I'll be honest, this game surprised me a bit. When I first got it I was trying to find excuses not to buy it, but I finally caved in. When it starts, it's about what you've come to expect from all the trailers. A short into showing your friends and family on the Rook Islands doing tourist things. Then you're in a bamboo cage and your met by Vaas. You proceed to escape, and you're left alone on this island. Jason Brody (you) clearly shows how horrified he is by the idea of killing in the beginning, and he begins to slowly spiral into insanity and violence. I think that for all of the focus on Vaas as a villain in the marketing, he isn't in the game nearly enough. The characters in this game are fairly interesting, but for most of it, you aren't interacting with them. Far Cry 3 has a few tricks up it's sleeve, and will surprise you a few times, but I can't talk about that without spoiling anything. As for the actual gameplay, the exploration is great, and is about what you would expect out of any AAA open world game. The ability to approach any given situation isn't an incredibly new idea, but is really fun none the less. You can blow all of your enemies up, shoot them from afar, run in guns blazing, or silently pick them off one by one. While there are a few parts where the game forces you to not get caught, you're free to do as you please for most of it. There is a large variety in the weapons, and you'll be able to find what suits you best fairly easily. The game has a crafting and leveling system too. You can make different syringes that can heal you or give you temporary buffs, and you can make loot rucksacks and ammo slings with animal skins you find. the skill system gives you skill points every once and a while for leveling up and getting XP. You can then spend it on a certain ability. Each ability will give you a new tattoo on your arm (a cool aesthetic feature.) Some abilities are more useful than others. For example, the silent takedown ability will be used about ever 5 minutes, but the ability to shoot handguns on a zipline is incredibly impractical seeing as the game lacks many enemies at the bottom of ziplines. The game also contains multiplayer, but it's just tacked on, probably because of the publishers telling the developers to add it, and contains nothing new or interesting. The same goes for the co-op. In the end, this is an incredibly fun game, if a bit short for an open world, and you should really pick it up.
7 January 2013
