Entry 31: Game Review: Far Cry 3

Okay, so Far Cry 3 is good. Very good. Stupendous in fact. But can we maybe give open world games a bit of a bloody rest now, please? It seems like since somewhere around the 2008 mark, there’s been a never ending deluge of such forays; there are now enough sandboxes on the 360 to grit the Arctic Circle. But FC3 shows the sandbox at its very best; a dark and interesting plot, a convincing villain, believable characters, tight shooting, great setting, and clever art and narrative design. Also, flamethrower bear hunting. More on that later.

 

FC3 doesn’t waste much time setting the scene, that’s for sure, and you start the game proper within a few minutes. This is no criticism though. Forget the bloated pretences of Metal Gear Solid, this is how to begin an action game. After a short video showing your character, Jason Brody, on an expensive Far East holiday with his rich blue-blood mates, generally larking about in the most expensive way imaginable, the camera pans out to reveal it is all a facade and you are in fact watching it on a smartphone screen whilst bound and trapped in a bamboo cage. Ubisoft Montreal, those sneaky buggers. You’ve been captured by pirates, and it would seem that they borrowed your iPad for a bit and lovingly rearranged your holiday snaps into an audio-visual collage to dangle before you, for some weird reason; although I suppose that is very nice of them. Furthermore they aren’t the swashbuckling vaguely effeminate pirates with cutlasses and peg-legs but very real very frightening pirates, with Russian assault rifles and attack helicopters. Case in point, our signature baddie, Vaas, pronounced var-s by all involved, which does make it a little funny in the climactic moments, when your impassioned hero is after blood and crying ‘where are you var-s?’ , conjuring up images of a stealthy Moorcroft vase lurking round a corner and cackling manically. Still, var-s is one of the best villains to ever grace a video game; with a Mohawk and effectively piercing blue eyes (also known as, the bloke on the box cover). Voice-actor Michael Mando brings him to life with a exotic, throaty voice that is disquietingly child-like and soulful; sounding a bit like a sociopathic Bobby Womack. Something interesting to note is that Mando is not just the voice of Vaas but he practically is Vaas; his aesthetic look was taken and rendered, virtually frame for frame, into the game engine. Such intuition pays off in spades. 

Across the table from the unsettling and violent volatility of Vaas, is your own character Jason Brody, who opposes with equal weight and conviction. This is similarly rare, since most protagonists in video games tend to have the emotive range of a bent nine inch nail. Then again gamers are a forgiving bunch; Gordon Freeman is hailed as an iconic protagonist and he never bloody says anything. The key to liking Jason Brody here is character building. You start the game as an everyman. When you find yourself applying pressure to your brothers’ hopelessly torn jugular, you react by crying and moaning and generally being pretty bummed out. You start off as a bit of a shrinking violet who faces his first firefights with pirates to the throws of ‘oh please no’ and ’fuck,fuck,fuck’, cringing and wringing your hands like a big girl’s blouse. Of course as you escape and start on the missions proper you leave behind these woosey trappings and start kicking serious arse; shooting great big machine guns whilst chewing a toothpick and fighting off wild boars like so many papier-mâché  house-cats. The story arc is believable and enjoyable, although Jason’s transformation from puny college student into killing machine is a little abrupt.  It’s only a few hours into the game and you’re skinning tigers and piloting hang gliders with relative ease; it’s surprising your in game hand doesn’t fly up every so often and suppress a yawn.  

Although you personally won’t be yawning since the action is non-stop and the shooting mechanics are as tight as ever. All the guns feel distinct, and the attachments add a genuine edge and rarely feel superfluous. The weapon skins vary in desirability, but it’s quite good fun choreographing your arsenal to fit a certain motif like an obsessive-compulsive militant retelling of Carol Smillie. The shooting is efficient and iron sights are accurate; perhaps this should be taken for granted but still so many games manage to get this wrong (Thank you, Call of Juarez: The Cartel). What really gives combat an edge is the heightening of the stealth portion. This was sadly lacking in African adventure Far Cry 2, thanks to hive-mind baddies with hyper optimized laser vision, which allowed them to see you coming from miles away, at night. To add insult to injury they even gave you a silenced shotgun in some DLC; probably with the tagline ‘Best of luck with this one’. This time things are much more tactical, harking back to the goon-stalking barrel-rolling extravaganza of the first Far Cry.

