689th played so far
Genre: First-Person Shooter
Platform: Playstation 3/Xbox 360/PC
Year of Release: 2012
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Publisher: Ubisoft
It’s been a few years since we played Far Cry 2, the Ubisoft open world game set in the jungle (as opposed to historical cities or Watch Dogs‘ futuristic city). This third game in the series was actually released after we played the second, being added in the list’s update, and with a lot of attention at the time.
Peter wanted to play it for his list and I joined in, going back to rule the jungle, but without malaria.
Our Thoughts
Far Cry seems to have a standard set up where you get captured in the jungle, escape and then try to defeat your captor – who is of course part of the bad guys in the game. They capture you and your friends – including your brother – and a lot of the game is you trying to reunite with them while taking out that gang.
You do this in a large open world, where survival is a bit of a thing. Not to the extent that you have to keep track of hunger levels or anything like that, but it feels like you’re constantly scrounging. What helps that is that you don’t just get normal upgrades – although they are in there – but that your inventory is mostly upgraded by you taking animal skins and turning them into different pouches. It’s a slightly different idea, nice, with the best upgrades locked behind special quest adventures. It makes it feel like there’s a bit more survival going on, even though it’s obviously not that realistic.
While exploring the world is great, if overwhelming, it falls down a bit at the plot missions. The main one that got to us is one where your weapons are taken away and you have to steal some as you stealth through a base. Stealth, because otherwise everyone will attack you at once and it gets overwhelming. Fine if you’ve been focusing on it, but the game is happy to let you rely on sniper rifles and the like before that, and Peter hit a real brick wall on this one. Part of the open world is that the game doesn’t telegraph you the preferred route – you have so many options – but that falls down when you can’t take another path and they don’t try to help you get along on the current one.
Final Thoughts
It’s a good game – overwhelming, sure, but a place you can get lost in. Just a shame it didn’t do that elsewhere, which was enough to stop us completely.