Farcry 3 Review

Farcry 3 by Ubisoft - 3rd in the Farcry series.
Farcry 3 by Ubisoft – 3rd in the Farcry series.

This is a FPS (First Person Shooter) game set on a desert island. It’s the 3rd incarnation in the Farcry series (unsurprising from the title!)

Plot

Far Cry 3 is set on a tropical island somewhere in the vicinity of the Malay Archipelago, between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

After a vacation goes awry, protagonist Jason Brody must save his friends, who have been kidnapped by pirates intent on selling them in to slavery and escape from the island and its unhinged inhabitants.

You must rescue your friends and take care of the bad guys, all the while, honing your warrior skills.

Gameplay

Farcry 3 is first and foremost a FPS with some role play elements in the form of skills and better equipment created from hunting the local flora and fauna.

Both action and stealth elements are available, so a run and gun approach is possible, as well as using the silent ‘take-downs’ to accomplish the mission in hand. Also included in your virtual bag-o-tricks is a camera with which to gather intelligence on the target, allowing you to ‘tag’ enemies and track them, and also to take photographs.

There are many diverse quests on offer, aside to the main storyline, which usually fall in to 4 categories:

  • Kill missions to assassinate a certain nasty with a knife in the traditional way of the local Rakyat tribes.
  • Hunting missions to kill a certain number of rogue animals with specific weapons (sharks with a bow was my personal favourite!), or to kill a rare prized beast (this will reward you with a skin to create the highest level of upgrade).
  • Helper missions, where some non-player characters will ask you to perform some task for them – for an example, you are asked to collect Japanese dog tags, or photograph barcodes on dropped packages.
  • Supply drop missions which are simply get from A to B as fast as you can in a specific vehicle.

There are a few others, but I’ll let you find them out 😉

The skills in the game are represented by a Tatau (Tattoo), that develops as you progress, granting some more useful skills such as better take-downs or more accurate use of weapons etc.

There is also numerous hidden items in the game which you can collect for further rewards. These are letters from the Japanese soldiers stationed there during the war (these reveal a minor story in themselves), relics which have significance to the local tribespeople, and memory cards which reveal the islands drug history.

Review

This game has some insane settings for the graphics, so you’ll need a good PC and a good video card to play it with good settings, or you’ll need to turn down the options – be aware!
This was a great romp through a beautiful island retreat! It was quite satisfying to complete a particularly difficult assignment or hunting quest, after dying a few times.

There were a few times I found myself fighting with the control interface, and it’s not really adequately described, but it soon becomes familiar and you can switch weapons and abilities on the fly.

There are numerous things scattered around the island to help in your quest, and it’s a huge map to explore, so there are many hours gameplay to be enjoyed.

There are a huge array of weapons on offer too – all of which have a satisfying feel, and all of which have a role to play given your specific style of play. I tend towards the more stealthy approach, so favoured the silenced weapons, but carried a shotgun just for those close-ups.

I feel that there is really much, much more I could write about this game, but I think this post is getting rather long.

So to sum up I’ll give it a 9/10