Far Cry 3 - not as good as the hype I fear

[Minty]

I got a chance to have a go at this today (granted I watched more than played, but that helps) & I'll be honest, I wasn't impressed hugely. One to wait for going budget rather than one for Santa's stocking, if at all.

The scenery is stunning, as with the previous two versions of the game. But there's a lot in this game that lets it down.

First up, you have to be logged online to play it: another computer game manufacturer wanting to keep track of every detail of you playing your games so you're giving them consumer feedback whether you like it or not - which I object to in principle.

Mind you, considering the amount of junk in this game people will be avoiding like the plague, I can see their point.

A lot of the game concerns side missions to get money to get the decent gear to stand any hope of survival. Some are fair enough, like killing some bad guy but only with a knife or killing certain animals required by the villagers; but others are offensive - like delivery driving missions that are more like some Mario Cart game's powerups where you have to drive over a succession of flared checkpoints to win the reward. There's also some "way of the warrior" crap where you have to keep shooting wave upon wave of enemies with a particular gun until they kill you or time's up. It totally jars with the game's plot. There's also occasional "talk to" missions that are carbon copies of ones from Skyrim!

My biggest moan is the fiddly control system. Fiddly keyboard that you cannot map yourself (every other 1st player shooter allows the changing of the keys, but not Far Cry 3) & a fiddly crafting system & buying/selling system that isn't very user intuitive & contains a lot of redundant stuff.

Far Cry 3 has a crafting system that looks suspiciously like a last minute add-on to match that of Skyrim. It is fiddly to use, & if you miss the onscreen prompt telling you that you are now allowed to make something now you have the raw materials you will only discover it by accident.

Worst of all, most of the animals that you have to kill to make certain items swiftly become redundant to the game - you cannot craft items from animal parts to sell, only to make items for yourself, after which all you can do is sell the skins. After about 2 hours of playing the game, the tigers, leopards, rabid dogs that hunt in packs, deer, komodo dragons, tapers, those ostrich things with an attitude, pigs, goats & buffalo were as far as I could see redundant, except to slaughter wholesale for cash or screw up your silent sneaking past some pirates by deciding to attack you.

There's even a mixing potions part of sorts, mixing green, blue, crimson or white leaves to make different injectables to either regenerate health, improve your hunting abilities temporarily, & so on. After the first hour, I concluded it's more trouble that it is worth, & you are best sticking only to green leaves for health & forgetting about the rest except to sell.

The real game changer is getting silenced weapons - once you have those, you stand a chance. Before that, the game is a never ending series of shooting bad guys & finding yourself having to run away from a truck load of well tooled up reinforcements (including berzerker type guys with machetes & molotovs!) before you get to loot any of them.

Oh yes, & only grenades and RPGs can kill tigers and leopards. Trying shooting one with any rifle from any distance & it will have legged it or killed you long before. Headshots make no difference. Buffalo meanwhile with their hard as s**t hides only need a few rounds in the head to down them.

The cliched "intellectual psycho" main bad guy complete with Travis from "Taxi Driver" mohican & Mr White/Patrick Bateman poseurisms badly lets the game down. I'm convinced if any of the other characters told him "you act the way you do not because of drugs or some deep trauma in your past, but because the girls all say you have a tiny one", he'd break down & cry. He's not frightening or threatening. Just
annoying.

I could sum up the faults of this game with one part in particular, helping the retaking of pirate bases by the rebels. Or rather you attack them & they come in later (except in the first occasion). If the base is in a jungle area, you can take the base without firing a shot. Go somewhere you can see into it from not too far away but they cannot see you. Look for dogs, leopards or tigers to come strolling along nearby.

Start throwing rocks in an arc that will make the predators investigate & that takes them near to the base. Once they get a whiff of the pirates, they'll charge straight in, & any tiger or leopard will easily kill three of the pirates before being shot dead due to the ridiculous strength attributed to them. Twice I saw a tiger waste an entire base single handed, whereupon the natives flag goes up, the tiger & any other wild animal in the base vanish by magic, & your native buddies arrive to congratulate you on taking back a base that the pirates can never attempt to retake (another moan: it isn't truly a dynamic campaign as claimed - like Skyrim, you are ticking off boxes. Are computer game manufacturers unable to create a game where the bad guys take some of their lost bases back if you dither for too long doing other parts of the game?)

Don't get me wrong, it appears to be a fun enough game, but I've a feeling many will buy this at Christmas & be well bored of it before the new year bells. For the same price its being sold for, I think you'd be better off getting Skyrim & Dawnguard.



PS. Just remembered: the constant nag boxes popping up telling you what your next mission is. That's what I object to most of all. Like the crafting & everything else, so much of this "free open world" involves the game holding your hand & telling you where you should be going/what you should be doing next. No - free world means I decide, not having "nag" boxes popping up or repeat phone calls that I took earlier.