The ending is enough to justify a negative review but I'll go more in depth...

It's a Taken/Pocahontas story we've heard before: bunch of bored, spoiled, rich, white kids travel to a deserted island where they get jumped by Spanish-speaking pirates and are held for ransom. One of them runs away (the player) and the story somehow turns into a heroic epic to save Pocahontas, her people, and the friends the player character is slowly caring less and less about. Pocahontas and her people grant him powers that they possess but can't use the way he does (or at all) because he's American and they're incompetent and he's special and blah blah blah. Then it turns out, the people who've been helping you are actually evil all along lol

The constant notifications bugged me so much. The game doesn't stop pestering you until you check every notification even though you've been notified of the same thing a billion times before. I know I got a relic, game. I chose to pick it up! I know I can craft a medical syringe; that's why I got the green leaves! Small thing, but annoying.

It's a simpler version of Assassin's Creed mechanics in FPS mode. Don't get me wrong, the developers should be able to recycle their mechanics—it's their game. The gameplay was entertaining and the graphics were breathtaking but there were still too many similarities between Ezio's game and FC3 that I couldn't keep separate. Liberating Borgia towers outposts, climbing to the highest point and synchronizing getting radio towers working, and doing the Leap of Faith ziplining down became a tedious chore after the 3rd time. I found it more fun to attempt a Leap of Faith and send Jason Brody awkwardly stumbling down the tower to his untimely death. "Stealthing"—or more accurately crouching right under your enemy's noses (sometimes literally) and hobbling about—was unintentionally hilarious.

The story felt as uninspired as the protagonist—who is the most boring playable character I've ever had the misfortune of controlling. In Assassin's Creed, Ubisoft made me want to do the mini-missions and care about the people just as much as the awesome main missions we chose to do. Here, I skipped every side mission because I didn't care. Sometimes the main missions were as coma-inducing as the side missions. As someone else said, the game felt more linear because it forced me to go certain directions and do certain things rather than being the promised open world it should have been. I'd get notifications throughout the game saying that if I stepped out of indistinguishable bounds, I'd forfeit a mission I didn't know I accepted. With some near-identical mechanics, I couldn't help but constantly think about how much I missed playing Assassin's Creed, especially with its superior storytelling and better sandbox gameplay.

Last but not least, I couldn't help but feel really weird that a group of mostly white dudes profited off of indigenous people only to make them the "spooky voodoo bad guys." I'm not Maori so it's not my place to say, but if I saw a dev team do something like that with my own cultures, I'd give it a hard pass lol

TLDR: The writing is weird Pocahontas fanfiction with gameplay that reminds me too much of Assassin's Creed. They had so much originality with Assassin's Creed that they failed with this Far Cry entry.

2/10

[h1]Disney's Pocahontas With An M-Rating[/h1] The ending is enough to justify a negative review but I'll go more in depth... It's a Taken/Pocahontas story we've heard before: bunch of bored, spoiled, rich, white kids travel to a deserted island where they get jumped by Spanish-speaking pirates and are held for ransom. One of them runs away (the player) and the story somehow turns into a heroic epic to save Pocahontas, her people, and the friends the player character is slowly caring less and less about. Pocahontas and her people grant him powers that they possess but can't use the way he does (or at all) because he's American and they're incompetent and he's special and blah blah blah. Then it turns out, the people who've been helping you are actually evil all along lol The constant notifications bugged me so much. The game doesn't stop pestering you until you check every notification even though you've been notified of the same thing a billion times before. I [i]know[/i] I got a relic, game. I chose to pick it up! I [i]know[/i] I can craft a medical syringe; that's why I got the green leaves! Small thing, but annoying. It's a simpler version of Assassin's Creed mechanics in FPS mode. Don't get me wrong, the developers should be able to recycle their mechanics—it's their game. The gameplay was entertaining and the graphics were breathtaking but there were still too many similarities between Ezio's game and FC3 that I couldn't keep separate. Liberating [strike]Borgia towers[/strike] outposts, climbing to the highest point [strike]and synchronizing[/strike] getting radio towers working, and [strike]doing the Leap of Faith[/strike] ziplining down became a tedious chore after the 3rd time. I found it more fun to attempt a Leap of Faith and send Jason Brody awkwardly stumbling down the tower to his untimely death. "Stealthing"—or more accurately crouching right under your enemy's noses (sometimes literally) and hobbling about—was unintentionally hilarious. The story felt as uninspired as the protagonist—who is the most boring playable character I've ever had the misfortune of controlling. In Assassin's Creed, Ubisoft made me [i]want[/i] to do the mini-missions and care about the people just as much as the awesome main missions we [i]chose[/i] to do. Here, I skipped every side mission because I didn't care. Sometimes the main missions were as coma-inducing as the side missions. As someone else said, the game felt more linear because it forced me to go certain directions and do certain things rather than being the promised open world it should have been. I'd get notifications throughout the game saying that if I stepped out of indistinguishable bounds, I'd forfeit a mission I didn't know I accepted. With some near-identical mechanics, I couldn't help but constantly think about how much I missed playing Assassin's Creed, especially with its superior storytelling and better sandbox gameplay. Last but not least, I couldn't help but feel really weird that a group of mostly white dudes profited off of indigenous people only to make them the "spooky voodoo bad guys." I'm not Maori so it's not my place to say, but if I saw a dev team do something like that with my own cultures, I'd give it a hard pass lol [b]TLDR:[/b] The writing is weird Pocahontas fanfiction with gameplay that reminds me too much of Assassin's Creed. They had so much originality with Assassin's Creed that they failed with this Far Cry entry. 2/10