| Title | Far Cry 3 (Classic Edition) (steam ID: 220240) |
| Platform: | XBox Series X |
| Available on OS: | Series X |
| Genre: | Combat, stealth, military, action, shooter, first person, open world |
| Date completed: | August 2024 |
| Notes: | Played without uplay login |
Summary review: A very fun open world game with a plot I would classify as “an attempt was made”.
Graphics: The upscale in graphics makes it look good enough on a 4k TV. Still rough given the original release date.
Music: Does not really exist except for a few random key moments.
Controls: Typical first person fair. I will have complaints about platforming on the whole hold-a-button doing multiple things.
Replayability: I do want to play this again, just to see if I can optimize getting different abilities and perks. So I’ll say it’s high.
Total score: 85 / 100 – The plot was very confusing and seemed to leave more questions hanging than it answered. Not sure if I missed something or what.
Introduction
Several years ago I did a review of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. Which is exactly Far Cry 3 in every way. So I’m not exactly completely new to this game. I’ve put more than 100 hours into the spinoff.
I was actually surprised how many things the Blood Dragon story had in common with Far Cry 3. A lot of patriotism or “jingoism” as the kids say now days. For a main character in his 20s.
Note: I’m going to keep this broad to avoid spoilers. Events of plot will only be mentioned in the vaguest of terms, instead I’ll concentrate on gameplay specific features and issues.
Save your friends
The main subplot of the game is to rescue the friends of the main character who were taken prisoner to be killed or sold into slavery. You must learn the skills of surviving in a jungle and do whatever it takes to get your free your friends and get back home.
Platforms and Quick time
I think I might have spent the most time in this game with three things: platforming, quick time events and hold-the-button prompts. By this I mean the things I most had to repeat over and over.
This game is a big open sprawling map, but viewing it is locked away until you scale a tower and enable broadcasting (or whatever the contrived reason is). Some of the later towers have kind of a “puzzle” element to them as the path to the top isn’t always obvious. Not so hard I had to look any of them up, mind you. But no elevator, either.
Jumping from one platform to another is necessary and to put it nicely this is completely broken. I fell to my death multiple times trying to get to the top. It was kind of stupid.
By comparison quick time events are pretty easy. If I missed one the game just reset and had me try again. Still annoying but not game breaking.
Lastly are the hold-the-button actions left to deal with: hold X and hold Y.
Hold Y: to put out fire and to heal. Just pushing Y also swaps to last used weapon. In retrospect I probably could have re-did the shortcut for heal but this was still quite annoying.
Then there’s X: reload weapon and swap out weapons and loot body. I spent I don’t know how long trying to position myself just perfect to loot a body versus swapping out a weapon on the ground. Both are “hold X” and weapons seemingly always overlap bodies. So this was a never ending source of frustration.
The main juice of the game e.g. the reason I kept coming back
Once the game got me through the tutorial and I was able to wander around the island, it actually is quite fun trying to explore different parts. It’s quite challenging at the start because there is only one weapon slot and very little bullet capacity. That one weapon can be swapped out for another as they’re obtained, but only one is on the character at a time.
That brings up the progress system: to get another weapon slot you must track down, kill and skin the specific number of a specific animal. And same for loot packs, ammo packs, money wallet and anything else remotely carry capacity-related.
There’s also something of a skill tree. As you gain experience there are spendable skill points but the skills also have to be unlocked via various methods. My last skill for instance was a “death from below” kill. Which I didn’t realize until I had finished the game. It didn’t matter though, it just would have been an XBox achievement to unlock all skills.
There’s also recipes for various effects obtained from different plants. I didn’t get that much into this as I kept running out of carry space and harvested plats were always the first to get chucked.
For me there’s something about a locked away map that can be unlocked via getting to a location. It just triggers something that makes me want to unlock that section of map for some reason. Same thing happened with Breath of the Wild, which has a lot in common with this game. Well mostly just the towers and map thing.
There’s something about taking over a hostile outpost as a goal to achieve that makes me want to do that straight away. Not sure why. This game does all of the things quite well.
Now some negatives…
As mentioned previously, there’s the platforming, the hold-the-button double up functions and to a lesser extent the quick time events.
