The Art of Far Cry 3

It's a enviable skill of Ubisoft, subtlety altering your mindset and providing the tools to execute your plan. And the action itself is fantastic. One of the game's best aspects is simply how you move, a sense of weight and inertia enabled by a decent line in climbing and the ability to brusquely enter into a slide, whisking between cover to flank unaware pirates. Clear an outpost undetected,
and you will earn more XP to upgrade your skills. The abilities you learn further bolster your arsenal, allowing you, for instance, to creep up on a bad guy, take him out silently before whipping his own knife out of his pocket and throwing it at his still turning partner. It's a skill tree that adds layers, rather than enforcing what's already there, and its generous, steady drip-feed encourages you to seek out tasks between the main missions. You'll be planning your route via as many sidequests as possible; climbing radio towers to reveal more areas of the map, taking on jobs to deliver medical supplies using an ATV, hunting notorious pirates. It's a clever, compelling array of distractions, dragging you from Far Cry 3's narrative path.
It's an interesting tale, however, a journey into a heart of darkness inspired by Conrad and Carroll. You play as mildly obnoxious American frat boy Jason Brody, a thrill-seeking jock holidaying across the South Pacific with his two brothers and a group of friends. Looking for one last adventure before heading home, Jason and pals take a sky-dive over the supposedly uninhabited Rook Islands, not realising that the area is in the midst of a brutal civil war between the native Rakyat and the pirates and privateers that have turned this slice of paradise into hell. Captured by Vaas and his mercenaries, Jason and his brother Grant manage to break free of their cell. But only Jason makes it out of the camp. A quivering, terrified wreck, Jason is taken in by the Rakyat and is trained to fight.

It's an intoxicating opening, slightly contradicted by Jason's immediate proficiency with firearms. But Far Cry 3 doesn't look to waste time before throwing open Rook's treasures, instead throwing in some wilfully daft mysticism about magical tattoos giving Jason his powers. What's compelling about Jason's story is that his sense of empowerment as a character dovetails superbly with your own as a player, as you dutifully unlock new powers on the skill tree. Beginning as an unsure fumbling ninny, a few hours in Jason is handed a flamethrower and tasked with setting a marijuana farm alight. While an enemy pirate is engulfed in flames, the poor soul running screeching as the land around him burns, Jason yells "I LOVE THIS THING!" An uncomfortable nod to you, because you love it too, and the game asks you to look closely at the gun in your hand.
The story missions are far more scripted and linear than the open exploration allows. For the most part this is a well-judged split between cinematic action and open-world traversal, setting you clear objectives to move the story along. Jason is initially searching for his surviving friends, but the island tempts him with a will for power. Far Cry 3's themes are thick with Nietzsche's philosophy, pitting Jason and Vaas on opposite sides of a bloody land grab. It's a concept that serves the game well, you question Jason's motives and it feels like the game is building to a great revelation.
But it never comes. What does disappoint with Far Cry 3 is that it has a confidence to build this fantastic house of cards, even willing to shuffle the deck two thirds of the way through, but doesn't have the gumption to knock it down when it should. As the game reaches its denouement, the silly mysticism takes centre-stage, allowing the game an escape route from its dark heart. It rubs off on the later story missions too, running out of ideas and relying far too heavily on turret sections, quick-time-events and Alamo style shootouts. The game's characters, setting and themes are fantastic, but they end up inhabiting a plot that ends up a little aimless and muddled.
A shame, but the anti-climactic denouement cannot completely take the shine from a wonderfully polished piece of work. An ambitious, flexible and exciting open-world shooter that offers some of the most interesting action you'll find all year. A competent multiplayer and four-player co-op round off the package, though they both focus on the shooting-gallery style of play which doesn't do Far Cry 3's systems justice. Instead, this is a game far more at home in the jungle, with you in your own company, armed with a bow, stalking your prey in the unpredictable tangle of foliage. Leaving you to do things your own way. Before that pesky bear turns up and spoils all your fun.
sourcetelegraph