50 Years of Video Games: Far Cry 3 (PS3)

“Like Skyrim with guns” goes the now rather famous quote from Adam Kovic of Machinima when describing Far Cry 3, and while that showed where the industry’s mind was at in 2012, Far Cry 3 would end up leaving a rather large footprint itself. While Ubisoft had been around since 1986, Far Cry 3 helped cement them as one of the big names in video game creation with Far Cry becoming a major franchise to keep an eye on. The series would become defined by its attempts to have a compelling antagonist with each numbered entry while its approach to open world exploration would start to bleed into other Ubisoft franchises like Assassin’s Creed. While you could make the argument the industry was more closely chasing the design approach of 2011’s Skyrim, the course of one of its major players was decided by the remarkably effective package that is Far Cry 3.

 

In a deliberately jarring opening scene, Jason Brody and his small group of wealthy friends had a world tour of decadence and debauchery planned and underway until they choose the wrong island to skydive over. Switching from scenes of partying to a horrible scenario where Jason and his brother are trapped in cages by a group of island pirates who are slaughtering tourists, immediately the game not only shows that this will be a battle for survival, but it will be a stark departure from the life Jason lived before. However, circumstances force him to get violent, Jason managing to break free but needing to find where his friends and brother have been taken by the kidnappers before it’s too late. Given the gift of the tatau by an island resistance that will let him grow in power as he assists them in gaining their freedom from the pirates, Jason begins walking the path of the warrior and finding it not only becomes easier to kill over time, but he begins to enjoy this life more than the one he left behind. Along the path to saving his friends and taking down those whose criminal muscle have taken over the island he begins to experience moments that make him question this new way of life, particularly as he gets closer and closer to taking down the two major players on the island: Vaas Montenegro and Hoyt Volker.

 

While set on a beautiful tropical island, there is certainly no fantasy to the way the pirates operate. Slave trading and cruelty are the marks of their trade, with Vaas being an unhinged look into the kind of depraved man who could perpetrate these actions so often and so easily. Vaas is unpredictable whenever he appears before the player, often having Jason at his mercy and using the moment not to torture him so much as torment him with ramblings that can range from truly philosophical to simple complaining. He does not come off as a true madman though, his descent into this dark way of life making him more violent and prone to mood swings but he can still articulate himself in a way that can be amusing one moment and menacing another. Vaas is certainly the more compelling of the two main antagonists as he dominates every scene he is in, and considering he was once a member of the Rakyat tribe who give you your tatau and support your efforts to take him down, he works as an example of one potential outcome for Jason’s path to becoming a warrior. When Hoyt takes over the plot though, he still has a certain villainous charisma about him but isn’t quite as memorable. While he displays some moments of pure capitalistic cruelty while you try to infiltrate his group to take him down and proves to be more capable than he first seems both in how he handles situations and can unflinchingly commit a violent act without losing composure, his more business-oriented approach, while explained in some interesting monologues, is a bit simpler than trying to unravel the madness of Vaas.

Not every mission will have you interacting with the two head honchos though, and in this first-person shooter you will spend plenty of time exploring the island, engaging in gun fights with the underlings of Vaas and Hoyt, and potentially getting side-tracked by a good amount of optional content. Set on the fictitious Rook Islands in the South Pacific, the player will find a land not only filled with the turmoil of a criminal group trying to exert their power over the local populace but a hostile place where the wildlife can be just as deadly as a gun. When you begin your adventure you are only able to carry a single gun and it’s not exactly a strong one. Story missions or side activities will require you to reach them on foot until you start setting up the instant fast travel points, and while you can pop into a car and try to drive across the rugged roads, you don’t even have the minimap to help you at first. Thus, your explorations of the island might suddenly turn dangerous as a tiger leaps out of the brush or a group of Komodo dragons doggedly pursues you. Animals definitely begin as a terrifying reality of trying to get around the island as they are persistent, take more bullets to put down than a person, and are much better at stealth, and with many of your upgrades like extra holsters to carry more weapons and items tied to skinning wildlife, you’ll even have to make yourself hunt down these fearsome beasts. Once you do become better equipped they become less of a problem though, especially since you start to lose any reason to pick a fight with them once you have the upgrades their hides provide, but they do also provide an interesting way to take down groups of pirates as you can lure an animal to their camps and have it go on a rampage to save you some time and trouble.

