Far Cry 3
40 hour of playtime, no achievements
★★☆☆☆
I bought this game a long time ago when it was on sale because my real life friends seemed to really enjoy it, then it got buried in my backlog for a really long time and I never really intended on playing it anymore. Until now where I was looking to play a FPS again. I had played Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon before which I did like and was the main reason for giving this game another chance. I’ve never really enjoyed (but I can tolerate it) the FarCry gameplay where all enemies just storm at you, and the healing system always annoyed me too. Overall the gameplay is ok-ish but not great in my opinion. The story starts out realistic-ish but definitely becomes weirder and more unrealistic as you progress. I usually prefer zany stories, but this game tends to want to seem realistic, but just has so many unbelievable plot holes that it breaks that immersion. This game also does what I’ve come to expect from Assassin’s Creed games which is to fill their games with an excessive amount of meaningless collectibles to fill up their game. This collectible grind was the last nail in the coffin for me, and really make me not enjoy the game much. Hunting animals with the bow was the worst, seeing how many arrows these animals could take and how horrible it is to use the bow. I’m honestly surprised how well this game was received, even disregarding the collectible grind. The story, but also decisions that characters make, is very unbelievable (and I’m not even talking about the mystical stuff which was fine for me), the gameplay is pretty meh and the collectible grind is ridiculous. This will be definitely be the last FarCry game I’ll ever touch.
TL;DR Unbelievable story and character choices, meh gameplay and a ridiculous amount of collectible grind.
Yeah, at the time, that brand of open world was pretty new and exciting, but I’d say that at this point, “Unbelievable story and character choices, meh gameplay and a ridiculous amount of collectible grind.” is an apt description for all the modern Far Cry games.
I guess I missed that by not playing it when it came out, this could explain why it has so many positive reviews I guess. Good to know that I won’t have to touch those other Far Cry’s.
Blood Dragon was great! It had a very unique style to it and I enjoyed it much better than Far Cry 3 too
I guess Blood Dragon was just a lot shorter and smaller in scale which in the end made it a more enjoyable experience and the story is just really wacky which was great. Sometimes more isn’t better, sometimes less is more, I wish gaming companies understood that.
Yeah I played far cry 3 when it was new and even then I preferred Far cry 2. I know some people get annoyed by the malaria and weapons in FC 2, but to me it felt a lot more raw and interesting and my silent protagonist at least had a military / mercenary background that made the killing more believable. Whereas FC3 was just too ridiculous. A spoilt rich dude takes about 10 minutes to go from being a scared crying child to mowing down whole bases? And the choice offered at the end just highlights that even the writers though Brody was a type A douchebag. But honestly, even with the seeming ease he went from dude bro to ‘warrior’, are we really supposed to believe he has become so calloused that he could bump off the very friends he’s spent the whole game trying to save? I can deal with a bit of escapist / power trip fantasy in my games, but that just left me with a bad taste in my mouth at the end. And so whilst I’d still like to play FC 4 and even primal one day, they are on my ‘deep discount / bundle ‘ list, rather than the ‘must play’ list.
I never played Far Cry 2 much, I thought the gameplay was even worse and just couldn’t get into it really. I agree with you on the endings though , they are so cringeworthy bad, there’s no reason whatsoever to kill them they were already leaving the island (your ties with them were already as good as severed). And what kind of psychopath would kill them, especially his recently ex-girlfriend, which he just tried to save throughout the game. It left a bad taste in my mouth as well. This story just has so many logic holes.
Yeah I know a lot of people do bounce off far cry 2, and it’s not an easy game to get into, but I find that as games grow and the gameplay improves, the games I remember enjoying the most are usually those with something unique or an interesting plot. Maybe they weren’t the best games to play at the time, but in the case of FC2, it had a lot of innovative ideas that really helped the immersion, and I liked the story. The plot felt a lot more akin to what actually does happen in reality.
After this thread I went backed and watched a clip of FC3’s endings and even now I feel myself getting mad at how stupid it was. Even in the good ending, he’s suddenly monologing about the ‘monster’ he’s become and feeling all angsty, which goes completely against the murder machine he quickly became in the story.
I played this shortly (maybe even directly?) after the 2013 Tomb Raider (which I loved) and wow was the story bad. I mean, it’s bad enough on it’s own, but these two games’ starting points actually were so similar – transformation from “sheltered kid” to “yeah ok I’ll just slaughter everyone if that’s what survival takes” and all – and wow was FC3 ridiculous. Even more so with the stark contrast between that dude chickening out in a “story mission” one minute and then going ballistic in free play one minute later (because what else is there to do in free play?). At least the story disposed of that scared spoiled brat pretty soon – and instead gave him a flamethrower and some Skrillex to really light it up. (Yeah ok that last bit was so over the top ridiculous, who wouldn’t enjoy that.)
… I don’t even know where I’m going. 5 years and that game still makes me rant.
It never dawned on me that they had a similar premise, it’s kinda true though. I guess it’s still a game though and there’s no easy way to transition going from being innocent to killing lots of people because you want to make an action game, Tomb Raider at least eases better into it than Far Cry 3. I do hate hysterical characters who freak out about every little thing in games and movies, so I’m glad they cut that out quickly. Story-wise this game is just all over the place.
6 years ago Far Cry 3 did feel fresh and interesting. The whole ubisoft-style gameplay had not been run into the ground, by Ubisoft, and other companies emulating them. But these days, it’s just one out of many, many games following pretty much the same formula.
And you can safely skip Far Cry 4, it’s just Far Cry 3, but with more elephants.
Good to hear that I won’t be missing out on anything, will definitely stay away from this franchise unless they significantly change it. Ubisoft especially seems to excel at putting way too much collectible grind in to fill their open world games. Hopefully it won’t be the case for Beyond Good and Evil 2.