milestone in good game development. Yes it is almost a decade older and the technological eras they were created in are vastly different but Far Cry 3 leaves Half Life and most all other games in the dust on the basis of story and voice acting alone.

As of this writing Far Cry 3 as a whole is the state-of-the-art, the best of the best. Given the long time period the Valve company has been taking in the development of Half-life 3, one holds hope for it to be another new milestone, if only Valve can escape its C3PO/R2D2 mentality to somehow find a mature story. Fingers crossed.

This review is focused completely on the story, not any game play elements. And as far as story-telling goes, this is the best depiction of the slide into insanity and/or empowerment that survival in a violent environment can bring.

The fact that the main character is a character, rather than just some first-person avatar for the player, let's the creators of the game tell an amazing story of transformation. Jason Brody starts the game out as a privileged white kid. He's the kind of guy that the majority of us would hate. And in fact, he is pretty douche-y. But over the course of the game, as he has to do more and more to save his friends he changes.

So many times Hollywood is quick to portray only two outcomes from having to fight a war, which though he is in no way a soldier is exactly what Jason does. Either you become a kill-crazy nut-job or you become a despondent, PTSD-ridden misanthrope. Jason skirts between both, sometimes questioning what it is he has become and other times realizing that he is in fact a stronger person for all that he has gone through.

It's really his reactions in this game and how he goes from simply wanting to save his friends to wanting to not only save them but also kill everybody involved in their capture that is so amazing. It really is like watching a very well written and directed movie.

The primary villain through most of the game is Vaas, and he is extremely interesting and fun to watch. He has the same kind of chaotic energy as Heath Ledger's Joker, a kind of humorous outlook and deceptively flighty attention to the world around him that makes is sudden snaps into full-blown psychotic utterly frightening. And he makes a great counterweight to Jason. You get the feeling that if Jason spends too much time on the island he could end up like Vaas.

I've never seen the psychological consequence of battle shown in this light on screen, in games, TV, or film, like this before, and it comes shockingly close to the reality of it. A little part of you does like it, and Jason shows that part. A little part of you can't believe what you've done, and Jason has those moments of panic as well.

If you don't want to play the game or aren't willing to spend $60 for a good movie, watch some Let's Plays on YouTube. It makes for a great movie night.

Far Cry 3 is an amazing open-world FPS.

Pros:

• A good story with an incredible main character and villain.
• Great open world filled with side missions and other things to do.
• A nice upgrade system that makes the gameplay more dynamic
• The guns are excellent. They sound great and are a blast to use.
• Vehicles are fun, but a little awkward to control at first.
• Good crafting system.
• Some good side characters.

Cons:

• Some of the side missions are repetitive.
• Most of the side characters aren't that great.

In conclusion, Far Cry 3 is incredible. It's one of the best open world games I've played in a while.