I picked up a copy of Far
Cry 3 a few weeks ago during one of Steam's holiday sales, and I've been
eking my way through it over the last few weeks. I'd read the reviews when it dropped and more
or less come away from them happy: here was a game I didn't have to play, a
product I could safely ignore during my last semester at graduate school. But with graduate school finished and grading
done for the semester, my curiosity loomed, and I thought to myself, why not
spend ten dollars? Why not give Far Cry 3 a few hours of my life, just
to see if it captures even a little of the magic of Far Cry 2?
The answer, as it turns out, was a resounding wavy-palm
sign: Far Cry 3 has some elements of Far Cry 2 in it, a few of the nicer
ones. It's fun to run around, it's fun
to shoot things, it's fun to explore.
There's a sense of wildlife as a resource, rather than an occurrence,
which manifests as a bit of a double edged sword (more on that later). There's a bevy of weapons which you'll want
to perform sidequests to access, there's a bevy of sidequests that will unlock
various craftables, there's a crafting mechanic that you'll want to participate
in because it'll be how you unlock all of the various elements you'd usually
expect out of a first person shooter.
And therein lies the rub.
Far Cry 3's story
aside, the gameplay of Far Cry 3 is
all about progression. It's rooted in a
complex leveling system that alters the way the game plays in some pretty
fundamental ways, increasing your ability to take damage, fire weapons
accurately, explore the environment and perform various "takedowns,"
a stealthy and brutal means of attacking an eliminating the many opponents you
meet in Far Cry 3. Some of these abilities are unlocked through
a progression tree (which might more aptly be called a progression flow chart)
but many of the most game-changing ones are unlocked by progressing through the
primary story. The end result is three
ability groups, none of them well differentiated, that you'll rapidly move
through the most basic elements of until you hit a ceiling of sorts and find
yourself play through the plot with points to spare to unlock new abilities.
It's clearly inspired by the Tomb Raider reboot's progression system, which is a great template
to steal from: the Tomb Raider reboot used its progression system to forward a
story, and over the course of its story it earned some pretty harsh twists and
turns and delivered some great gameplay.
That's where Far Cry 3 doesn't
deliver.
The gameplay the progression is running through feels iffy,
sloppy even. Not sloppy in the gritty
way that Far Cry 2 did, with its
brutal, bone crunching fights, hostile environs and nasty quick fix field medic
cutscenes. Sloppy in the Duke Nukem Forever sense. Every element that has been transferred over
from Far Cry 2 has something slightly
off about it. Far Cry 2's field medic animations made sense, and they had real
impact. They were also a response to an
intense, panicked situation: you were almost dead, this was how you restored
the last sliver of your health. In Far Cry 3, they're just things you can
do when you're out of medkits, and the context surrounding them is
nonsense. Bandaging your arm is fine,
great even. Patting out flames on your
clothes? Perfectly sensible! But why are you fishing bullets out of your
arm with a butter knife? Why do you have
a butter knife in the first place? Who
cares, check out this explosion! Hurt
yourself jumping away? Just hold down Q
until you pop your hand back into place with a quick flick.
There's a lack of attention to detail running through the
entire game, from those improvised first aid procedures to the exploration
through to the shooting, which is dicey and iffy and relies heavily on
progression through a weapon tree. The
weapons you'll unlock later in the game will wholly replace all of the weapons
you buy at the beginning of the game, the "signature weapons" you can
buy for a hefty price tag after completing enough side quests are all the
weapons you should be using. Sometimes
it's subjective: if you like shotguns, the Bull is the best shotgun, but you
don't need it. Sometimes it's very, very
clear: the Shredder, a custom Vector you can purchase relatively early in the
game, is a nasty piece of business, and has quickly become my default
weapon. In Far Cry 2, it was all a matter of taste: every gun, from the first
one you purchased to the last, had a use, and even when the game unlocked a
bevy of new weapons in a new area about halfway through, the basic weapons I'd
already bought were still a critical part of my inventory (though sometimes this
was because of the hefty pricetags associated with weapons, an issue Far Cry 3 doesn't have). Even without considerations of balance,
there's something slippery about how shooting works. Sometimes you'll be firing clear and true,
sometimes you won't. Sometimes your
abilities will work just right, you'll interact with the environment as you
thought you would, sometimes you won't.
I'm not even sure I'd qualify these issues as bugs, they're almost
quirks. If you approach a jump a few
degrees off, the game won't meet you half way.
If you come at an enemy in a chair from the wrong direction, you won't
be able to perform a takedown, even if he doesn't notice you. There's also a
chance he'll somehow see you through the back of his head.
