16.0 hours played
Written 12 days ago
This one is conflicting for me. I bought this game years ago and only got around to it these last few days. Not sure why, just one of those purchases you make on a whim and sit on for a while, I guess. I have never played any other Far Cry, though I do plan to play Blood Dragon soon. And I think after BD, I'll have had my fill of this series.
This game starts with a lot of promise. I'll start by saying I definitely don't hate this game, but I had too many issues with it to be able to say, conversely, that I liked it. But I'll pay this game the respect it deserves, and it definitely does deserve some credit. I am not a Ubisoft fan and never have been, but this game gives me the sense they once had some idea on how to make good games, even if they aren't terribly interesting in terms of their design. FC3 propelled Far Cry to stardom and that's for a lot of reasons. FC's open world design is attractive for many, and the repetitive and simplistic objectives make for an easygoing but engaging experience for players who aren't looking for something very complex, which is perfectly fine. The gunplay was a leap for the series and still holds up fairly well. The graphical design is colorful and pops with the way shadows are rendered, and the look of the game has aged well. Moreover, FC3 provides a pretty good narrative which actually, from time to time, surprises and delights. Vaas, no doubt, steals the show as the main antagonist for the first two thirds of the game, but many of the other characters are very well done also: Hoyt Volker, Buck, Dennis, Citra, etc. The cast of characters is replete with interesting faces, and the overall narrative surrounding the Rook Island's troubled conflicts, slave trade, and violence contrasted with Jason's, the protagonist, conversion from innocence to savagery is a mature and effective storytelling combination which Ubisoft does deserve some credit for.
However, that is where all of my compliments for this game end. My three main issues with this game are this: game imbalance past Vaas's exit from the story, copy and paste design, and technical problems. I have plenty of issues regarding the narrative and some of its weaker points, such as Jason as the protagonist, Jason's friends and their lack of presence, the lack of interesting gameplay as a result of intervention by the villains (who all only ever appear in cutscenes), Citra's obsession with turning Jason into a warrior, and the bizarre intermixing of cultures which make the Rook Islands feel like they have no real ancestral binds, instead just being an imaginary delusion by Ubisoft as to what a "native" culture somewhere might look like. Instead, I'll just stick to my main issues.
After Vaas exits the story, not only does the narrative feel a bit more uninteresting as a result but the game goes from a bit tough but reasonable to complete enemy spam which are all armored making kills harder to make as a result. The final series of missions just involves you swamped in a sea of enemies constantly shooting at you, forcing you to mostly hide in a corner and pick enemies off one by one until it becomes safe to move again. This quickly becomes rather frustrating. The way the medicine system was designed, with healing being possible without syringes but just slower and less effective, makes it seem like this enemy spam design was meant to be tanked and that taking heavy damage is unavoidable, which I guess makes some sense but in games with superior combat systems damage can simply be avoided if you're good enough. But in any case, the enemy spam becomes quite tiring after a while.
Copy and paste design is Ubisoft's favorite thing, I suppose, and that design has affected the approach of many other developers such as Monolith and Techland, for better or worse. In FC3, you have a choice of 3 types of side missions which never at any point change. The only side missions worth doing are the rare animal hunts, which are in themselves a bit annoying since you're forced into using a certain weapon type but at least they actually give you something useful, i.e. animal hides for final tier upgrades. The assassination missions and supply drops are just alternative ways to gain XP and money, but outside of that there is no real point in doing them. The trials are somewhat unique, since you can (or could) compete with your friends on timed trials and each one is somewhat different. The radio towers and outposts are all mostly the same with some occasional variation, but after the first few of each they all pretty much blend into each other. Why Ubisoft has such a fascination with this copy and paste design is beyond me; it's dull, boring, and ceases to become engaging after the first few interactions.
And the greatest sin of all: the crashing. Oh, God... the technical bugs I had with this game were legendary. I haven't had technical issues with something like this in a while and it definitely brought back bad memories. So often during missions will this game just suddenly crash, either kindly reverting you to a mid-mission checkpoint or forcing you to completely redo it, which happened to me many times. But the worst bit came during the famous "definition of insanity" mission where, at the end, the autosave would trigger right before a loading screen which crashed my game, effectively softlocking me. I replayed that mission maybe three or four times before, after tweaking setting some graphical settings per a steam discussions suggestions, I got past it and managed to play the rest of the game. But that was not fun and largely ruined my perception of the game, however unfair that may be. While the game ran at a pretty high and stable fps at 1440p max settings, the constant crashing was very infuriating.
Overall, I don't really hate nor love FC3. I'm glad I tried it and there is certainly a worthwhile experience somewhere here, but if this is what the fandom thinks is the best FC has to offer, then I think I'll sit out for the rest of it. This kind of game design should've died a decade ago. By the end of this game, all I could think was how much I just wanted to play Dying Light instead.
5/10.
