Nov 21, 2012

Far Cry®

I don’t know what an Undying Bear is exactly, but I’ve vowed to kill it. I hope it’s just a name. This is a mission for the island’s Rakyat tribe, and Rakyat tradition dictates that I must defeat the creature with the infinite-ammo pump-action shotgun they’ve given me. A recent tradition, I would guess, but one I’m happy to honour. The truth is, I have an ulterior motive for finding and killing the legend: I’d really like a new rucksack.

A lot of what you do in Far Cry 3 raises perplexing questions: why would a rucksack made from the skin of the Undying Bear hold more than the one I made from four dead dingoes earlier? Can’t I just make one out of six dead dingoes? What is it about Undying Bear skin that facilitates a particularly capacious rucksack design? And more to the point: if it’s never died, how would anyone know?

But as I scramble away from it, panic-firing my traditional tribal pump action, what I’m actually wondering is this: when did Far Cry 3 become so good?

We’d been told it was an ‘open world’ game, but everything Ubisoft showed of it made it look like a monologue-heavy, tightly scripted adventure, its freedom limited to small mission areas. That is in there, it turns out: there’s an absurdly long series of missions about rescuing your friends from the pirates who’ve captured them. But it’s just one of the many different games you can play on this vast, freely explorable tropical island.

Hunting wild game to make bags out of their skin is another. Guns, money, syringes and all types of ammunition require their own special container, and every size of every container can only be made from the skin of one particular species of animal. And while guns, money, syringes and all types of ammunition are abundantly available on the island, its people have apparently never invented the bag.

So you, American tourist Jason Brody, must bring your container technology to the island by personally inventing and reinventing various types of harnesses, wallets and sacks, culminating in your magnum opus: the Undying Bear Skin Rucksack, a masterpiece of dermatological engineering capable of holding up to 96 leaves.

If you’re going to ask players to buy into a system so hilariously removed from its origins in real-world logic, it had better work. It does. Making the island’s wildlife the fodder for your personal upgrade system turns you into a hunter, forced to study and understand the jungle as you explore it. The place teems with life, to the point that you’ll often just sit in a bush and watch it. Check out the leopard stalking those boar! What are those dogs howling at? Ooh look, a Komodo dragon mauling a villager!

They don’t just fight amongst themselves: the island is dotted with pirate outposts, and the roads are travelled by trucks and cars full of pirates, Rakyat rebels, and civilians. Almost any pair of these have some reason to scuffle if they blunder into each other on their randomised routes, and hearing it happen around you makes the place feel alive. Distant gunfire or beast growls are never just ambience: something’s actually happening over there, and you can go and find out what. Maybe steal its skin.

Those outposts are what the game is really about, and conquering one demonstrates everything that makes it great. Your first job is to scout: you’ve got an entire island of free space to circle this small settlement, and the zoom lens of your camera to study it with. The first Far Cry let you tag enemies with your binoculars: once seen, they’re marked on your map in real-time. Far Cry 2 ditched that for being unrealistic. Far Cry 3 brings it back with a vengeance: not only does your camera mark enemies on the map, it lets you see them through walls from then on. As with the skin-crafting, the philosophy is clear: screw reality, this ability makes the game more fun. It does.

Once you’ve scoped and tagged the 5-10 enemies guarding the outpost, you have perfect situational awareness. You could open fire, but at least one of the pirates will make it to an alarm panel. That brings a truckload of goons to reinforce, and things get very messy. So priority number two is to disable the alarms, and the systems for this are deliciously clever.

You can shoot them. OK, that one’s not clever, but it has an interesting complication: only the panel you shoot is disabled, and even a silenced shot will make enough of an impact noise to send the guards running to the others. If it’s a small camp, and you’ve scouted it thoroughly, and you’re sure you have line of sight to every panel, you can speed-snipe them all before the guards can set them off. This is cool.

Trickier, but cooler still, is to methodically eliminate each pirate without alerting the others. This is tough, but your tools support it: you can lunge for any unwitting enemy nearby and impale them on your machete before they can call for help. A perk system lets you spend experience points to upgrade stuff like this, including a great trick that lets you steal the dying guard’s own knife and throw it at someone else for a second silent kill.

My favourite method, though, is often more practical. If you can get to one of the alarm panels in person, you can tamper with it to disable them all. It’s silent, instant and comprehensive. But the panels are always in the heart of the outpost, watched by everyone. Getting to one requires perfect scouting, obsessive planning and steady nerves.

That generally means creating a distraction, and that’s another thing Far Cry 3 is great at. You have a dedicated button for throwing a rock, and the sound will distract any idle guard in earshot. It’s not a new feature for the series, but short-sighted enemies, more predictable AI and the see-through-walls thing make it massively more useful this time. And those same factors apply to other distractions: a car-full of rebels showing up, a stray bear wandering past, or the pirates’ pet leopard suddenly finding its rickety bamboo cage shot open.

