* FAR CRY 3 : Blood, Bullets and MANTA RAYS! *
I was actually pretty surprised by the time I finished everything I wanted to do in FAR CRY 3 with how I felt about the game. Beautiful game of course, both graphically and in reference to game content. Plenty of stuff to do and plenty of ways to do it. A wide range of weapons, three diverse skill trees, stealth and aggressive kills, land/water/air - combat and travel, gripping story and a serious amount of side stuff to do....
PLOT (5 stars)
The story starts with six friends partying and enjoying vacation on an island. While skydiving, one of the friends takes out his tablet and starts filming the moment. The camera zooms into the tablet and zooms back out where you find yourself (Jason Brody) locked in a cage with your older brother, while Vaas (the games antagonist) is taunting the two of you. You find out that he has kidnapped your friends, so you and your brother break out to find them. As the story progresses you meet various allies and befriend the islands inhabitants, on a path to saving your friends and getting off the island. I'll leave it up to the player to see where all of that eventually takes your character. I will leave you with this though, I DID NOT expect anything that happened after about three hours into the game.
COMBAT (4 stars)
By the end of the game, I was a little bored with the regular combat, however, there are some break away moments in the game with certain people, that make the combat exciting again. It's a pretty straight forward shooter if you play it aggressively, but the kills can actually get pretty technical if you play in ninja mode and run everything stealthy. Jumping from ledges to cut the throats of goons, coming up from the water to pull them to their death or just throwing rocks to distract so you can sneak up and do more throat cutting, all to avoid making them shoot at you.... yeah it's not for me either... I started almost every fight with a grenade launcher or rockets. I watched a video of someone killing like 40 guys in a base without being detected .... took him 45 minutes.... I did the same part in 5 minutes with a magnum and spas shotty. I will admit sneaking around was fun for a bit but like any sneaking in any game, I got bored so I went back to blowing things up.
ATTENTION TO DETAIL (4 stars)
I know I'm going to catch crap for this, but the camps started looking the same, every area in the game had all the same elements and, to be honest, the only thing making me give this area a 4, was diversity in enemies (not much, but a noticeable amount) and of course, just how beautiful the more obvious graphics were (trees, water, etc.). I hate to be the guy who complains about something trivial, but the camps killed it for me pretty hard. Now given how beautiful everything else was, I would say a 4 is pretty reasonable.
REPLAY-ABILITY (4 STARS)
If you like shooters, you will like playing this game more than once, at least to try beating the game in stealth mode instead of aggressive or vice versa. If you don't like shooters you might not like beating it more than once, considering you're probably playing for the story. Assuming most people buying it are into shooters, I would absolutely say it's worth a 4 in this area. My advice, beat it once on MASTER difficulty one way, then reply the way your less comfortable with on an easier difficulty. Worth it.
MULTIPLAYER (4 STARS)
It's a shooter with some new elements to it, and many.... many .... old... over played..... "beat a dead horse" elements. I found myself a few times saying "this feels like call of duty with end game shenanigans"...however.... it's pretty well balanced and a good amount of fun for shooter lovers. I would like to point out that the maps are actually pretty beautiful, most of which have an even amount of high ground to low ground areas (I note this because I hate "king of the hill" maps in shooters...).
COOP (4 stars)
The coop comes with 5 missions, all pretty much the same, different names and skins, same goals. The free DLC adds two more missions to the bag, that are just two more copies of the first five. Now that I got that out of the way, I had a lot of fun playing with my friend Ben for a few reasons. It was exciting for me to combine two COMPLETELY different playing styles in a game that has.. well.. two major playing styles. I made things explode to distract and he snuck around like TOM CLANCY: GHOST RECON... he will get that... anyways, I liked that it was a whole story of its own, with its own characters, that had literally nothing to do with Jason and his friends (subtle mentions to the whole thing but the focus point is on the four people getting off the island). Lastly, and probably most importantly, IT WAS HARD AS #^%$. I'm not the best but I'm certainly not the worst at shooters, and Ben is pretty damn good . . . we got our @$#'s handed to us multiple times, it was quite the challenge. Harder than anything in the full game and I beat it on master.... my theory was the infinite mobs made advancing a lot harder, but whatever it was, it was ridiculous.
CONCLUSION
I recommend the game to any shooter fan for sure, I guess the story is strong enough for the average Joe to play it on normal and enjoy it, but mostly, I just think every shooter fan needs to experience this title. There is plenty to do and plenty to see before you're bored with it, worth the money and the time. If you love shooters, go buy it, if you don't, rent it, either way, I enjoyed it very much and would consider it in my top favorite shooters of all time. However, I don't place my ratings on my opinion, I place them on the game itself at it's core, so I'm going to sneak up behind Far Cry 3, grab it's neck, take out a hunting blade, and cut 4 stars into it.
FIN