Far Cry 3 review

Start your story in the middle, they say. While Far Cry 3 doesn’t go quite that far, it does establish its premise with brutal economy. Its Rook Islands are a paradisal warzone, with the native islanders now on the losing side of a protracted conflict with the pirates and privateers who have established a heavy presence on their shores. Pirate commander Vaas is a psychotic murderer. And Jason Brody is the run-of-the-mill everyman thrust into the midst of the insanity.

Well, sort of. Jason’s only as much of an average Joe as the game, and its open world, allows him to be. And while Far Cry 3’s story tells a good tale of an ordinary guy finding his inner warrior in extraordinary circumstances, its mechanics do not. Jason starts the game remarkably proficient with both firearms and explosives, and ends it incredibly proficient with them. For every well-observed moment of conflict between the mundane urban lifestyle he’s leaving behind and his warrior’s calling – including one exquisitely timed phone call from a concerned girlfriend that happens to intrude on him doing something time-sensitive with C4 – there are moments that shatter the illusion.

The game tries to start Jason off slowly, sending him off foraging in its forest during the second mission. It’s a nice idea, and a deft introduction to the game’s crafting mechanics, but that doesn’t change the fact that our playthrough saw the novice action hero take a dip in a nearby river to harvest some aquatic plants and emerge having wrestled a crocodile to death. After Far Cry’s sci-fi and Far Cry 2’s politics, there’s a spiritual, mystical theme running through this third game that seeks to support Jason’s apparently superhuman abilities. While this does help suspend disbelief, it can’t change the lack of a meaningful journey for him.

Of course, if Far Cry 3 had hobbled players from the start, there’d be no sense in giving them a whole island to explore. And the Rook Islands are a beautiful slice of paradise, a postcard-perfect mixture of green forest, open beach and soaring peaks, run through with river routes and dotted with lagoons. It offers less varied terrain than its predecessor’s unspecified chunk of Africa, however, which offered lush pockets not too dissimilar to this as well as wrapping a desert or open grassland around them. But while the Rook Islands’ flora doesn’t look quite as ready for the tinderbox as the savannah’s yellowing grass, you can rest assured it responds just as eagerly to a flame.

Indeed, view Far Cry 3 as a postmodern neocolonial critique in which a western explorer alights upon a remote tropical paradise and razes it to the ground in the name of benevolent intervention, and you’ll be surprised how well it all holds together, not least because progression is marked in terms of territory claimed as much as distanced travelled. Far Cry 2’s checkpoints were nuggets of emergent possibility – unpredictable assortments of guards, supplies, vehicles and terrain that could be approached however you saw fit. Far Cry 3 has Outposts – similar stations that could have been plucked straight from the African plains but for one crucial difference: they no longer respawn.

An outpost cleared in Far Cry 3 becomes a position controlled by the Rakyat, the local militia aligned with Jason. You can save and fast travel here, as well as purchase or upgrade your guns and take on sidequests. More importantly, however, the takeover will have an effect on the surrounding environment, dramatically lowering the incidence of pirate activity in the region.

Far Cry 2’s civil war existed in rigid stalemate, with little direct contact between its two interchangeable factions. There’s a greater sense of conflict in Far Cry 3, where the colour-coded pirate and native patrols can stumble across one another and engage in unscripted skirmishes. Add in the island’s native animal population (which is surely large and aggressive enough to qualify for third faction status), and you have a recipe for some beautifully emergent chaos and occasional comedy. So a simple shootout between Jason and an enemy patrol could get gatecrashed by some overly keen islanders who, in their rush to lend assistance, inadvertently attract the attention of small pack of komodo dragons. At one point, we were bought precious seconds to heal and find cover when a tapir, rest its soul, unwittingly strolled into the path of a reinforcement-packed jeep.

