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The People's Score

Far Cry 3 according to Slater
User Score 9
(Note: I'm in Europe, I've had this game since Nov 29th) I think this is the first game this year to not disappoint me. I was a semi-fan of Far Cry 2 - it was almost a good game, but some unfortunately game-breaking bugs, such as the quickly respawning enemies and broken stealth elements, kept it from reaching its potential and could unfortunately not be modded away. I had high hopes that Far Cry 3 would fix these mistakes while keeping the open gameplay and solid shooter mechanics. It has. Far Cry 3 starts you off as a regular Joe who's never killed anyone before, and forces him to become a killing machine in order to save his friends and two brothers. This story is nice enough, but doesn't explain how Jason - that's you - becomes the world's foremost assassin in a couple of days, so Ubisoft apparently felt the need to add some voodoo magic to explain this. I'm not too sure about this design decisions, which also leads to some, in my opinion, bad story elements, but I suppose it works well enough to keep you interested. The gameplay is absolutely great, letting you freely choose stealth or gung-ho gunning in almost every situation, and particularly the stealth gameplay is some of the best I've seen yet, and it's my favourite genre. Like in Far Cry 2 you are encouraged to scout enemy positions before attacking, and your (admittedly unrealistic and unexplained) zoom-lens camera can tag enemies for you, letting you know their positions in realtime when you move in. If you go the stealth-route you can then choose to dispatch your enemies either with your machete, which will give an XP bonus (yes, the game has RPG elements that also work great), or with any number of silenced weapons, not least of which a bow. If you go with the machete, a skill upgrade will also allow you to drag away the bodies, so your enemies won't find them and raise the alarm. If you clear an enemy outpost silently, you get triple the XP on top of the satisfaction. Graphics are of course as excellent as you'd expect from a Far Cry game, and the island is huge (but don't worry, you can fast travel) and looks absolutely stunning, with extreme view range even on the lowest settings. Though I have to say I miss the African savannah setting from FC2, which has now been replaced with a more commonly seen South-east Asian jungle island. Unfortunately there are a few things I don't like so much, that prevent it from getting a perfect 10. One of the things, which may seem minor, is that the game constantly reminds you to go to your next main mission with a box on screen and a thumping sound. That's extremely annoying when on a side mission, as even after many hours of gameplay, I think I've been discovered or something when the sound plays. The story has clearly taken quite a few hints from COD, and incidentally they're the parts I like the least. The side missions are still very repetitive and don't feel natural. The hunting gameplay, which starts out very rewarding, becomes completely pointless fairly quickly, when you've upgraded what you want. Why not make pelts worth some decent money at least? I can get more from searching one enemy corpse than by selling a tiger skin. I'm also not too crazy about most of the skills being locked for the first half or so of the game. I think it should be limited by XP levels alone. There are also a few inconsistencies in the gameplay, such as enemies sometimes hearing you throw a knife and sometimes not, and the takedown button (one hit kill with machete) sometimes not working, making you just slash an enemy instead, which alerts the others. Really annoying when you're going for that undetected bonus. But none of this is enough to ruin my enjoyment of what really is a great game.… Read More »
30 users found this review helpful.
Average User Score for this Game: 8.1