I also encountered some much more serious issues. For instance at one point I saw a building with a bunch of chests, ammo and healing packs inside but the only way was through the window. It’s really hard to jump through windows in this game. And hard enough to jump back out I actually tried quick traveling to another location no realizing that would reset the mission I was on. So I had to start over. In conclusion: F*ck windows.
At least twice in the game I actually encountered a dead NPC I couldn’t fit by. In other words, the body was in the door way and I had no way to get around it. The last instance this happened – literally the final mission of the game – it was a flamethrower enemy and I blew up the gas tanks on his back to finally continue. Those are the sorts of bugs I really don’t appreciate.
I would also like to complain about the plot: wtf man. Was whats-his-name imaginary? Does the main character have lost time not revealed to the player? Why did his vision go blurry and streaky and random moments? Are there alternative endings? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. And I wish I did. There’s also a MacGuffin that doesn’t really get resolved.
Conclusion
There’s actually a few things I didn’t mention. Can’t talk about everything, can I? It’ll be a surprise.
If you like open world games that take 30 to 40 hours to complete you’ll really like this game, I think. It does show it’s age at this point, perhaps, in both gameplay and graphics. And it’s not a key all time classic like Morrowind (though that’d be a strange comparison anyway). The game really did give me just enough to strive for without making those goals too difficult.
Addendum – Playing on Windows 10
In a first for me instead of posting this review as soon as I finished the game I re-played the game on Windows 10, just to compare/contrast and I wanted to see the other ending.
Firstly, it took a while to even get it running because for some reason this game from 2012 or so has a constant stutter to it (and also crashes). I don’t remember having this issue with Blood dragon. I also couldn’t get the HUD to scale properly to my ultrawide screen monitor. I don’t remember having this issue with Blood dragon. So I’m not sure if Blood Dragon is just a slightly newer version of the Far Cry 3 engine or it just happened to work differently.
Actually I resolved the stuttering and crashing issue with a utility called LAA (which modifies the EXE so it can use more than 2GB of RAM). I did a wide number of other things trying to get it to get this to a playable state (like frame limiting it to 100fps) but didn’t really write them down. I know it’s possible to play perfectly well as there are still recent YouTube videos of PC players enjoying it. I just have no idea how do set it up like they do. Probably doesn’t help my GPU is the laptop version.
As for the game itself, there isn’t a whole lot of difference worth mentioning – keeping in mind I played with a keyboard/mouse. The biggest difference is the mouse still functioning as the “free look” while in vehicles. I just had to train myself to take my hand off the mouse when I got into a vehicle or the looking would mess me up.
Outside of that it still looks good or good enough and plays very well. If it wasn’t for the frustration in the setup I would prefer this PC version.
I also did the “other ending” just see what it was. I think it had about the same impact on me as the first one.
I also wanted to add I may have dismissed the story line entirely too quick in my initial review. After watching some video essays I think this game might be deeper than it appears. Usually I’m the one looking out for metaphors and extra meanings (see my review on Last of Us Part 2…or don’t). But so little is explained, expanded or revealed with this game I just felt like it was only giving half effort to the story. But really there is a deeper meaning. Probably. I’m not saying what it is but it rhymes with art of arkness.
One advantage the PC version does have is some kind of universal mod installer/uninstaller, called Far Cry Mod Installer. There’s one to add the blade from blood dragon, for instance, and another to disable picking up weapons off the ground. Which makes the mission that requires that slightly harder. There’s also one to make the animation for picking up plants/skinning/looting bodies much shorter. And the one I didn’t install…replace the main character with the Rex Power Colt from Blood Dragon. That requires a new save game. Maybe someday. There’s a whole library of mods beyond that in fact.
Metadata
| Method of control used | Gamepad | ||
| Controllable via both one analog stick or digital four-way (“HAT”) | n/a | ||
| Hardware requirements: | XBox Series X | ||
| Supports 21:9 aspect ratio screens? | never got scaling to work | ||
| Device(s) tried on | XBox Series X | ||
| TV | 4k Sony | ||
| Initial setup required | none | ||
| Sound setup | TV audio | ||
| Total time to completion | ~38 hours (32 hours for PC version) | ||
| difficulty level | default difficulty |
Tildes on the side 