Of course, the Rook Islands ecosystem has more function than simply providing a wildcard element to combat. Jason can hunt animals for their hides, and he’ll need to do so if he wants to expand his inventory. The demands of the crafting system are entirely arbitrary – you can a make a moderately sized ammo pouch out of two dingo hides, for instance, but if you want to make a larger one then only the pelts of another species will do. But this does, at least, force you into the wild. In order to create a new holster that would allow us to carry an extra gun, for instance, we had to head out to sea. Hunting sharks from the comfort of our hovercraft and the aid of a grenade launcher made for an amusing couple of minutes, but that didn’t make diving to the seabed to harvest their skins any less terrifying. The gory cutting of hide from flesh is complemented by a foraging system that allows Jason to make stat-boosting syringes out of plant life.

But for all the embellishments and tweaks, including an RPG-lite set of skill trees, the core of the game is very much Far Cry 2. Combat is robust with hefty feeling guns and satisfyingly large explosions – and enlivened by a strong awareness of Jason’s physical presence. He kicks up dirt when he slides, tumbles disorientatingly out of jeeps, and pulls off the trick of elegantly using cover in a firstperson game. Even so, hectic gunfights aren’t Far Cry 3’s strongest suit. Despite the nominal distinction between enemy types, they’re all rather similar when you take them on face-to-face. Like its predecessor, the real thrill of Far Cry 3 is found in the execution of plans formed while lying in the long grass, perhaps using Jason’s camera to pick out mercenaries before taking them out silently or maybe annihilating the Outpost in a swift, considered attack. If Halo is built around 30 seconds of fun, then the Far Cry series is built around these three minutes.

At least this is the case in singleplayer. Far Cry 3’s multiplayer modes are diverting enough, but both the cooperative and competitive gametypes focus on arcade-like shooting. Play against other humans is built around the fashionable blend of customisable loadouts, streak rewards and progression trees that Call Of Duty has popularised. Its maps have been competently constructed, with chokepoints, switchbacks and multiple lines of sight; its gametypes are variations upon recognisable themes, and everything works much as you’d expect. It’s doomed to sink without a trace in the face of COD, in other words. Co-op fares better. There’s not much room for stealth in the funnelled encounters this sidestory provides, but a group of four players is more than capable of flanking, outwitting and toying with a pack of pirates.

Even the campaign’s three minutes of fun can end up looping a little too repetitively, though, due to a ripple effect caused by some well-meaning changes. This is a more considerate game than its predecessor. The lack of respawning Outposts, plentiful fast travel options, and generous mid-mission checkpoints are joined by the fact your guns no longer break. The resulting game is less prone to frustrate you – but it’s also one where journeys feel shorter, less eventful and where things are less likely to go wrong. In Far Cry 2, having your rickety sniper rifle shatter into pieces, or succumbing to a malaria attack in the midst of a shootout might have been irritating, but it was justified by the thrill of calling upon your powers of improvisation to salvage the situation. Find a set of tactics that work in Far Cry 3, however, and you can rely upon them indefinitely – you have to switch approaches yourself to stave off fatigue. That, or dip into the main story.

Far Cry 3’s main missions are nothing special in and of themselves, and include one or two exhausting slogs and limp stealth sections, but the campaign does a better job than Far Cry 2’s storyline when it comes to providing an alternative to the open emergence of the player-authored escapades. Sure, it’s liable to all go a bit surreal, at times, with sequences that ram home the insanity theme, but its protagonists are sympathetic and charismatic, and the villains are loathsome, and it frequently forces Jason into the kind of confined spaces that he never finds outside.

Regardless, Far Cry 3 is at home in the jungle. Wild, reactive and unpredictable, it’s where the series still feels so distinct from other FPSes. It’s built from many of the usual ingredients, including guns, explosive barrels, and thoughtfully placed cover, as well as few less usual ones – tigers, for a start – but refuses to tell you how to approach things or what to do with them. Visiting Rook Islands is no package holiday, then, but it’s a great place to make your own fun.