Last time I did the cage trick, the leopard savaged every pirate in the camp, waited for my Rakyat allies to show up and take over, then savaged all of them too. That camp is under leopard control now. I gave him sovereignty.

Part of what I love about all these systems in Far Cry 3 is the way they chain together. I find myself hedging my bets: I want to take an outpost down undetected, but I’ll try to sneak in and disable the alarms first in case I screw it up. And before I do that, I’ll drop some C4 under a nearby truck: if I’m close to being discovered, detonating that’ll take their attention off me. Often, halfway through carrying out my plan, the guards catch sight of something they want to attack outside the outpost walls, and rush off to shoot at it. So you have to be ready to restrategise on the spot, and sneak through any window of opportunity that opens up.

Once, when I couldn’t get to an alarm panel, I was rumbled halfway through eliminating the guards. I finished the rest off before the reinforcements arrived, but that left me trapped in an empty building with eight angry pirates hunting for me. It was heart-poundingly tense. I’d peek out of windows to tag them with my camera, then watch their silhouettes through the walls until one strayed close. I couldn’t risk leaving the huts, so I’d just throw a stone near the doorway. The sound would lure him inside, I’d impale him on my knife, drag his body out of view, then wait for my next target.

If you do manage to disable the alarms, your reward is an even more satisfying second phase to the fight. You still have to eliminate all the guards, and it’s still good to remain unseen, but now it doesn’t matter how panicked they get as their friends drop around them.

Far Cry 2 had outposts too, though they were smaller with fewer ways to approach. They were also the source of my biggest problem with that game: they repopulated. Far Cry 3’s solution to this problem is: they don’t. You can conquer the whole island, outpost by outpost, turning each into a rebel base with hunting and assassination missions to help secure the area. It’ll just take you a while, because it’s huge.

Taking over an outpost gets you a new safehouse with a built-in shop, selling a fairly ridiculous array of guns and attachments. These are unexpectedly satisfying to use, and Far Cry 2’s slightly tiresome habit of causing them to randomly jam is gone. It’s also very generous about which ones you can fit silencers to - I ended up taking a silenced SMG, a silenced sniper rifle, the silent bow, and a grenade launcher for emergencies (leopards, basically).

Yes, it’s a game in 2012, so it has a bow. Along with the endlessly distracting rock and the brutally effective machete, the bow makes you feel like a hunter, stalking and butchering teams of heavily armed guards with nothing but blades and guile. You’re never forced to get it, and it’s not actually as effective as a good silenced sniper rifle, but it gives you a sense of identity the other two games never had. As you walk through a silent town of corpses, pulling your arrows back out of their skulls, you can’t help thinking, “Christ, I’m glad I’m on my side.”

Your captured outposts become hubs for two types of missions: assassinations and hunting quests. Both are fun, but assassinations are the highlight: you’ve got to take out an enemy commander with only your knife.

I’ve been putting it off, but I should probably talk about the story missions. The pirates have captured - no kidding - you, your brother, your brother’s girlfriend, your girlfriend, your friend, your other brother, and your other friend. By the end of it I was surprised we didn’t also find my mother, niece and high-school English teacher somewhere in the compound.

It’s not all bad. About half of the Jesus Christ /thirty-eight/ missions give you enough freedom to have fun with the predatory combat systems that make the outpost fights so great. The other half... erk. They’re like a guided tour of all the clumsiest ways to mash story and videogames together until both of them break.

You left the mission area! Restart! You lost the target! Restart! You failed the quicktime event! Restart! A plot character got themselves killed! Restart! We spawned some enemies in a spot you knew was empty! Restart!

I don’t feel like you have to be that smart to predict this stuff won’t work. You don’t have to play a lot of games to see how it backfires. And you don’t have to talk to a lot of gamers to find out how much we hate it when you cheat or punish us to make a scene play out the way the story needs it to. It’s so painful to see clumsiness like that in a game that’s otherwise so elegantly designed.

The island itself is so rich and interesting to explore that it’d be a fantastic game even without any main story missions. So the question is, does the presence of a half-rubbish campaign hurt it? A bit, thanks to one unwelcome quirk of the level-up system: most of those neat perks, including the knife-throwing one, are locked off until you reach certain points in the plot. That pretty much forces you to play it, though thankfully not for long. Most of the good ones unlock at the same time as knife-throwing, a few hours in. You can safely stop there and get back to the good stuff.

