Far Cry 3

**Another one of them posts I wrote and then never actually posted...enjoy!**

First things first, I have discovered in my time playing video games that straight first person shooters are not really my thing.  They get pretty boring to me when all it comes down to is shooting people with various weapons that really all do the same thing just with different firing rates/sights/etc.  Point is, most of the time I'm not a fan.  Which also means that while I went into Far Cry 3 with open arms, it had that bias running against it.  Did the game shine through despite it?  Read on.

What really got me hyped for Far Cry 3, having never played the other two, were the story trailers with your main nemesis Vaas.  It looked to combine psychadelic, surreal story elements with the versatility of combat and strategy that Far Cry is known for, along with a villain that was creepy in the most sinister kind of way.  And on those fronts, it (mostly) delivered.  The story is an unfortunately predictable but nevertheless engaging look at Jason Brody, a man who went on an island getaway with his brothers, girlfriend, and other friends only to get captured by Vaas and his pirates to be sold for ransom.  After an intense initial tutorial, you escape and find yourself in league with a resistance force of island natives, trying to rescue your friends and family no matter the cost to your own sanity and identity.  Unfortunately the overall plot wanders quite often, as it is wont to do in first person shooters, with many missions serving as simple excuses to give you more to do or take you to different parts of the island.  However, in its meandering it does also come across some quite emotional and gripping moments, as well as some missions that are just plain fun (aka the flame thrower vs. marijuana fields mission) and these moments tend to make you forget the rather boring things they were just having you do.  I guess this is where my bias against first-person shooters shows itself.  To FPS fans, all of these missions may be quite engaging, especially when left to your own devices about how to infiltrate a stronghold and eliminate a target without setting off any alarms.  To me, though, it all just came down to shoot this, shoot that, go here, do this, then shoot this guy, which means my enjoyment of it rested on the plot, and with the plot being so inconsistent it was hard to fully enjoy the experience.

In all other aspects Far Cry 3 is a solid game.  It cleverly introduces some RPG progression in the form of tattoos which boost various abilities in three skill trees (Heron for long-range and movement, Shark for combat, Spider for stealth), there's a crapton of collectibles (though with sadly very minimal rewards), the hunting system is very well-implemented with significant rewards in the form of more holsters, better wallet size, etc., and travel (eventually) becomes tons of fun once you get a flight suit and parachute and can traverse practically everywhere with ease.  The shooting mechanics are spot on, enemy AI is often a challenge (including rogue beasts) but never feels unbeatable.  The quicktime event boss fights are a major disappointment, but otherwise practically every aspect of this game is well designed and lots of fun.

I nonetheless walked away from this one feeling rather..."meh" about it.  It is perfectly serviceable in a rather empty market of big sandbox first-person shooters, but the problem with making an FPS so big is that no matter how much variation you try to throw in there eventually it becomes rather repetitive.  That could be fixed by a solid narrative driving the thing, but that is simply lacking here despite the presence of one of the most crazy yet loveable villains I've ever seen in a game in the form of Vaas.  Is it still fun?  Absolutely.  But for the story-driven, completionist I MUST FILL IN THAT MARK ON THE MAP gamer like me, there's simply not enough there to warrant anything more than a single playthrough.

Far Cry 3 gets a 7.5/10.