Central to the stealth is the line of sight function, which we have seen before but it works gratifyingly well in this game, informing you when you have to slide back into cover to avoid detection. Despite the fact that in the game you are nearly drowned, set on fire at least once, shot, mauled and fall a great distance, you have on your person and functional at all times, a chunky paparazzi camera, a phone, and a tablet (Even on a remote jungle paradise, there’s just no escaping idiotic consumer electronics). The tablet contains information on everything in the game, though a lot of it is fairly needless and it’s written in an achingly trying-to-be-funny-but-really-isn’t kind of way, and even when you meet the character who writes it all it doesn’t really improve it. The camera is far more useful. You use the camera to ‘tag’ enemies from cover, zooming in and hovering over distant baddies like a Nikon toting hipster with NRA membership. This means you can see the bad guys in silhouette from cover, allowing you to move about silently and decide what to do next, and pulling it all off is quite acutely satisfying. It scratches an itch at the back of every young man’s brain to get to act a bit like Predator era Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

 

This is essentially land reclamation, and along with Radio Towers, which you scale to unlock sections of the map, this is the bread and butter of the gameplay. The game really embraces the open world aspect of the experience, and this means in between proper missions you have a great time pottering about. In between the aforementioned skirmishes with baddies you can complete side quests, though I found many of these to be dull collect-quests that could be skipped with little consequence. There are also ‘Path of the Hunter’ quests where you hunt specific creatures, and some Hitman-esuqe hit tasks which are fairly engaging and open-ended.  But beyond this you usually have a good laugh dicking around in the game world. It wouldn’t be Far Cry without hang-gliders; and flying them is as whimsical and brilliant as ever, especially when you try and dive-bomb your buddy AI’s who are minding their own business. As you progress you gain access to some sort of gliding-wings suit, which allows you to glide from high points for a little bit and then magically pop up a parachute; such parachutes presumably reside in infinite quantities up your bum. It’s definitely a great way to waste hours looking like batman on his summer holidays in Corfu. 

 

Far Cry 3 slots in somewhere between Red Dead Redemption and Fallout: New Vegas. One thing more present in Far Cry than either of those games though is a sense of the random. The wildlife in the game is ferocious and absolutely bloody everywhere. There has clearly been a lot of effort put into making them all fit organically into the environment, and there is a dizzyingly wide range of animals in Far Cry. There are plenty of harmless critters, as in the previous game, but some truly dastardly baddies too, such as lions, tigers and wild boars. The sharks and alligators are utterly terrifying, and every swim is done with the player frantically checking over his shoulder. But there are so many you often don’t even notice; various birds, rats, and even crabs are all present and well animated. The animals keep things interesting, and ensure Far Cry is a decidedly original experience among its competitors.  Pirates often keep animals locked in suspiciously fragile bamboo cages (this isn’t a good idea guys), and if you shoot the door they escape and proceed to fuck shit up, which is great fun to smugly watch from afar. 

The fact that fauna are never far away means that human and animal AI interaction is comedy gold. More than once you will have scouted an enemy position, worked out a strategy and are only just about to bring out the jams and chutneys to begin the assault, when a bloody great lion shows up and proceeds to maul the shit out of the poor bastards a little in front of you.  One vivid memory I have is of a command post I was in the process of clearing. I was in cover, about to pop out and shoot at everything when a crescendo of squawks and cries erupted from on yonder, and I peeked from round a corner just in time to see a bison and three cassowaries having some sort of loud disagreement, which only got more heated when the angry pirates intervened. According to Wikipedia cassowaries are ‘very shy’, but this is certainly not true of the variety seen in FC3, as the second a group of the aimless bastards see you they proceed to try and peck your face off. The problem with animal hunting is that the game clearly wants you to take them on in straightforward ways that are easy on the eye; the various hunting quests have you using a bow or a sniper rifle. However, unlike say Red Dead, where this is all you can do, this very modern game has some rather more heavy choices on offer. The game wants you to stalk some deer with a bow, like Bill Oddie with a gentle death wish, but the things that work best are also the most hilarious, and more often it is a damn sight easier to set a tiger ablaze with a flaming bottle to the face, or just run the poor thing the fuck over in a speeding ATV. Far Cry should fail at maintaining a serious tone amongst such instances of unmitigated hilarity, but somehow they all fit in with the more sober moments in the games story. 