Elsewhere in Far Cry 3’s efforts to be all things to all people, it somehow has four competitive multiplayer modes and a separate co-op campaign. Playing this pre-release, it’s too soon to review the competitive stuff. The co-op missions are a lot of fun, though: brisk, ridiculous shooting galleries about helping each other plant explosives and repair vehicles. There’s no server browser, unfortunately, but they’re best played with friends where possible. My favourite moment was taking a stealthy loadout and playing scout for a heavy-gunner friend in a dark cave: I’d ‘spot’ targets in the dark to highlight them on his HUD, he’d gun them down and draw all their fire.

Another caution about online stuff: Far Cry 3 uses Ubisoft’s Steam-like service uPlay, and if you play online, your game can get interrupted temporarily if your connection or their servers go down. It’s just a brief pause, though, and you can always start the game in offline mode to avoid it entirely. You miss out on uPlay achievements and a few lame unlockable rewards that way - I didn’t particularly care.

Other than that, it’s a nice PC version: responsive mouse movement, specific graphics and FoV options, tutorials reflect your custom controls, and it runs decently on Ultra-everything on a modest 3GHz dual core machine with a Radeon HD 5800. The engine doesn’t quite suit the jungle as beautifully as it did the African desert in Far Cry 2, but it has some beautiful views.

The original Far Cry’s developers Crytek used to describe that game’s philosophy as ‘veni, vidi, vici’: you show up, you scout out the situation, and you decide how to conquer it. Ubisoft kept the Far Cry name, and Crytek tried to stay true to its spirit in the Crysis games. But only Far Cry 3 really feels focused on doing that concept justice. You’ve got a huge island to explore, ridiculously effective tools for scouting every hostile situation, and so many clever intersecting systems to inspire creative ways to conquer them. It’s a better stealth game than Far Cry 1, set in an open world that feels richer than Far Cry 2’s. That’s an amazing thing to play.

Nov 21, 2012

Far Cry 3: The Kotaku Review

Far Cry®

Here's what happened: I was soaring above a gorgeous tropical island in a hang-glider when I heard gunfire below. Waaaay down on the road below, a gang of friendly islanders was going toe-to-toe with a band of ruthless pirates. I banked around and dropped in low, landing just inside the treeline. I pulled out my high-tech bow, then crept up to and took down one of the pirates with an arrow before another spotted me. Shouting and gunfire erupted from all sides.

Forty-five seconds later, burned bodies lay strewn in every direction; a deadly tiger had come roaring out of the jungle, and the grass and trees to my left were ablaze, deadly-hot flames spreading as fast as I could scramble. Cutting my losses, I sprinted toward a cliff overhang, violently jerking my dislocated thumb back into joint as I ran. In one smooth motion, I swan-dove into the open water a hundred yards below. A crash as I broke the surface, then silence. Sun-rays sliced into the murky depths as I regained my bearings. And that was when I saw the first shark.

That's Far Cry 3 in a nutshell.

Repeat the above encounter five times in the game, and you'll get five different outcomes. Maybe you take out all the bad guys without raising a ruckus. Maybe you stay high up on a hill and blow everyone up using rockets, only to get chomped by a tiger you didn't hear behind you. Maybe your allies win the firefight before you land, and you've got nothing left to do but clean up. Or maybe the fight spills over into an enemy outpost, and before you know it you're up against an army of troops, trained dogs, and helicopters. It's all possible, and every permutation is as fun as the last one.

Far Cry 3 is an open-world shooter through and through. The setup is simple: You're set loose on a massive island in the south pacific and tasked with gradually conquering it, one dead pirate/tiger/shark at a time. Here's a gun. Have fun.

WHY: Far Cry 3 does so much right: It's an exhilarating and empowering adventure that marvelously combines player freedom with shiny technical polish.

Far Cry 3

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3, PC (Reviewed)
Release Date (US): December 4

Type of game: Open-world first-person shooter with an emphasis on exploration and stealth.

What I played: Completed the single-player story and a ton of side content over the course of around 30 hours. Played an hour or so of co-op and an hour or so of versus multiplayer.

My Two Favorite Things

Realizing that my 20th base raid had been just as exciting and unpredictable as my first.
Running up a winding mountain ridge before hang-gliding off. It never gets old.

My Two Least-Favorite Things

Every time Jason Brody would pipe up to tell me how he was feeling about things.
The inability to turn off the HUD, mini-map or objective markers.

Made-to-Order Back-of-Box Quotes

"My leopard army and I are coming for you."
-Kirk Hamilton, Kotaku.com
"I swear I saw a hatch around here somewhere."
-Kirk Hamilton, Kotaku.com
"Why doesn't this game just star Vaas?"
-Kirk Hamilton, Kotaku.com

There's also a story you can play through, though the distinction between the "story parts" of the game and the "non-story parts" is an important one: It's in the balance between the two that Far Cry 3 finds success. The game casts you as Jason Brody, a twentysomething layabout whose drunken island vacation is interrupted by pirates (the scary modern-day kind). They kidnap him, his brothers, and his friends, and set to ransom them and sell them into slavery. The story parts are a long series of mostly linear, welcomely varied adventures Jason undertakes in service of this rescue/revenge plot.

