Dusty Relics: Just Another Day in Paradise…

After skydiving your way into what looks like a tropical paradise only to find it full of assault rifle toting pirates and mercenaries, you could be forgiven for thinking the fictional world of FarCry 3 isn’t all that unlike the Somali coastline. After all, there are speed boats and AK’s there too. White coral sand beaches stained with blood, a crazed lunatic after your head, a strange tattooed woman with mind altering drugs and a maniacal crime lord running the show; just another day in paradise. 

FarCry 3 is unlike any other FPS you’ll play: it has depth, a good story-line, great action and a huge open world to explore. I personal hold it in higher regard than FarCry 4 in terms of enjoyment and replay value. Ubisoft has tried to do a lot of things with this game and it has actually managed to pull most of them off. The corner of the tropics that is ‘Rook Island’ is lush and often quite good to look at – the textures are well rendered and the colours are rich. The foliage waves majestically as it flexes from a grenade blast and the crystal blue water glistens, reflecting the flames from that speed boat you just machine gunned to destruction. The sun climbs slowly creating that beam across the sea and gently illuminates your little corner tropical hell. Max this game on a decent gaming PC and it looks effing' fantastic. 

Whether you are just out exploring, or waging war with wanton disregard for ammunition and explosives, the effects in this game are good, even up close. Its quite satisfying to see your knife punch through an enemies throat or your character digging shrapnel out of his arm with a stick (apparently no matter what happens, Brody, the protagonist, only ever gets injured in the arms...). Just sometimes on this game, its nice to stop and smell the napalm, so to speak. 

The rich textures and tropical lighting really contrast the often
brutal action and story-line of this game,
making it something a feast for the eyes and the mind.

You are quite literally plunged into the action as the first ‘tutorial’ type mission has you escaping from a pirate strong hold (much less friendly than Jack Sparrow) and then legging it through the jungle trying to escape certain death; chased by the henchmen of the one of gaming's most memorable villains - Vaas. The story then plays out in a series of missions that you can undertake at your leisure. The USP (“Unique Selling Point”, not “Universal Self-loading Pistol”) of this game is the world you escape into; the beaches, the jungle, the ancient ruins and enemy strongholds. Its up to you what you do with it and there is so much to do and explore. 

Firstly you are pretty much naked; I don’t mean you're strutting round in your birthday suit, I mean you have one gun and a knife. If you want to carry more weapons and ammunition, you must craft holsters and pouches from the skin of the animals found on the island. If you want to survive a gun fight, or hold your breath for longer when underwater, you need to find the right plants to make syringes to reap the various benefits. Luckily all this doesn’t require a degree in engineering or chemistry, it just requires a little time and what way to spend that time than exploring and hunting on Rook Island? 

The vehicle selection is very good in FarCry 3,
you'll probably find yourself doing a lot of off-roading between missions
 and with plenty of elevation changes the game is basically made for
stunt driving lunacy.

Whilst out foraging you will inevitably come across other points of interest such as shanty towns, ship wrecks, sunken ruins, underwater caves or old WW2 bunkers, to name but a few of the attractions. Exploring has also never been more fun with a host of vehicles to hoon it around in. From jeeps with machine guns on top, Land Rovers with machine guns on top, boats with machine guns on top, to hand gliders and quad bikes (without machine guns sadly), the driving, flying and boating physics are also smooth and for the most part very good. The different vehicles all handle and feel slightly different too, a point often missed in games that mesh a lot of concepts together under one roof; usually something remains unfinished. Thankfully this doesn't seem to be the case in FarCry 3. 

FarCry 3 features many gratifying close-quarters takedowns,
from a simple stabbing to pulling the the pin on an enemy's
grenade and booting him to the floor.

The gameplay is fairly intuitive and doesn’t require much getting used to; after all, it is, at it’s core, simply a fancy first person shooter, so most situations can be solved with a suitable application of firepower and explosives.There are a number of skills that you unlock throughout the game that will help you better survive the jungle and the bad guys. These can make things more fun, my personal favourite being the “grenade takedown” – no prizes for guessing the outcome of that one... or more useful one's like being able to make certain syringes for beneficial effects.

The skills you learn are depicted as tattoos on the characters left arm which builds into a half sleeve as you learn more skills, which is certainly a novel way of showing progression if nothing else. The skills are also quite varied, as they range from health increases, to more functional skills like special take downs and other stealth and fighting abilities that you can use. Though the game is a huge advancement over the previous FarCry games, and indeed any other FPS/free roaming type game, all that glistens is not gold and it does have its flaws. 

Despite FarCry 3 handling like pretty much every other FPS, it's
the story and the game-world that really set it apart from the rest.