 

Your mates aren’t gifted with the greatest motivation, and you seem to be the only one doing anything (why, when they are heavily armed and in large numbers, do they wait until a weedy college student shows up, and then let him do everything anyway?). Furthermore whenever you grant them more land they have the cheek to quickly show up in a jeep and lecture you about how there is ‘more work to be done’. As such you care little for the sanctimonious pricks, but this is all the better since you wind up killing quite a lot of them anyway. Firstly because they look almost exactly like the bad guys, and sometimes they don’t even turn the reticule green as per shooter tradition. When a car is driving towards you, you usually have to wait to see whether they stop and shoot you or not to discover their identity; though I personally rarely took the chance. On more than one occasion, upon seeing a jeep with armed men coming towards my vehicle, I generally just crashed into it at a fairly unreasonable speed, sending a car full of my best mates back-flipping off of a sheer cliff face, with betrayal on their faces and sadness in their hearts.  However a second reason for this necessary slaying of friendlies is they tend to get in harm’s way. This is particularly acute in the ‘Supply Drop’ tasks; fairly standard affairs requiring you to drive from A to B at high speed and deliver medicine. The poor souls in urgent need of the medical supplies you are carrying seem to think it a good idea to stand in the middle of the road at the last checkpoint, their silhouette obscured by a purple flare, and wave cheerily as their approaching saviour trundles over the bend at high speed and squarely runs them over.  It is strange to see ‘task completed’ appear on the screen as the guy in need of the supplies in question is at that moment flying through the air like a bin bag full of twigs and angel delight.  

The AI is quite good but a few creases do show up now and then.  When put behind the wheel of a few tonnes of steel and gasoline they get a bit too into it and are so keen on getting somewhere that they have no qualms in creating a few new road kills. To their credit, they have saved my bacon a few times by flattening some pursuing dingoes and leaving them by the road side like a line of used toothpaste tubes. However the game often spawns random peasants by the main routes to complete meagre tasks and give a feeling of things going on beside your own actions. It is a nice gesture but the friendly AI’s don’t take to it too kindly when they have somewhere to be, which is most of the time. It becomes a common sight to see an elderly peasant woman flying off the ground with legs akimbo after a jeep of determined gun-toting youths have sent grandma on a one way trip to Mercury. Even more brilliant is when you convince some of your buddies to get in the car you are driving, since they take loyalty very seriously and will often follow you into some dubious situations. They stay fixed in place with steely glazes as you drive your ride off a rise and into the sea; this is despite the fact that unlike you, they can’t swim, and all you are left with is four drowning animations and some bobbing good guy corpses. 

 

 

Your ability to fuck with the people around you is increased tenfold since you are granted the ability to throw rocks to distract enemies. It is a useful tool since the rocks you throw seem to echo in eternity and can distract enemies from seven paces away, even when they are surrounded by the buzz of a jungle teeming with noisy wildlife. You also have unlimited quantities of rocks and keep them in a bottomless sack, presumably with the parachutes wedged snugly up your colon. This feature is ripe for abuse, and it is hard to make it through a single AI encounter without hocking a few rocks off of his face mid-speech.  There are no moral restraints here; one time I was meant to be caring about an abusive father but I couldn’t as I was too busy throwing rocks at his daughter to notice. Far Cry 3 is rife with glitches and bugs but these are usually the kind you laugh at and not the kind you cry at, á la Fallout game freezing. Clipping can sometimes be a problem, and the animal AI can get twitchy around water since few of them can swim; then again there’s nothing quite like seeing a group of frightened Tapirs running off a short jetty and sharing a watery suicide pact. Falling off of things results in death if you connect with anything solid; anything solid. Diving in to water proved fatal on occasion as I accidentally clipped a passing parakeet, which was apparently made up of tungsten and depleted uranium, and smugly flew on by as I plummeted to ground with a red screen. Clipping in to the environment has always been the Achilles heel of open-world games with expansive game maps, but this was actually seldom a problem, and FC3 should be hailed as a god among men for fully implementing a sliding mechanic ,so that slipping from high levels no longer results in death. 