The non-story parts, on the other hand, are the emergent action that happens all over the island between missions. As with many of the best open-world games, the story parts are fun, but the non-story parts are what make Far Cry 3 special.

The tale begins with Jason narrowly escaping captivity, then quickly taking up with a group of friendly island dwellers called the Rakyat, who are led by a charismatic, bespectacled dude named Dennis and a sexy, mysterious (and kind of ridiculous) woman named Citra. Dennis believes that cowardly Jason is, at heart, a warrior, and the rest of the game follows Jason's (and your) quest to rescue his friends and take down the men in charge of the Rook Islands' slave- and drug-trading empires.

It's a perfectly workable setup, as these things go, but the character at its heart—Jason Brody—is little more than a party-boy nebbish. Despite the fact that he was likely cast because the highest percentage of young male players would see themselves in him, he's never all that relatable, and while his journey from zero to hero sure looks convincing as you're blowing apart enemy helicopters, it never feels convincing when he talks about it. He's an overwritten tryhard who frequently yells exposition in the middle of action sequences, just in case we forgot what was going on. "I have to find Riley, Liza and the others!" he hollers to himself, running through the jungle in terror. "I can't take any more of this heat!" he grunts, as a burning building collapses around him. At one point, he actually looks down at his hands and asks, "What have I become?"

But even though the story is something of a mishmash, it certainly has its moments. The motion-capture technology used to portray the rogue's gallery of quest givers—a paranoid CIA operative, a deadly renegade hostage-taker, a sultry island woman, a drug-addled scientist—is some seriously impressive stuff, in some ways even surpassing Naughty Dog's work on the Uncharted series. The primary antagonist, a pirate named Vaas Montenegro, is marvelously brought to life by actor Michael Mando, who gives a magnetic, menacing performance. Whenever Vaas was on the screen, I couldn't take my eyes off him.

The single-player campaign also contains a welcome amount of variety—a series of tomb-exploration missions in the middle play out like first-person Uncharted, and a number of hallucinated drug sequences are creative, pure goofy fun. The story missions are best thought of as a garnish, a way to break up all the sneaking, shooting, and exploring you'll be doing in between them.

That the story is inconsistent is perhaps Far Cry 3's primary failing, only because the rest of the game is so good that the story holds it back from true, we'll-still-talk-about-this-in-five-years greatness. The more compelling story is the one outside of the proper narrative, the age-old video game story of progression and mastery. As players earn experience points, Jason levels up, and his arm-tattoo grows more and more elaborate with each new armor-upgrade or takedown ability. The transformation from the start of the game to the end of the game is remarkable, if not as cleverly tied to the narrative as the writers would have liked. You'll begin as dead meat—a weakling with no health and a pistol, running for his life. By the game's end, you'll be a deadly predator, silently skittering through the jungle and dealing death with monstrous precision. You'll toy with your foes, and you'll like it. Rarely has progression in a game of this sort felt so satisfying.

You'll toy with your foes, and you'll like it.

The Rook Islands make for a spectacular video game playground, one part Ling Shan from Crysis, one part The Island from LOST. From the dense jungles and murky swamps of the northern island to the wide fields and sweeping overlooks of the southern, the whole map is jammed with fun distractions and rewarding stuff to occupy your time. And the most remarkable thing isn't that there's so much to do, it's how well it all works together.

The game revolves around five core mechanics, more or less: Sneaking, shooting, driving, exploring, and hunting. All five work well and are fun in their own right, and all five tie in with the leveling and progression system so that every time you do something, you feel like it's making you more powerful. It's that sense of seamlessness that elevates Far Cry 3—there's a feeling of "concert," of interlocking systems that have found a hell of a groove together. That encounter I described at the top of this review is a good example, and that sort of thing happens more or less constantly. The game encourages you to quickly hop between driving, hunting, hiding, swimming, shooting, and hiding again, all with astonishing fluidity.

The item-collection, experience/leveling, and crafting systems are all well-balanced, too. You're encouraged to go hunting because if you skin animals, you can use their pelts in the crafting system to make better holsters and containers for your gear. Animals roam different parts of the islands, so if you want to go hunting, you'd better explore. To craft better health upgrades, you'll need to harvest the best plants. To carry more plants and syringes, you'll need to hunt the animals to make the proper cases. To get upgrades for your gear, you'll need money, which is perpetually in short supply—so to get money, you'd better go looting, hunting, or undertake side-missions. It's all balanced, and the game maintains scarcity in its resources very effectively. The "gaminess" of it all might be a turnoff for some—Far Cry 3 exists in some middle ground between the complex micromanagement of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and the minimalism of Far Cry 2. The balance worked very well for me, and felt like something of a sweet spot.

