Far Cry® 3

I haven't played any Far Cry, since the original in 2004. I've completely ignored the series. I think I maybe tried to get the 2nd game running when it was new, but my PC was terrible at the time so I couldn't.

Then I stumbled upon the 3rd game when YouTube played me Digital Foundry's time capsule video on it:

I didn't think much of it, but then someone, I think Rich, mentioned something along the lines of "there's so much to explore... and then there's even a second island" my interest was piqued, especially when I saw he was collecting a bunch of stuff and the mini map was full of it. I'm a sucker for games where you run around a huge map collecting stuff.

So on a whim I checked my Steam library, and sure enough I already had the game, so I downloaded it, forgot about it, then a week later I was bored and scrolled through my ready-to-play games on Steam, and there it was!

I started playing it and I was hooked pretty much immediately. The game kind of blew my mind. This was a game from 2012, yet it felt like it was a modern game.

As it turns out, I guess this game invented a bunch of a things I thought more recent games invented.

The towers in Breath of the Wild that unlocks parts of the map? They're here.

Point of no return prompt in Cyberpunk 2077? It's here.

Skill trees? It's here.

I feel like this the original modern open world game, and all other open world games are just derivatives of this. Unless I'm still under a rock and there's some other game before FC3 that did all this.

The game also looked gorgeous. Sure, the texture work might not be up to snuff, but I thought it looked damn good.

The gameplay was fun and satisfying. Shooting was fun. Taking over bases was fun. Playing stealth was fun, something I thought I would never say.

The game is just fun. That's it. Plain simple fun.

So what's bad about the game? Well, pretty much everything else.

• The story is incredibly bland. Feels like someone watched Lost and made a loose spin on it.
• The voice acting is god awful. Like, really, really awful. I cringed every time your character, Jason, talked. It's like he's trying to be deep and convincing, but it just ends up sounding like terrible acting.
• The characters were all terrible. People really like the villain apparently, but I thought he was just annoying.
• The music, the little there was, was awful. I know it's 2012 so dubstep was popular, but dear god.
• In general, all the story/voice acting/characters/movies/themes/music seems like a product of someone who was 12 in 2012
• The performance. I have a decent computer (9800X3D, RTX 5090) and this game is somehow the most demanding game I've played on it, the only game I cannot have a consistent 60+ FPS. Sure, I have a locked 120 FPS most of the time, but light something on fire and your FPS tanks, hard. It blows my mind this game ran on PS3 and 360.
• The game launches Uplay when you play it on Steam, and for some god ****ing forsaken reason it requires you to enter your Uplay password everytime you launch the game. Super annoying.

So yeah, a lot of complaints, but the gameplay more than makes up for it. It was really fun to take over camps, climb towers, do the hunting missions, do the side quests, do the WANTED DEAD missions, collect treasure, sell stuff, buy ammo, try new weapons, use the bow, hunting certain animals to get certain parts for upgrades, etc etc.

On that last note, I guess I can rant about how annoying the money and loot system was in the beginning. Basically, you need to upgrade your backpack, err, loot rucksack, ASAP because it will fill up very quickly. And when it's full you can't loot.

Same thing with your wallet. You need to upgrade your wallet to carry more money. Very annoying. And what's worse is that you cannot loot more money when you are full on money. My OCD brain that wants to loot everything went crazy every time this happened.

But I got all the upgrades fairly quickly (I did all of the side stuff before proceeding with main quests), and then it was less of an issue.

The game also has some beautiful jank in it. I'm not sure if it's because I'm playing at a high FPS or what, but fairly often things would just fly off into the sky and stuff like that. I love seeing stuff like that.

I'm currently sitting at 38/44 achievements, and the achievements that remain don't seem that bad, so I might go back and clean them up.

UPDATE a few hours later:

I doubt I will ever replay the game though, but maybe. Kind of doubtful I will play any other FC game either. But Far Cry 3 was great, and I am happy to no longer be under a rock.

I'll leave you with a video clip and some random screenshots I took throughout. Unfortunately not a lot of screenshots because for some reason the game would sometimes instantly quit everytime I hit F12 (Steam's screenshot key), so every time I took a screenshot it was a bit of a gamble.