When people talk about what makes a good open-world game, they usually talk about the freedom to do whatever they want. Of course, you can’t really do whatever you want in even the most forgiving open-world game. Your actions are limited not just by what the designers say is or isn’t possible, but by the virtual environment surrounding you—the world that’s being opened up. While it’s the “open” part that gets the most attention when discussing these games, more often than not it’s a strong, compelling world that separates the good open-world games from the bad ones.
Far Cry 3 is a case in point. The Rook Islands are probably the most enjoyable and richly detailed new video game environment since last year’s Arkham City. The islands are characters in themselves; a tropical paradise with everything from thick jungle and rolling hills to subterranean caves and undulating rivers. They feel like a place that has been around long before you got there, and one that will continue to grow and evolve long after you leave.
It’s a bit of a shame the islands often seem much more real than the people that inhabit them. You play as Jason Brody, an unassuming kid whose thrill-seeking vacation with his friends gets a bit too thrilling when they’re all captured by a group of pirates. Naturally, being pirates, they threaten to ransom you all before killing you or selling you into slavery. Through a mix of personal ingenuity and sheer craziness from the captors, Jason is the only one to escape the makeshift prison, quickly vowing to save his friends and get revenge on the pirates who put him in this position. He’s soon aided by a trope-standard Magical Negro character that gives him some mystical “tatau” (read: tattoos) that grant Jason some relatively unimpressive powers (more on those later).
But the tatau doesn’t really explain how Jason goes from worrying over never firing a gun before to becoming a blood-thirsty and effective mass murdering machine almost immediately. They also don’t explain how his mission quickly morphs from saving his friends and trying to escape with his life to casually accepting a destined role as the “chosen one” who will lead the island’s natives to freedom. Jason doesn't come across as a credible protagonist with believable motivations. Instead, he's a kind of mindless, standard action hero mold for wish-fulfilling players to pour themselves into.
The game does its best to weave in a sort of drug-induced, pseudo-psychological examination of Jason’s descent into madness, trying to force an unsupported identification between Jason and his aggressors at the same time. All this does is muddy an already messy and confusing narrative without providing a shred of explanation for many of the nonsensical things Jason does. It all culminates in one final storyline decision (the first meaningful one offered to the player in the entire game) that comes out of nowhere. This utterly fails at being the difficult moral conundrum it was obviously intended to be.
It’s a shame, because some of the individual characters do quite a lot with the weakly plotted material they’re given. Pirate leader Vaas easily steals every scene he’s in with his quick transitions between psychotic rambler and criminal mastermind. There’s a whole rogue’s gallery of interesting support characters brought to life by strong vocal and animated visual performances, but they seem to primarily exist to push you to your next mission while delivering some witty one-liners. The fact that these performances had to be wasted on a story with such little impact or apparent meaning is a real shame.
| Our Velocity Micro gaming rig | |
| OS | Microsoft® Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit |
|---|---|
| CPU | Intel® Core i7 2700k processor, Hyperclocked |
| RAM | Patriot 8GB 1600Mhz PXD38G1600LLK Memory |
| Video | EVGA® GTX580 1536MB 015-P3-150-AR |
| Motherboard | Asus® P8Z68-V Pro Gen3 Motherboard |
| Storage | Patriot® 120GB Wildfire SATAIII SSD PW120GS25SSDR in RAID 0 |
| Optical drive | LG® UH12LS28 |
| Power | Corsair® Professional Series HX1050 Power Supply |
| Case | Velocity Micro™ GX2-W Silver |
| Keyboard | Velocity Micro™ Slim Multimedia Keyboard - Black |
| Mouse | Velocity Micro™ Optical Mouse - Black |
Luckily, the story doesn’t really get in the way of the free-form mayhem that makes up the bulk of Far Cry 3’s gameplay. Once again, the design of the island is key to the appeal, and the tight pacing keeps the game humming. Sure, there are plenty of missions in which you end up just plodding along against wave after wave of near-identical enemies, slowly working your way toward the next Macguffin in the storyline. But when you’re simply exploring the island, the map is dotted with so many fun things to do, it’s hard to avoid putting off your main goal for a series of quick, satisfying side-missions.