Each of the islands' many non-storyline diversions net you experience points, money, and gear. Enemy bases are the most satisfying of these distractions, encampments of pirates that you can conquer and take for yourself. After you've killed everyone at a base, you'll raise up a blue Rakyat flag, and the base's bulletin board will open up with additional hunting and assassination challenges you can undertake. In a smart touch, the hunting challenges must be tackled with specific weaponry (usually the game's outstanding bow and arrow), and assassinations must be performed up close and personal with a machete. You can sit down and play a number of poker games around the island, or engage in fun, arcade-y "Trials of the Rakyat," which give you a specific challenge ("Shoot guys, and each time you kill a guy your gun instantly changes.") and then put your final score up against your friends. On top of all that, there are story-based sidequests you can undertake ("Take photos of dead pirates") that could have been filler but frequently feature funny writing and interesting challenges.

In fact, the biggest complaint I have about the side-stuff is that the signal-to-noise ratio can become a bit overwhelming. There is no way to turn off the mini-map, HUD, or objective markers, meaning that no matter what you're doing, the game is constantly throwing information at you, and constantly reminding you to get on with your next story mission. As the wubby soundtrack churned, and the hud popped up and nudged me back on track, it was hard not to resent the game a little bit for being so up in my grill all the time. Back off, game! I want to explore you! As an avowed fan of the notoriously HUD-minimal Far Cry 2, I found the lack of display customization somewhat dispiriting. I'd love to play this game with the HUD turned off, particularly on a second playthrough. Why won't you give me the option, Ubisoft? Surely it isn't that important to give me all this information if I don't want or need it.

The Far Cry 2 Question: This comparison isn't that important for the majority of people, but it matters a great deal to me. How does Far Cry 3 stack up to one of my all-time favorite games, Far Cry 2? Basically, Far Cry 3 is a mechanically fine-tuned, more-complex upgrade from Far Cry 2 that adds a crapload of very enjoyable, but very video-gamey junk to the the equation. Far Cry 3 lacks the dark, oppressive magic of Far Cry 2. You have a mini-map, and HUD data litters the screen. Your guns never degrade, they only get more powerful. The Rook Islands are lovely, but they lack the haunting grandeur of Far Cry 2's Sub-Saharan Africa. The story has much higher production values, but is less sophisticated. The music, while enjoyable in its wubby way, is inferior to Far Cry 2's eerie strings and hand-drums. But what Far Cry 3 lacks in focus it makes up for in functionality. Enemy AI is greatly improved. Stealth works. Surround-sound audio is more locational and useful, and hunting is easier. You have a reason to drive other cars than the machine-gun jeep. Hang gliders are no longer a cruel joke. I really like Far Cry 3, but in a more traditional way, in the way I like well-made, highly enjoyable video games. The majority of players, I sense, will vastly prefer it to its predecessor. And most of us who retain a preference for the second game will still have a good time with the new one.

Ubisoft has performed a smart lift from their own Assassin's Creed series by adding radio towers to Far Cry 3, which you must climb and activate in order to un-fog sections of the map. There are 18 of these strewn around the islands, and climbing them gets progressively more challenging as you go. The radio towers could have been rote or boring, but instead are delightful—perilous ascents that can be downright tricky, but almost never frustrating. It's not quite first-person platforming, more first-person climbing, with a focus on figuring out how to get to your next point of ascent. When you stand at the top, the tower lightly buckles and sways beneath you, creaking in the wind. This kind of attention to detail runs through most every moment of Far Cry 3.

None of this stuff is all that new, but it's amazing how well it all works, and how well it all works together. It feels great to play an open-world game where all of the systems are polished to this extent—the game is rarely buggy, and dishes out surprises on a regular basis. Cars handle with a realistic sense of physics and momentum. There's an organic first-person cover mechanic that works so well it feels like a revelation. Press up against a wall, and you take cover. Hit the "aim" button and you pop out to take a shot. Please, other first-person shooters, borrow Far Cry 3's cover mechanic!

The stealth is just as polished as the gunplay—taking down an enemy base without anyone spotting you is an exercise in caution, observation, alarm deactivation and enemy-manipulation. But full-on combat works just as well—on normal difficulty, enemies are deadly and will frequently overwhelm you, and you must play smart to win. Enemy types—chargers, shooters, snipers, heavies—all run varied and complementary routines, and force constant improvisation. And none of that's to mention the (truly) wild card: Those deadly animals. Cobras, tigers, leopards, boars, komodo dragons, sharks, and the world's most startling crocodiles—all will conspire to throw a wrench into your best-laid plans.

