"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
