My favourite aspect of the game is the story campaign. It’s excellent. Although the plot to rescue your friends from pirates doesn’t seem very inspired at first glance, I found it gripped me emotionally and I really wanted to rescue my friends and punish the people who hurt them. I like how the protagonist starts out as just a normal guy, but finds his true self in the adversity and struggle, and yes the killing. This is a refreshing change from playing a hard as nails special forces guy. The missions are very fun and varied and have you encountering some colourful characters along the way. It’s also good and meaty, with an easy twenty hours to get through it.
It’s when you venture off the story campaign that you start to notice the game’s problems.
Initially I found it too easy, even on hard. I found little challenge from combat largely due to enemies appearing as little red dots on the mini map so you know where they are, even which direction they’re facing. This is even if you don’t “tag” them with your camera. The tagging feature is really stupid and I suggest you don’t use it, and turn “Weapon Tagging” off in the options. Things don’t get challenging until much later in the single player campaign, and you’ll finally have a need for all those perks you’ve been saving up.
The other problem is it’s too easy to accumulate money, and there’s little need for it. This is a real shame because scavenging for loot and doing jobs to pay for weapons and equipment should have been one of the most fun aspects of the game. But the potential here is completely squandered as you get your weapons for free and pick plants for healing supplies leaving little else to spend your money on.
Everything, from missions to plants, vehicles and loot containers are displayed on the map, so there really isn’t any incentive or reason to explore (this isn’t helped by the fact that the island looks the same everywhere you go). The island is littered with cool features like little shamshackle villages, caves and ship wrecks, but after a while you realise just how pointless exploring them is. You’re never going to find anything other than cash, sellable items and the pointless collectibles. You’re not going to find some cool, unique weapon or something. You might find an NPC with a quest but they show up on the map as well so you don’t have to search for them. I don’t know what they were thinking with this omnipotent map and mini map but I’ve rarely seen a game that lets itself down so badly by a single feature.
Checkpoint save system during missions, which I can’t say I’m a fan of but you can save your progress manually when you’re exploring between missions. When you load your game you spawn at the nearest safehouse or radio tower. I don’t know why they did that, I would have preferred a standard save/load system but it didn’t bother me. The radio towers expose the map when you activate them, which is cool but each one is a climbing puzzle, and they get more and more difficult. By the eighteenth I was absolutely sick of them. The safehouses can be used when you capture an enemy outpost. The problem there is when you capture one it makes a large area of the map completely free of pirates leaving no one to fight. As you can imagine that gets pretty boring. You might as well be on vacation in Hawaii or somewhere. I considered not capturing them but doing so opens up the side quests, and its fun! I considered not activating radio towers either but it made getting around too hard as the map doesn’t display the roads otherwise.
Most of the side quests are found on notice boards and are repetitive and boring. There are three different types and you’ll probably do each once or twice then forget about them. There are a few slightly better ones that you start by talking to NPCs but they are very few.
The stealth mechanics are pretty good though it’s a little too easy to lose an enemy by simply breaking line of sight. Hunting is cool, which you need to do in order to craft holsters, wallets and containers for ammo. When you start the game you have one weapon slot and can carry only a few rounds. You have to find and skin specific animals in order to craft containers. This is quite cool, I like the restriction it imposes and initially gives you a real incentive to hunt. And it’s not as silly as it sounds. “Are there no bags on the island-” You may ask. Well the main character is on a journey to uncover the warrior within himself, and he does this by becoming one with the jungle and bending it to his will, or something along those lines. One of the ways he does this is by hunting for the things he needs instead of buying them. So it is actually perfectly in line with the story.
Far Cry 3 is an undeniably cool and fun game. A good, solid shooter with an awesome single player campaign, high production values, interesting characters with excellent voice acting and good combat and stealth mechanics. The hunting and wild animal attacks are a novel and interesting feature. The graphics are about as good as one can expect from a clapped out, obsolete system like the 360. But the game sabotages itself with an omnipotent mini map, initial lack of challenge, repetitive side quests and unbelievably intrusive and annoying onscreen popups and clutter.
A brief note on the lost expedition missions; they suck.