Talk to ten people, and you'll get ten different highlight reels of their time on the island. Shark hunting off the northern coast, fleeing from a collapsing Chinese ruin, zip-lining from the top of a rickety radio tower, or demolishing an enemy encampment with a ton of strategically placed C4. The one constant is that island, gorgeous and deadly, sprawling out before you. Running along the top of an open ridge, the sun setting in the distance, feeling for all the world like an extra on LOST… it's something that has yet to get old for me, even after around 30 hours with the game.

Far Cry 3 looks fantastic on PC—I played using both an AMD Radeon 6870 and a newer GeForce GTX 660Ti. Particularly on the GTX, with Directx11 enabled, this one's a real stunner. I would recommend that anyone who has the means play the game on PC—while I don't have final retail console copies of the game to compare it to, I was less impressed by the PS3 version at a recent press event I attended. The 360 version looked okay, but neither console comes close to the crispness and high framerate of the PC version. Far Cry 3 feels as close to a true "next generation" game as anything I've played this year, and it requires current hardware to run at its best.

(This video is from a preview I did of the game a little while back. My opinions are much more solidified now than they were then, but this gives a good sense of what the game's all about.)

In addition to its lengthy single-player campaign, Far Cry 3 also comes with separate co-op and competitive multiplayer offerings, though both are much harder to judge at this point in time. The game still isn't out for another couple of weeks in the states, and there are few people playing it on PC at the moment. I teamed up with some press friends to play around an hour of co-op and found it to be fun enough, if buggy, but not really in the same league as more polished co-op games like Gears of War and Left 4 Dead.

Co-op has its own story and characters, but they're mostly weirdly acted clichés, and it's all very removed from the events in single-player. Enemies in co-op are damage-sponges who can take what seems like 400% more damage than their single-player counterparts. Un-upgraded multiplayer characters move and aim quite slowly, and the levels are all linear. You won't be able to grab your friends and tear around the main single-player island, which feels like a shame—that's really all I wanted to do! I'll still probably play through all of the co-op missions, but so far I've found co-op to be much less satisfying and enjoyable than the single-player game.

I also had a tough time scheduling sessions to test out the competitive multiplayer. I played a few rounds of both "firestorm" and "transmission" modes, both of which are riffs on capture-and-defend. They worked fine, though in general they felt sluggish when compared with both Far Cry 3's single-player and with other popular first-person shooters like Borderlands 2 and Black Ops II. A lot of that could just be tied to my low-level character, though. So, the jury's out, and at this point, two weeks in advance of the game's release, it's just too early to say whether the multiplayer is any good. My sense? That it's fine, and that it'll find some longevity in the fantastic map-editor, but that it won't attract a huge multiplayer following. Far Cry 3 is a single-player game at heart. I'll play more multiplayer once the game is out, and will update this review after that.

Even if Far Cry 3 shipped with no multiplayer at all, the game would be a cinch to recommend. It's a smart, challenging, and polished adventure that does what it does very well. Some missed storytelling opportunities don't overshadow its fun, occasionally daring narrative successes, and the whole thing revels in a luxurious sheen of high production values and extraordinary design talent.

Far Cry 3 is an example of the rare ambitious, big-budget game that accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do—chaotic yet controlled, with a brilliantly-balanced mechanical ecosystem that challenges and empowers at every turn. It's a wild ride, and one well worth taking. Just watch out for crocodiles.

Nov 7, 2012

Far Cry 3 hands-on: we carve our own path in Ubisoft’s open-world shooter

Far Cry®

This article originally appeared in issue 246 of PC Gamer UK. Article by Rob Zacny.

You play Jason Brody, a child of wealth and privilege. You meet him through home movies of his latest vacation. Beautiful, vapid young people drink, dance, jet ski and sky dive in a tropical paradise somewhere. Then the camera pulls back, and you’re watching the videos through Jason’s eyes as he sits inside a wooden cage in a pirate camp.

His kidnapper, Vaas, holds Jason’s phone through the bars of the cage, enjoying this opportunity to mock an American princeling. Vaas’s mohawk sits above a pair of unnaturally wide eyes. You and Jason belong to him now.

By the end of the intro, you and Jason have watched someone bleed out through your fingers as you try to staunch a fatal gunshot wound. You have killed a man: a pirate loomed out of the darkness, and suddenly there was a knife and you were shoving it into his chest and neck. You are lost. Your friends are gone.

He’s been to college, but Far Cry 3 is unequivocal in its statement: Jason Brody’s education has finally begun.