One moment you’re sneaking into an outpost, trying to take out its pirates without being seen. The next, you’re bouncing an ATV across the countryside to deliver supplies to some rebels. Then you’re fending off a bear attack and harvesting the pelt for a new key item in your inventory, or climbing a radio tower to open up a new section of the map (don’t ask me how that’s supposed to make sense). Next thing you know, you're jumping from that tower and soaring over the ground on a wingsuit, popping into a timed challenge to take out as many pirates as you can without dying. You move on to harvesting a patch of flowers for some power-boosting syringes. Then you're swimming to a nearby jetski and just gliding along the coast for a while. Finally, you try to remember what you were actually supposed to be doing in the first place.
Even more impressive, you can complete almost everything in the preceding paragraph without a single loading screen. Far Cry 3 seems to make it a point of pride to transition naturally from one sequence to another without pausing the game to load more content. There are some exceptions; the game takes a few seconds to load every time you die (which could be considered a fair punishment) and when you “fast travel” to a far off location. Still, you don’t realize just how much the frequent loading interruptions mar the flow of other games until you find them largely eliminated here.
The islands delicately straddle the fine line between "too empty" and "too crowded." Even when you’re just wandering around aimlessly, you’ll never go too long with running into a passing car with enemy pirates, or an abandoned relic to plunder for valuables, or a rocky outcropping just begging to be climbed. It’s all presented with a kind of naturalistic, organic care; it’s rare to see a repeated set-piece that just seems stamped in from some sort of pre-made designer’s template. Even those repeated radio towers you have to climb each have their own character and design to them.
The excellent environmental design feeds into the gameplay as well. Using the terrain to aid in stealth reconnaissance and for cover in a firefight becomes second nature. It’s rare to find a mission where you can’t use either or both, and the level designers have placed subtle set-pieces to aid either form of play. More than that, though, there’s just a smoothness to the interface and movement in Far Cry 3. Everything from your swimming speed to the firing of the upgradeable guns to the way each vehicles handles over different types of terrain just feels easy and uncomplicated. Things as simple as being able to see Jason's flailing arms and legs when falling from a great height increase the impression that you're really inhabiting his body and this world.
It doesn’t hurt that Far Cry 3 is at the absolute cutting edge of graphics technology. It’s a bit scary how real everything looks on my Velocity Micro rig, right down to the individual blades of long grass that sway gently in the wind. Complex effects like water, smoke and explosions are rendered beautifully. Distant pieces of the world come into view naturally, with no pop-in. The human figures are right on the verge of escaping the uncanny valley, with realistically watery eyes and amazingly natural movements. The Xbox 360 and PS3 versions do a passable job rendering the world, and you can get by with any computer that meets the (decently high) minimum specs. But this is one of those games that really shows off the extra money you spent on the newest computer hardware.
If there’s one major downside to the gameplay, it’s the feeling that your character is pre-baked, without much meaningful power progression throughout the story. More elaborate kills earn you more experience points, which work toward earning new tattoos that unlock new powers. But these powers are almost all just minor improvements from your base state. Things like quicker health regeneration and quieter sneaking are nice, but they felt like marginal improvements. Even new abilities like two-person takedowns and the ability to slide out of a sprint didn't make me feel like my death-dealing abilities had gotten much of an upgrade. By the end of the game, I didn’t feel that much more powerful than I did at the beginning.
The enemy artificial intelligence is also a low point. The waves and waves of pirates that come at you in many missions have a distressingly low sense of self-preservation, often charging your position at full speed, running out in the open just to be shot down easily. Other times they’ll stand there stupidly at point blank range, waiting for you to pivot around and kill them before they react. When the game wants to turn up the difficulty, it usually just throws more of these pirates at you, forcing you to find a new hiding spot before you’re overwhelmed.
These quibbles aren’t enough to ruin the experience of exploring one of the finest video game environments ever created, though. Far Cry 3 is the kind of world you'll want to come back to long after the forgettable story is over, just to see every corner of its painstakingly detailed environments and cross off all those enjoyable mission markers on that map.
The Good
- One of the most detailed, enjoyable open-world environments ever conceived
- Wide variety of missions and tasks to perform
- Excellent physics modeling and interface
- Top-of-the-line graphics (if your hardware can handle them)
- Some strong vocal performances
The Bad
- Nonsensical, easily forgettable storyline
- Not much feeling of character progression
- Enemy AI is often incredibly stupid
The Ugly
- How much it costs to get a machine that can run the game on the highest graphics settings
Verdict: Buy it.
reader comments
63