Here is my review of Far Cry 3:
Story- 8.5/10
You start out on an island captured by a guy named “Vaas” as well as Jason Brody’s (main character) friends and brothers. You are in a prison camp with Jason’s big brother, but after a while you will go through a tutorial while trying to escape the camp. When you do escape (not going to tell you what happened) you will be forced to run through the forest to get away from the pirates. You can hear dogs barking behind you and a sense of realism with Jason panting from exhilaration. Even when he kills somebody for the first time he seems devastated about it. When you do escape, you will wake up in a house with a guy putting tattoos on Jason’s arm. These tattoos represent him as a warrior. Every time you unlock a skill you get more tattoos. Speeding ahead, you will get requested to go on top of a radio tower, get ingredients like pick flowers and skin an animal, etc., tutorial stuff basically. Radio towers unlock new parts of the map, with flowers you can make medicines, and skin can be used to make new wallets, gun pouches, etc. The beginning of the game was good. It really did set up what you will have to do throughout the storyline.
After the beginning is over, your goal is to save your friends and kill two main people. The missions are short and some are just disturbing. If you played it, you would know the disturbing parts. There are 38 story missions which most of them are really short sadly. During the story, you will meet some crazy people like Citra, Sam, Willis, Dennis Rodgers, DR. Earnhardt, & not much more. Some of them were actually disturbing but they all had a personality that was likeable to some extent. The story is short but that is the point of exploring to make it feel longer but just doing the story missions and nothing else, you will probably be able to beat it within four to seven hours which really is sad because it’s like previous installments, but that is the beauty of a sandbox game though because there will be plenty of things to do outside of the storyline.
The ending was not the best but choosing the bad ending is worse. I hope when they make Far Cry 4 that the ending will be better than this game. On the good side of things it’s that the Good ending may also be bad but not that bad compared to the bad ending. Going through the game I expect a good ending not a bad ending. In a way I felt cheated when I finished it.
Overall the story is really good excluding the ending. It had some funny, wow, disturbing, and sad moments. It was entertaining at parts and just bad in others but it’s worth to play again just to explore and play the story again. As a whole, I expected a little better story than the one that was given but it is still great as is. There is a set of missions I hate though like the Buck missions because I just felt like I was doing his dirty work. Nonetheless I congratulate Ubisoft for trying to make a great story with an open world setting. Hope whatever they have planned for Far Cry 4 (which I am sure they have already) is a step up and I have confidence that Ubisoft will make Far Cry into a bigger and better game in the future.
Shooter/Sandbox Genre Mastery- 9/10
It did great for the genre it was aiming for but was it executed right? Yes it did because this game has tons of stuff to do like climb radio towers to unlock areas on the map, test how good you are with Trial of the Rakyat against your friends score or try to beat your own score, hunt people with knives in wanted dead, hunt animals with specific weapons in path of the hunter, do a time trial like objective for supply drop’s, level up to unlock all the skills, acquire all the weapons, skin animals to craft equipment, find memory cards, find letters of the lost, customize your weapons, find relics, find 12 different vehicles, take over outposts silently or non-silent, do story quests, and others. It is what a sandbox type of game should be but it has a few flaws but not that big of a deal. Like sometimes(rarely) the guy you need to kill with a knife in wanted dead kills himself by shooting a flame barrel he is close to or another rare that the Rakyat kills your wanted dead target or sometimes the game would glitch and you would have to reset the game to complete a story quest. The shooter part in this game is good but a lot of the guns are bad. The better guns in this game is a Flamethrower, RPG, Sniper Rifles, and Shotguns
Overall Ubisoft did a great job with the genre they chose for this game. How does the sandbox type of game stand on its own merits? Well it did a great job doing that. The problem is just a lot of the guns are bad and there is some glitches but that’s it. I love this genre and this game but I think Ubisoft could have done a little better job than they did but it’s still good nonetheless. I think they should have added a feature or mode that will let you hunt animals and eat them for health or building a tent to sleep in to regenerate health. Things like that could add more experience in a jungle/island setting and it would make it feel a little bit more real but that is only adding a feature that would have been awesome but it doesn’t affect the game overall.
Gameplay- 9/10
The gameplay seems to stride on parts and fail on others.
The Good: Parachuting was good to do once you get the hang of it. The sneaking part in this game feels like a bit of splinter cell and assassins creed combined, which I don’t mind because they did a good job with it. Different ways to liberate an outpost like kill them with a silenced sniper rifle, sneak kill them up close, if the outpost has an animal cage you can shoot it open and let the animals kill the people in the outpost, or go all in and taking the risk of getting killed. Being able to tag people with your camera to know where your enemies/animals are. Fire spreading is cool to try to trap your enemies; it is hard to do though. AI’s don’t drive stupidly when you rescue a friend that is because that is the only time AI’s drive you around. There is several ways to kill an enemy which it would add variety in how you play the game.
The Bad: Gliding is a part fail because sometimes for no reason the glider would just nose dive and kill me but I think it was a glitch. Some glitches are just annoying (it mostly happens on the southern island) like running down a hill it puts away my gun and brings it back out, or when knifing someone it puts my weapon away totally and I would have to press the change weapon button to bring it back out and it will get frustrating when getting attacked by pirates, or sometimes when climbing up a mountain it will push me away and it has a possibility that it would make me commit suicide, or magically getting stuck in rocks. Driving quads in this game is hard to control because it bounces too much.
Overall the gameplay was good. The shooting aspect in this game was well done I thought. Like a bow, aim carefully or you could overshoot/undershoot. It takes time to understand how to shoot a bow from long distances but once you do get the hang of it, you can become a great bowman in the game. Trying to kill an enemy from above in a glider is hard because it feels like it is impossible to do that. You think you may get it but you will probably die by a short distance or from a far distance because trying to get the right perception in a glider is really hard to do. I can say more but I will leave it at this: the gameplay is good but not revolutionary in anyway.
Presentation- 8/10
Well Ubisoft did well with the graphics department.
The Good: They designed the island really well, plus the trees and the mountains are really well designed. They did a good job with the animals because I felt like I was getting attacked by wildlife in the real world but not. The music is good but nothing that great. Everything in this game improved from Far Cry 2 which is really good.
The Bad: The problem was when it rains, it goes from sunny to instantly cloudy/rainy was a sign of some laziness but not a whole lot because that is small detail that you probably wouldn’t have noticed. They could have shown the clouds rolling in quickly, rain, and it rolls out quickly but not appear randomly and disappear like it was nothing. I also heard something about screen tearing so that is another flaw. Oh and the objective popping up every couple of minutes gets annoying.
Overall the games presentation was a job well done. There are flaws but what doesn’t? Ubisoft did a great job but I know they can do better next time. The land was detailed very well but some texture problems was occurring like an object I was close too was blurry when I was only an inch or so away from it but it is not game breaking though. Sometimes I will fall through the ground and make an everlasting fall which can be game breaking when it does happen but it is ultra-rare, so no worries about it happening that much. It happens once in a blue moon practically. Other than the small problems, Ubisoft did do a really swell job with the presentation of this game.
Conclusion-
So all in all, I’d give it a thumbs up. When you do finish the story and if you didn’t explore or get all the stuff like outposts, relics, find memory cards, etc., than this will be the perfect time to do that. Any way’s the game is great but it is lacking in some areas or lost some opportunities but if you love sandbox games, you will definitely love this game. As for me, I am enjoying every bit of it.
Story: 8.5/10
Shooter/Sandbox Genre mastery: 9/10
Gameplay: 9/10
Presentation: 8/10
Overall: 8.7/10
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