Far Cry 3 combines ideas you’ve seen in other games and other genres. It has Crysis’s sense of stealth, and the open-world chaos of its predecessor, Far Cry 2. You’ll find a bit of Assassin’s Creed in the way it reveals the map and side-missions, while the hunting, crafting, and character progression smack of Elder Scrolls. From these very good parts, Far Cry 3 creates something new.

My guide to this world is a middle-aged man named Dennis. After Jason’s escape, Dennis welcomes Jason to his small village. He recognizes him as a fellow warrior, and will teach him the ways of warfare on this island.

I might as well get this out in the open: the racial politics in Far Cry 3 look troubling. Dennis and the villagers border on ‘noble savage’ stereotypes. They live together in harmony while women perform sensuous dances to the sound of drums. Dennis himself is a mystic, explaining that Jason’s new tattoos mark his progress on the path of the warrior. It all raises some troubling red flags.

Dennis shows me the basics of surviving on the island. I can reveal the map by climbing radio towers and disabling the jammers the pirates have placed there. Once the jammers are down, not only is nearby territory revealed, but so are new mission locations and hunting grounds.

My first hunting quest involves killing wild boar and gathering a variety of local flowers. Boar, in addition to making delicious sausages, are also good for fine leather goods. If you want to increase your carrying capacity for basic items such as cash and ammunition, you’ve got to craft gear using animal skins, which means things aren’t looking so good for Piglet, Tigger and Owl.

Plants, on the other hand, are primarily useful for crafting syrettes. Like all homemade drugs, the injections you make from plants enhance your skills and even grant various forms of second sight . One type of injection, the ‘combat instincts’ syrette, reveals all nearby enemies, so that I can see their outlines even through solid obstacles.

All my flower-gathering and hunting left me feeling that Far Cry 3’s tropical island is sometimes too much like a theme park. The colours are heavily saturated, the jungle almost painfully verdant, and the weather sunny and clear. Far Cry 3 seems like the sort of place where you might find Prospero and Caliban hanging out while Ralph and Piggy squabble over the conch and Sawyer takes his shirt off. It places itself somewhere between reality and dream.

Once I have the basics down, Dennis drives me to a pirate outpost. This is my final exam before being turned loose on the island, and I’ll be using my stealth, shooting and recon skills to tackle it.

Outposts provide fast-travel nodes, weapons lockers and hubs for side-missions. But first you have to take them from the pirates’ warm, still-twitching hands. To help me with my first battle, Dennis brings along a posse of indigenous warriors, the last hold-outs of the native population that has been driven into the heart of the island by pirate attacks.

My battered machine pistol doesn’t inspire confidence in my ability to shoot it out, so I circle through the trees to come up behind the outpost. Thanks to the dense jungle and poor visibility, I easily slip into the outpost. Three guards are doing lazy turns around the courtyard while spouting some amusing, if repetitive, dialogue.

By bringing each of the enemies into focus in Jason’s camera viewfinder, they’re marked on your minimap and in your first-person view. As with the ‘combat instincts’ injection, a marked enemy is visible at all times, even through solid obstacles. It pays to take a few minutes to conduct a proper recon in this game.

After marking about five guards and their attack dog, I’m ready to begin. I put the camera away, pull out my pistol, and start creeping up on a nearby pirate. He’s oblivious to my presence, too busy complaining about an STD he picked up at his last port of call. His day is about to get worse.

It’s hard to get anywhere in Far Cry 3. Half of the people you’ll meet along main roads are pirate raiders who want you dead. Fortunately the other half are fellow rebels who’ll let you pass unmolested, but it’s your own easily distracted brain that might be your deadliest enemy. I decide to hit another outpost astride a long dangerous route between two major quest locations. It’s a quick five or ten minute drive along a coastal road from my position. But it takes me almost two hours.

The first thing that gets me is a pirate patrol. I’m in a jeep barrelling downhill onto the white sands of the shoreline when a car full of pirates blazes past in the opposite direction. We spot each other at the exact same moment and throw our jeeps into hard sideways spins. I was quicker on the handbrake: I manage to get my ride straddling the road before the pirates turn their jeep around. Bailing out, I take cover behind the engine block as they race toward me.

I fire a half dozen shots that blow in their windshield and most of their driver’s face. A few more get the other pirates as the now-driverless jeep hurtles past and crashes into a tree.

Far Cry 3 is not a game of drawn-out gun battles: neither Jason nor his enemies can stand much punishment. Most of the firefights I had fell into one of two categories. The first was fast, random encounters like this one – if you don’t finish these off quickly, reinforcements will show up and the maths will turn against you. The other was like my raid on the outpost: a long recon and planning stage followed by a swift, decisive annihilation.

