Far Cry 3

Far Cry 3

This is my first Far Cry game. I enjoyed it quite a lot.

Overview

Far Cry has been around a while so I'm only going to hit the highlights. 

At it's core, Far Cry is a first person shooter. Everything else the game does is secondary to putting the enemy in the crosshairs. 

While combat and slaughter is the basis of Far Cry, there is a whole lot more going on. Most missions can be accomplished more easily through stealth than frontal assault. It looks like there are many styles of play available -- for example I didn't like the obvious choice of assault rifle and preferred a light machine gun for general firepower. I hated using the bow, but some people swear by it. The flamethrower is lots of fun and you could build an entire play style around it. I talked with one guy who used two of his four slots for different sniper rifles.

The crafting system is decent. There are skill trees, money, and a large variety of weapons that can be improved. 

In addition to the main storyline there are tons of secondary and tertiary objectives. A completionist could spend hundreds of hours with this game.

My Reaction

I really enjoyed the plot. It was strong as satisfying but fairly unobtrusive when I wanted to play in the sandbox world. The minor characters in the game were well developed. 

The tower puzzles were neutral for me. I didn't especially enjoy them, but it was welcome variety from the usual mission that involves killing things.

The most fun for me was taking enemy camps. I would try for maximum stealth but usually I would get detected so it was satisfying when I could take a camp completely silently. If you go in guns blazing, they call for reinforcements and the camp becomes very tough unless you cheese it.

In general I'm a fan of the strong story 1st person shooter genre and this did not disappoint.

The Cons

Like most games that are build for consoles, I had to change the field of view to avoid motion sickness.

The cut scenes where choppy for me despite a high framerate. I did some research and this is a fairly common problem on the PC. I never solved it, but it isn't too intrusive.

Because the game is cross platform, the interface isn't slick. I hate "hold E to interact". I want to just tap E. There were a few times I died because I would hold Q to heal but it didn't take. As far as cross platform interface goes, I'd say Far Cry is average. It's better than Assassin's Creed 3 and worse than Fallout 4.

The Game is Old, Should I Buy It?

Yes. At least by today's standards the graphics are quite decent. Everything else about the game is timeless. I will certainly buy Far Cry 4 the next time it is on sale.