One of the biggest flaws that shows up after a great deal of game play is the enemy AI. Most fire fights are just too easy, even if you crank the difficulty up all the way – all that really changes is enemy accuracy and how many more grenades they’ll lob to flush you out. There are four types of enemy that you will face for the whole game; regulars, chargers, heavies, and snipers/RPG wielders. Even though shooters have advanced a great deal, and FarCry 3 is a good testament to that, the enemies remain as dumb as ever and quite frankly its not hard to run circles around them. All you need is a good position and you're pretty much set and by good position I don’t mean dug in on a hill top, behind your jeep seems to suffice for 98% of encounters. They don’t flank effectively or gain position, its generally always a frontal assault. They call in back-up but its more of the same and never more than 3 or 4 guys. If you are in a ranged position up a hill or another vantage point, its ridiculously easy, as they never really come looking for you or deploy heavier weapons to flush you out. This is a shame, as it means every encounter with the bad guys is pretty much repeat of the last hundred times you shot those four mercs’ with child-like ease. 

Vaas is arguably one of gaming's most memorable villains;
he is the perfect blend of insanity, intelligence and brutality.
I'm still not sure why they chose Gok Wan to be the villain in FarCry 4..

Although you can liberate areas by clearing out the occupying enemy camps, after doing 4 or 5 you’ll begin to struggle with new ways to do that as well. Thankfully the story missions offer some variety and the story itself isn’t all that bad considering its an FPS. The protagonist, Jason Brody, skydived into hell when he and his friends were captured by pirates (gun swinging, not rum swilling) after landing. After a shocking escape sequence, Jason Brody then goes on a search for the rest of his friends who have gone missing too.

During the search, Jason loses himself and finds new allies to follow on Rook Island, leading to some interesting plot developments and choices as you follow his own personal story arc. The way the story, and Jason’s character, develops isn’t done all that badly and its is quite good to follow. It won’t win an Oscar and its no Metal Gear Solid but far flimsier tales are usually found in the realms of the first person shooter. I guess this one is also well done because Jason isn’t some double-hard bastard ex-marine gone rouge, he’s just a normal bloke who is forced to learn the skills he needs to survive. 

Unlike in Red Dead Redemption, you can't just
 gun everyone down if you lose, shame.

Besides mercilessly slaughtering bad guys in missions, and mostly for fun, Rook Island offers some other, perhaps more wholesome past times, including poker, knife throwing, racing, hunting and favours for the locals. So when you’re bored of gratuitous destruction and bloody murder, you can cool your heels at a card table or take to mountains in search of some rare beast. Thankfully, these activities also offer financial incentives, how much depends on how good a poker player you are but money can be made from selling the hides and plants you gather and other ‘loot’ items you can find as well – these are more bullet tokens than beer tokens, in truth.

The bow is arguably one of the most enjoyable weapons to use,
especially as it offers flaming and explosive arrows as well at normal ones.

There is a good selection of remorseless pieces of metal for you to unlock and do harm with. However, another flaw in this game I found is that all the guns can be unlocked for free once you activate the right radio tower, so what was the point in having a price for them in the first place if they are all going to be free eventually? In this sense it also makes the economics feature of the game a little redundant, as there is little point in gathering money other than to buy ammunition (which can also be looted from enemies or found in weapon stashes) – it would have been nice to make the gun you want more of a challenge to get. Another minor issue is that the type of combat tends to be short to mid range for most encounters, meaning a good assault rifle and a shotgun will pretty much do you for everything, making unlocking something new later on have little impact on the game. 

The fictional Rook Islands are far more enjoyable to explore
than FC4's fictional corner of the Himalayas. 

Sure FarCry 3 has its flaws but it does what it does better than most that have tried it. Rook Island as a huge arena is inspired and the game play is tidy and smooth. The graphics are lush and the textures are detailed and look great, it seems as though no expense was spared in creating this little corner of the tropics. The missions are varied and enjoyable and include everything from proper stealth missions to frontal assaults and even burning a marijuana plantation... 


There is a host of other things to do on the island from hunt bad guys for money in the “Wanted: Dead” quests, to doing “Rakyat Challenges” where you best performance is recorded online. As well as acast of memorable What's important for me is that it's enjoyable and FarCry 3 is a pick-up-and-play kind of game; if you are bored you can just grab a controller and shoot up an enemy base for half an hour, create havoc, burn and pillage, run out of the bushes and knife someone in the face. But if you want you can spend a long time exploring and discovering, doing missions and earning the associated rewards and all the time its fun and that’s important. 

For me FarCry has excelled where so many other FPS games have failed; longevity and replay value. That is a mark that many new games have sadly fallen far short of, including the most recent FarCry which lacked all of the charisma and replay value of it's predecessor - though let's be honest, FC3 was a hard act to follow. 

You could do a lot worse than spend a few hours discovering the awesomeness of this lost paradise and as it's been superseded by FarCry 4, FarCry 3 is a lot of gaming fun for a bargain basement price.