 

Naturally you should be just as worried about the human opposition on the island, and in Far Cry 3 you’ll find your life can be drained fairly quickly if you aren’t treating them like proper threats. Engaging them openly is usually the worst case scenario though as the island that hid animals from view so well can also work to your advantage. Sneaking up to silently eliminate hostiles is often key to thinning the numbers down to a manageable amount, the AI actually fairly capable in terms of flanking you or using different weapon approaches to catch you off-guard. Rather than being defined solely by their weapon choice there are a few different types of enemies to worry about on top of typical gunmen and expected variations like those wielding sniper rifles or RPGs. Men with knives will try to rush your position and either flush you out or flay you, and while men with molotov cocktails seem like they’d want to attack from afar they also charge in with reckless abandon even if its sets them afire. Fire itself spreads across the greenery of the tropical island with ease and Jason can’t really focus on shooting if his arm is on fire, so while those close up concerns try to keep you busy you have gunfire from the gunmen and the dangerous heavy duty enemies to worry about. Not only can the opposition sometimes bring mounted turrets on cars to the battle but some come equipped in such heavy armor they’d drain your resources to put down unless you have something explosive to quickly crack their defenses. This spread of enemy types both human and animal definitely finds some phenomenal footing in the game’s outposts, these technically optional content which each have a different layout that gives you and the enemy different advantages. Some you’ll be able to easily sneak through and pick them off silently one by one, others you’ll need to concoct distractions to try and not find yourself in the crosshairs of too many pirates to handle, and some have unique methods of attack like a mountain you can snipe from or water you can dive into if things go south. Being able to mark enemies with your binoculars also helps you track them even when they’re out of sight so you can better plan your attack method and disabling alarms prevents reinforcements from complicating the effort, the tactical edge making taking an outpost down already satisfying from a gameplay angle. The outposts grant you the fast travel locations where you can buy weapons and taking down an outpost prevents enemies from harassing you while you explore nearby parts of the island, and with their interesting diversity and high rewards it is easy to make the time for these well crafted diversions.

The main story does a lot to provide varied missions as well. The outposts definitely emphasize a freedom of approach with their design where you can tackle them with whatever weapons or strategies you think might work and adjust based on their effectiveness, but the main missions are often a bit more linear and focused on specific goals. There are still a good amount of moments where things will take place in a rather open space so you can attempt whatever tactics you feel are best, but at these moments the game can start to include more focused concepts like navigating a trap and puzzle filled temple, escaping from a sinking ship, burning down a drug farm, or getting into chases where you need to mow down your pursuers while someone else drives. These missions also have you interact with the game’s mix of helpful and antagonistic characters including other interesting personalities like Buck whose wordplay and patter could have made him an appealing character if he wasn’t talking about his unrepentant sadism. Far Cry 3 does show a willingness to break away from its sometimes harsh realism though, thanks in part to a frequent embrace of hallucinogenics but also a desire to make more out of some confrontations than a simple gunfight. A confrontation with Vaas would probably be just a matter of a few bullets being exchanged if we’re being realistic, but instead fights with major villains take you to a space of visual metaphors to better represent the meaning and weight of the fight than the actuality of it. Similarly when you do get something in your system that makes you see the impossible the game is willing to introduce things more akin to over the top video game boss fights or show impossible sights that are meant to better show Jason’s mindset. These shifts away from the regular gunplay on top of new areas and context for play are definitely good for keeping the game lively as sometimes the abundance of optional content isn’t always up to snuff.

 

While the outposts are great for creative battle approaches, some of the other activities you can engage in around the massive islands aren’t quite as imaginative. Radio towers are scattered around and climbing to the top of them is key to giving you a minimap that helps you better explore the often confusing and twisting design of the island’s roads. Taking a tower is often just a matter of climbing it, the task rather simple most of the time and about identifying how you need to go from one level to the next with the often damaged geometry. The clues are generous though and the task not involved enough to really test your mind or reflexes, but the task is too important to ignore despite being rather basic. When you do have the minimap it will fill up with symbols meant to help you find useful items or collectibles, and while finding herbs for crafting syringes or chests that contain money or sellable loot is nice, finding things like the relics or SD cards can feel like rather plain busy work. Unsent World War II letters from a group of Japanese soldiers on the island at least have their own little story to follow once you’ve found enough and in general the game does add a bit of personality to its description of the things you can encounter when they’re committed to your codex, but a fair bit of optional activities aren’t really substantial. The special hunts and bounty targets can at least engage you with a bit more action, the hunts of special animals locking you into one weapon while the bounty targets are like little snippets of outpost-inspired play but with less complexity to them. Side activities like playing poker, participating in races, or doing side missions with short activities that often pay off in some joke though feel like they needed more substance or direction to make them worth doing more than that first taste test.