The main story is well paced, and the formulaic nature of story levels is off-set with the open-ended game world, which means the game is just linear enough to maintain focus.  The ethos of Far Cry has always been the same; explore the environment, master it, and then control it. That has never been achieved as successfully as it should be, until now. Far Cry 3 is pure, simple enjoyment. Free from pretence or stories that spend too long smelling their own farts (Call of Duty, get that hosepipe out of there), the game just gives you a set of tools and lets you do as you please. That’s not to say it is a dumb game, far from it, the writing is gratifyingly solid, and the characters are interesting and believable. There’s the broken-hearted and disgraced doctor, Earnhardt, or the sneering nutjob Australian (though I suspect most aussies are just that) Buck. Vaas is rightly the poster boy of the marketing campaign, but I found the most entertaining character was the questionable CIA operative Willis, who seems to see everything through a fog of red white and blue, and intersects dialogue with loads of clunky Cold-war slang.  There’s also plenty of context and greater awareness in FC3. The main story arc is broken up by extracts from Alice in Wonderland, whilst the tale of a sane man losing his marbles in a tribal mirror-world echoes as much of JG Ballard as it does of the more obvious Heart of Darkness references, and the games other big antagonist, Hoyt, more than echoes a little of the shadowy Mr. Kurtz from Conrad’s classic. 

In some ways you do miss the aesthetic of Far Cry: Instincts, which had you as half-man half-beast Jack Carver (who I know we all remember vividly). That game had a fever-dream B-movie feel to it, with you running about clawing baddies and driving quad bikes with one hand and firing a machine gun with the other. The newer instalments are headed straight for the big time and in some ways you can’t help but mourn the absence of the daftness in the newer entries in the series. But Far Cry 3 is one of the most substantial and satisfying games of this generation.  It’s hardly revolutionary; in fact you could even call it derivative, which in some ways it surely is. But it crams in so much you want to do and trims the fat to the point of non existence. There is still padding, for sure, and the afore mentioned side-quests vary in quality from alright to incredibly stupid. One of them is literally just a series of boring conversations. But Far Cry’s greatest strength is that it knows exactly what you want. In most games you either become overpowered much too early, meaning the second half of the game offers slightly less resistance than a single page of soggy newspaper (ahem, Bioshock, ahem) or, that you are only given the really cool stuff in the climatic moments, and so you only get the death ray cannon to kill a final boss and heat a bag of microwave popcorn before the game is over and it is whisked away from you once more. 

In this game you are built up into a killing machine, and then you spend the second half having a bloody good time of it, and this works almost indecently well. It may seem a simple arrangement but it’s rarely been utilised to effectively. The best thing about it is that the game is fully aware of this shift and chooses, not to ignore it, but hinge much of the story of it. Jason begins the game as a mellow socialite but by the end he’s murdered quite a few people and has a pulsing black hole where his heart should be. We hated his mates from the beginning, but the brilliant touch is that by the end of the game, as he watches them witter on about superficial crud and tell bad jokes , Jason feels a disconnect from them as well. The ending is a simple fork in the road but only one of the endings ever feels natural, as by the end of the game Jason is totally divorced from the humdrum of everyday life. And it is for this reason that the humorous mistakes fit amongst the more severe storyline so easily; because the central theme here is not the usual sentimental crap about saving the free world or the human race. Far Cry 3 is about one man losing his grip on reality, and the contrast between sober and slapstick only furthers the underlying feeling that by the end Jason can’t really tell them apart. In many ways it is not a particularly intricate or complicated storyline, nor is it particularly inventive or fresh. But FC3’s greatest narrative technique is the art of understatement. You don’t ever get a Sims style pop-up box that says ‘Jason is now a bit mad’, it’s just that his revulsion to civilian life is pretty clear when he spurns any offering to return to his comfortable home. 

The single player campaign is substantial, and can take up to twenty hours to complete, with fast travel to make sure you enjoy as much of that time as possible. The soundtrack is skilfully arranged, with plenty of obligatory tribal drumming and air horn blasts, but also some dirty dubstep effects that fit the frantic jungle combat exceedingly well.  Various tracks play whilst driving, and all of them are simplistic little ditties that come out all tinny over the car radio, and besides really adding to the feeling of delirious dislocation from reality, they also mean that many of your deaths are sound tracked to some delightful Hawaiian banjo plucking. The multiplayer is solid enough even if it does feel like rather a token addition, but the four player co-op mode is really good fun, if a little short, and maybe too simple. Still, few co-op campaigns have given such a satisfying thrill, if short lived. The legendary map-editor is back and resolutely showing Halo’s Forge mode how to do it, and you really have to check out the simply brilliant prelude to the campaign, The Far Cry Experience, featuring Michael Mando’s fully realised Vaas, and, bizarrely,  McLovin. Far Cry is an interesting mix of chunky fun and subtle storytelling, and while other games have pioneered one or the other to greater effect, in combining the two, Far Cry is a success of almost unmatched magnitude, and will surely be remembered as a gritty and involving modern classic.