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… … … click here for 100% realistic simulation of Chezni*
I broke down and traveled through the Uplay realm to play this one. I had to. I’ve been waiting literally years to play this one. Ever since I saw my brother play this back in 2013, it genuinely just looked fun. Like, lots of fun. A game where you wear a Hawaiian shirt, run around and shoot terrorists and boars and have access to a quantity of guns and rides that would make Rambo jealous? I’m in. The problem is (and a big reason why Lepcis and I are doing this Steam challenge to begin with) is that I bought a pack of Far Cry games and *forced* myself to play through and 100% the first two before I’d let myself play this one. Truth is, while the first two weren’t bad games, they weren’t the one I wanted to play. Call it thick-headed gaming machoism or perhaps completionist masochism but it’s the truth. That was the kind of gamer I used to be before we started doing this. Anecdote in mind but out of the way, there’s no way I was going to let even Uplay ruin this one for me.
Getting to play the game myself reveals… a few things. As you might be able to tell from the picture above, this game is heavily aimed towards a douche-bag youth audience. I say “douche-bag youth” because everything in the game is built around creating a fantasy world for a rather specific set of heterosexual teenage to early 20 males to import themselves into. Large-billed hats, getting drunk, middle fingers, strippers and the works are all flashed on the screen at the beginning, depicting fashion and custom aligned for their intended consumer. The main character (Jason) is actually not the white male with stubble from the army–that’s his older brother’s job. In fact, I would argue in defense of Far Cry 3 in that they did a reasonably good job creating realistic reactions out of Jason in regards to the events going on around him matched with his age and social stature.
He’s scared, doesn’t know what he’s doing and loses morale when he sees his brother kill someone. In many ways, Far Cry 3 does a good job of painting a reasonable mold for its target audience to slip themselves into. Now, is there inherently something wrong with this concept? No, not at all. It’s been done countless times before from movies as old as Cloak and Dagger or The Last Starfighter (and probably plenty before). I think my issue is that the teenage youth that they are targeting is the douche-bag teenage youth. I’m not saying this out of some “get off my lawn, I’m old and don’t understand kids” kind of way. I thought this audience were douche-bags when I was a teenager and I still think so now. While it certainly wasn’t enough to halt my play of the game, it did make me cringe a bit.
That’s okay though, because the character I was really interested in is still awesome. Vaas. He’s a psycho written right. His design, animations, delivery and entire demeanor strike insanely intelligent, insanely violent and insanely… well, insane.
Vaas is the a (the?) leader of the pirates that runs the island that Jason, his brother and his friends were vacationing on. While partying, Vaas and his crew kidnap the American vacationers which leads to the situation Jason finds himself now. Jason’s brother dies, a on-again-off-again native of the island saves him, sets him on the course for revenge and then says “have fun.”
Gameplay from Far Cry 2 has been revamped in a good way. Skills and exp are now part of the mix as well as crafting and upgrades. I know that sounds a bit cheap (saying that they are “good”) but in a big problem with Far Cry 2 was progression. Getting more diamonds just meant more guns that you probably wouldn’t use. Adding skills in Far Cry 3 is a great way to allow the player to feel like they are getting rewarded for their actions.
It unfortunately is a Ubisoft game though (I’m on a roll with this company lately) and the designers cannot seem to get the idea out of their head that climbing up towers to reveal the map is cool. Seriously, what is this doing in a FPS game? Just like Assassin’s Creed, the map is littered with (Radio) Towers, so it’s not like this was a one-off tongue-in-cheek quest. You’re expected to do this throughout the entire game. What’s even worse is that there’s still the obligatory “hay right next to the tower” thing, only this time it’s a zipline. You know what game was awesome and didn’t have you climbing towers to reveal the map? Just Cause 2 (and 1).
Overall, I still feel that this is an improvement over 2 and it still feels like a decent play. However, it’s not quite as good as I’d hoped. I think as far as sandbox games go, it’s of fair quality–you run around, shoot stuff, gather stuff and generally travel in any direction you want. The bigger problem is that I’ve already done most of that for 40 hours in Far Cry 2 already (the main character in that one was a psycho too now that I think about it), which puts a bit of a damper on doing it all over again, even with the improvements, which leads me to recognizing this title as Tier 2.