Given how tight Far
Cry 3 wants its action game play to be, it's a pretty loose game. I frequently have trouble with the most basic
of Takedown maneuvers because it's unclear just how close you need to be to
chain Takedowns. Sometimes the Takedown
follow-ups simply won't work. Sometimes
you'll be able to hurl knives at enemies you can't see. It can be downright infuriating since, as
messy as the gameplay can be, the Takedowns are actually pretty satisfying when
they work right.
But there's still the issue of story to address. Far Cry
3 has one, and it wants you to know about it. It's got a massive, sprawling heavy handed
story with a massive cast of characters.
These characters have little bios and personalities, and they'll tell
you elements of backstory about yourself before informing you of how you've
changed. And boy, will you ever
change. There's some pathos going on
here in the cutscenes, some real grim consideration of how tough it is to
become a killing machine, and a consideration of how violence is reshaping you
as a person into something monstrous.
But all of that emo bullshit is clumsily executed as all get out,
emerging through heavy handed dialogue and telegraphed plot twists standing in
for actual character development. Even
if it was well executed within the "narrative" portions of the game,
it's wrapped up in a gameplay model so concerned with power fantasies that it
would be absurd on its own: Far Cry 3
is a game where you fight dozens of people with the help of plants and murder
sharks with a machete and a bow. All
that action is wrapped up in some problematically fratboyish patter addressed
at no one in particular. I've never
longed quite so much for a voiceless protagonist as I have in Far Cry 3. I'd find Jason's prattle irritating enough
under ordinary circumstances, but his narration as he mows down dozens of
people is way too much. Hearing him
describe the experience of being near a bunch of flaming marijuana fields was
likewise asinine. Far Cry 3 seems to celebrate being an ugly American, and goes so
far as to push you into each form of ugly Americanism it can think of. From America's callously problematic
relationship with race to its celebration of ribald violence to its utter
inability to deal with issues of class from its insane attempts to process
these issues with ridiculous, asinine platitudes; it's all on display. The fact that there are, at most, five
different "models" of native citizens on Rook Island adds a layer of awful
to the whole thing: Far Cry 3 seems
to believe that brown people can effectively be divided into five subsets: men,
old women, women you want to fuck, insurgents, and speaking characters. It's going to make you wallow in these
distinctions while you navigate its sloppy gameplay.
Its laughable engagement with drugs (and its portrayal of
both hallucinogen and marijuana use) is another topic altogether: Far Cry 3's world is immature in every
conceivable way, possessed of a child's perception of adult themes, and
navigating it will make you feel like an asshole just for being there. This is mirrored, in a sense, by Far Cry 3's hunting system which, in and
of itself, isn't a bad idea. It makes
the act of stalking and killing wildlife purposeful (in Far Cry 2 it was just something to do when the tedium of the
savannah started to get to you). Alas,
the way the hunting grounds actually map out, and the relative shallowness of
the crafting trees associated with hunting (particularly when they're compared
to the weapon and character progression models) leaves me with a sense of
dissonance. I've exhausted my need to
hunt and I'm not even halfway through the game yet. Hell, I'd exhausted it within my first few
hours of starting the game; hunting is actually quite a bit of fun, and many
elements of Far Cry 3 simply
aren't. Hunting is simply underutilized
as a mechanic: it could be much more than it is. Rare hunts are too few and far between, and
the cost-benefit of selling pelts simply isn't worthwhile. It wouldn't be hard to make it worthwhile:
pelts of difficult to kill creatures would just have to sell for a higher price
than most of the average loot you find in treasure chests scattered throughout
the island. If they were really
ambitious, they could've made pelts into a kind of secondary resource, for
trade to specialized vendors for weapon upgrades or experience. Instead they're mostly on par with trash
loot. If you don't need them for
crafting, you're better off discarding them.
It's frustrating to see. When Far Cry 3 tries to engage with new
things, when it tries to push boundaries, it does so in a way that undermines
its own efforts. Sophomoric is the
defining adjective for this sequel.
But as I say this, I still haven't finished Far Cry 3, and I plan to finish playing
through the game. That says something,
either about Far Cry 3 or me. I'd prefer to attribute it to Far Cry 3: there's something running
through the heart of this game that understands what was good about Far Cry 2 on some level, some nugget of
what made that game so great, and I'm hungry enough for that brand of play to
wade through the mire of Far Cry 3's
story and world to get a hold of it. The
sloppiness feels so off somehow, so iffy in a way that it just doesn't need to
be, and the progression, oh god the progression... But within all of that, a core game persists,
a fun, dynamic suite of systems that promote a particular brand of kinetic,
frenetic play. The Takedown system, when
it works, is great: even if it makes zero sense, story wise, there's something
wonderful about getting your machete on in a camp full of baddies, running in
and out of cover and hiding bodies in bushes.
There's something there still, even if it's rooted in some problematic
non-politics, even if it represents a step backwards in design, the magic of Far Cry 2 remains present on some level.
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