Game Review: Far Cry 3 is a journey into the heart of darkness

The opening minutes of Far Cry 3 are full of fun, surf and sunshine. As Jason Brody, a young man on vacation in the pacific with his friends and brothers, you’re partying, adventuring, and basically busy making the memories of a lifetime- until you find yourself captured by pirates and the game takes a turn for the dark.

Trauma and violence are themes that Far Cry 3 explores with an intensity that is frequently disturbing but artistically potent. Though Jason manages to escape from the pirates and their dangerously unstable leader, Vaas, he finds himself learning the ways of the Rakyat, or the native island warriors of Rook island in order to rescue his friends and exact revenge.

Jason’s transformation from average joe to fearless assassin is a gradual one; he learns to hunt wild animals, construct gear using the hides of aforementioned animals, harvest plants to make medicines and other formulas, and most importantly, take human life. The game dwells quite a bit on this last aspect and what it does to the human being, and it’s possible to imagine that Vaas or some of the other hyper-violent characters were once not unlike Jason themselves.

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?

The game handles its psychology well; there are a bunch of colourful characters on Rook island. While Vaas might seem the most extreme in his insanity, each of the others exhibit their own unique flavour of crazy. There’s the drug-addled doctor, haunted by loss; the Liberian-born ex-US Marine (maybe) who saves and trains you; the unhinged mercenary who likes to alternate between menacing threats and cheerful history lessons. The list goes on.

[caption id=“attachment_551986” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Screengrab from the site.[/caption]

The characters and plot are for the most part quite strong. When you’re not trying to rescue your friends from death or slavery, or plotting violent revenge on Vaas, you’ll probably find yourself wrestling crocodiles, finding ancient treasure, or on a drug trip (the game has some very well done drug sequences) fighting a giant hallucinatory demon while simultaneously copulating furiously with a living goddess. Far Cry 3 likes to keep the drama high, spitting in the face of the mundane and laughing at its shame.

Like its predecessors, Far Cry 3 is open world, huge and gorgeously designed. Rook island is teeming with pristine waterfalls, underwater coves, beaches, and whatnot. Everything is incredibly beautiful, even more so if you choose to hang-glide off a hilltop and absorb the scenery from above. It’s not just a visual space either, myth and history intertwine to make it a living thing; ancient, mysterious and foreboding. The island was said to be formed from the severed head of a demon, the Chinese empire once built on it, followed by the Japanese during the second world war, and then drug and slave traders in the present day. Violence and conflict are intrinsic to Rook island.

The story missions generally follows first person shooter convention with good amounts of linear levels, straight-up firefights and vehicle sequences. HoweverJason can, in his spare time, climb rickety old radio towers scattered across the island to get the lay of the land; roads, animal haunts, and plant locations, as well as to obtain free weapons.

He can also attack pirate camps to bring them under Rakyat control. There are a lot of ways you can tackle these missions; you could attack head-on and kill off the guards and the reinforcements they call, or sneak in and disable the alarm and then attack, plant mines and lure the pirates into a trap, free a wild animal caged in the camp to cause a diversion, or circle around the camp sniping the guards one by one.

These missions are where the open world really shines. It’s a nuisance when your carefully laid plans go awry when you happen to stumble onto a tiger in the wild, but on the other hand if you’re lucky enough to start your attack just as a bear wanders into the enemy camp you’re basically home free. There’s plenty of motivation to take over camps apart from OC-tendencies; they allow fast travel between them, have weapon shops, unlock missions, provide money and XP, and reduce the number of enemy road patrols.

There are hunting challenges where you’re tasked with tracking and killing certain unique animals using just your knife or bow, which in turn will allow you to craft some high-quality items. Besides this, there are assassination missions, various weapon challenges, and some incredibly fun vehicle missions which see you hurtling across narrow island trails, trying to tame the wildly choppy steering.

All these missions give you XP, which can be used to unlock several abilities. As a Rakyat warrior, Jason can follow the path of the Heron (long-ranged skills), Shark (short-ranged skills) or Spider (stealth and survivability). Unlocking these abilities are a great motivation to perform side-missions early game, but by mid-game players will find that they’ve got most of the good skills across the three classes and the enthusiasm will dwindle away. The game could have done better by having more exciting late-game abilities, just like it introduces a new batch of weapons as you begin to collect all of the original range.

When the trailer for Far Cry 3 first came out, it seemed like it would draw heavily on the Uncharted series, and though there’s a fair amount of temple exploration and daring escapes from crumbling or burning buildings, the game that really finds resonance here is Assassin’s Creed. The hunting, tower-climbing and assassinations are made much more immersive by the first-person perspective, and unlike Assassin’s Creed 3, which leaves you more or less free to decide whether you want to hunt or not, Far Cry 3 makes it essential, since animal hides are required to hold more than the bare minimum of money, ammo, weapons, medipacs, or loot. I’ll leave the reader to decide which system is better, but I actually ended up hunting a fair amount in Far Cry 3, and didn’t at all in Assassin’s Creed 3.

With its strong, well-crafted plot, writing, and voice-acting, as well as its expansive single player mode (most players will end up investing at least twenty hours, while completionists will need above thirty), Far Cry 3 is already far ahead of most of the FPS-pack. But it also has a four player co-op mode and a map editor and competitive multiplayer, making it quite simply one of the best shooters around.