Before I can leave, two more patrols appear on the road. My skirmish turns into a running shootout that consumes most of my health syringes and most of my ammo before I manage to reach a hiding spot in the forest.

After losing the pirates, I catch a glimpse of a hawk circling nearby. I glance at my half-clip of rifle ammunition. What the hell. The hawk falls on my third shot. That’s the easy part. The hard part is finding where the damn thing actually dropped. After five minutes of searching the forest floor, I give up and shoot another hawk that appears to have spawned near the same location.

At last, I am ready to resume my journey. I go back to the scene of the pirate battle, grab one of the few cars that didn’t get shot to pieces, and start driving along the same route as before. This time I won’t let myself get dis- wait, I see a radio tower from the road. I head over there, kill the pirates guarding it, and reveal more of the map, which tells me that I’m near a hunting range. Perfect: I need deer hides for some new Bambi-coloured gear. I mosey over to the picturesque meadow, and find deer shuffling in flowers and tiger grass. I plug a few in the head from five feet away.

After my hunt, some flower picking, some item crafting, and a long walk to find a new vehicle (with a few further gunfights along the way), I finally resume my drive to the outpost... and end up pulling over at a roadside bar to play a surprisingly good game of high-stakes poker against three computer-controlled opponents.

But for sure, as soon as I fleece these fools, I’ll get back to storming that outpost... right after I use my winnings to buy new weapon upgrades.

My final mission in Far Cry 3 is to sneak aboard a beached cargo vessel the pirates are using as a communications hub, in order to eavesdrop on their radio chatter and discover where one of Jason’s friends is being held. But first, I have to stealth-kill some sentries who hold the encryption codes for the pirates’ communications. If I’m discovered, they’ll destroy the codes and I’ll fail the mission.

I arrive at the shore late at night, although the sky is so clear and the colours so saturated in this game that night is more of a dim, electric blue. It hardly interferes with visibility at all, but pirates do seem to have a harder time spotting you after sundown.

Since I need to maintain silence, I distract the guards by throwing rocks against crates and the sides of the ships. Far Cry 3 uses a radial marker to indicate whether you’re hidden. It points in the direction of guards about to spot you, giving you a chance to scurry into a convenient bush.

My targets investigate the noise, allowing me to approach unseen and kill them out of sight of the camp. Once they’re dead, circling inside the base and taking out the code-bearers is simple. Then comes the hard part.

No sooner have I eavesdropped on the pirates’ communications from the ships’s bridge than a couple of squads of goons arrive to investigate why the camp went silent. Now the bridge, three stories above the ground, is a trap. Stupidly, I decide to use my high ground ‘advantage’ to pick off the pirates as they arrive on the beach.

I get a couple before the rest soak the superstructure with machinegun fire. It’s intense – I can’t even peek over the side without getting shot. The AI may not always be brilliant (and I question Ubi’s decision to leave them all in easy-to-spot red shirts that stand out in the jungle) but it certainly understands the value of suppressive fire. These guys get into cover and start firing everything they have.

I fling a few grenades over the side and pray the explosions catch a few, then sprint down to the main deck. The first pirates are already coming aboard – I can’t get down the way I came. I flee to the prow of the ship and hide, trying to pick off the pirates as they bound along.

Far Cry 3’s AK is one of the better weapons I’ve used so far in my adventure, but it still feels like a third-world piece of garbage, much like the machine pistol I had at the start of the game. The game’s guns buck in a satisfying way, refusing to hit anything unless you keep adjusting your aim and show some restraint with your trigger finger. High-level weapons and upgrades promise to ameliorate this later, but here at the beginning of the game, it’s all too easy to spray a clip at someone from 20 feet away and only hit air.

My AK goes dry as two more pirates storm over. I sprint toward them, drop into a slide between them, leaving their shots flying over my head, then jump back to my feet right behind them and take them both out with my knife. I grab their rifles and jump down to the sand below.

I run around the back of the ship and flank the last group of pirates. I walk toward them, aiming down the iron sights, methodically downing them as they run for cover. It’s over in seconds.

Just as the guns fall silent on the beach and I stand ringed by corpses on a moonlit shore, a PR rep taps me on the shoulder. “Time’s up. Are you ready to go?”

A radio message is coming in from the village, where the pirates are launching a retaliatory raid. I have enough experience for some new abilities, enough money for some weapon upgrades, and I’m just getting the hang of stealth and distraction. I want to save the village and hunt more pirates, and I want to go explore the blank spaces on my map. I want to rescue Jason’s friends, and find out whether a better version of him was waiting at the end of all these adventures. So much to do, so much more than either Jason or I ever expected to find here.

“Can I get a few more minutes?”