 

Trials of the Rakyat do take the game away from its careful survival focus quite often though, the game briefly shifting the rules so that you’re less worried about using the right weapons and healing when you take heavy damage to something about earning points against less intelligent enemies. These have an online leaderboard and prioritize accuracy and rapid kills to earn high scores with whatever attack options you’ve been locked into, but there is some true multiplayer in the form of the small co-op campaign. Leonard, Mikhail, Tisha, and Callum end up on the island as well as they pursue a ship captain who took off with a load of their cash. Players end up fighting pirates in a more restrictive story-focused mode with moments of competition like trying to kill the most with a specific weapon and rewards that help them improve similar to Jason’s gradual expansion in the main story. The small but open battlefields aren’t as conducive to multiple approaches as they are in the story but the shooting is still satisfying and varied even in the context of co-op play or the Trials, the usual shooter spread of pistols, assault rifles, sniper, and shotgun present but many enemies are easily put down with few bullets so accuracy, situational advantages, and weapon-specific drawbacks like reload times feel more important than raw power. The specific parameters of these two types of play do feel like they benefit from breaking away from the open world design though since otherwise they too might become a little bland like the small but open bounty hunts.

THE VERDICT: Fascinating antagonists and unique action set pieces make Far Cry 3’s story one worth engaging with even if the potential of the island’s open design often proves to be just as rewarding of a distraction. When the game begins the island feels hostile, but once you’ve begun hunting wildlife and working to take down the well designed outposts you’ll slowly grow into a more capable fighter that is thankfully still challenged by enemies who have their own unique approaches to fighting you to match the openness with which you can tackle them. Some side activities do feel rather repetitive or empty, but by weaving them in between the better designed missions and outpost taking they simply become part of exploring an enjoyably dangerous game world.

 

And so, I give Far Cry 3 for PlayStation 3…

A GREAT rating. The quality of the extra content feels like the real make-or-break area on deciding whether or not this game could have earned the top rating, and while the outposts are a phenomenal intersection of strategy, weapon options, enemy design, and area layouts, it does feel a bit like they got all the love while going off the path for radio towers feels like it’s only being done for the necessary info they provide. Leveling up your abilities and crafting helpful tools with the extras gained from dabbling in side content is rewarding still though and it’s not too hard to rope in a few simple hunting missions or some of the other plainer ways to spend time between missions without being too bothered by their simplicity, but it’s in the main story that the game does deliver on constantly interesting content. Providing new gameplay goals, giving time for intriguing yet deranged individuals to take the stage, and even breaking from reality make following the plot definitely a worthwhile investment, but the island is still designed a bit to funnel you towards distractions with your initial limited capabilities. Starting off the danger the island presents is exciting, the player not wanting to be spotted by pirates since they aren’t packing the required firepower to easily take them down and having a leopard or cassowary pop out of the brush is an unexpected but thrilling complication. Getting more capable thankfully doesn’t diminish the experience even though it starts to shift to you toawrds being the predator more than prey, the tools you can get to plot out your take down of a batch of pirates making for an interesting gameplay challenge since you still are vulnerable despite the new gear. There was some appreciated effort to make some areas that could have been dry like the glossary of plants, animals, and equipment more amusing with more jokes than information but collectibles and side activities do feel like padding at times since they don’t feel distinct enough from other versions of the activity or rewarding enough to engage with.

 

At least in Far Cry 3’s case the wealth of extra content that isn’t as compelling as it could have been doesn’t detract from the experience due to its minor influence and mostly optional nature. Climbing the radio towers isn’t bad either so much as it is basic, so once you can get back to doing bombastic or unique missions or plotting your desired way to take down an outpost you’re easily able to focus on the thrills and the interesting mix of danger and power that you feel as you try to execute your plan for progress. At once grounded in harsh realities but embracing more abstract concepts to give certain moments more weight, the plot also has you interact with memorable characters that add more to the narrative than a simple rescue mission. Vaas may be the man on the box and the most compelling of your enemies, but the island is probably the true star of Far Cry 3 as it provides an open space that is inviting in what it promises yet hostile in the most entertaining of ways.