Heart of insanity? Not even.

I’m not sure how to start this…

FAR CRY 3! Yeah

That’ll do.

I kind of didn’t want to review Far Cry 3 because I’ve been too busy playing Far Cry 3 to do it. As you could probably guess from the number “3” behind the name “Far Cry”, this game is the third game in the Far Cry series. If you didn’t guess that then you were probably last in the line for brains. I’ve never played the other two Far Cry’s but I can tell that the stories have nothing to do with each other, I know that because the story actually makes sense given my limited knowledge.

The start of the game is pretty much the beginning I guess. There’s an opening cinematic of some of those rascally teenagers partying on some sort of resort island. These rascally teenagers came here because one of them just got his pilots license and he’s super popular or something, then they go sky diving and suddenly the main character is in a cage and some crazy Mexican guy is telling him about his background. The main characters name is Jason Brody; he’s tied up with his older brohemia Grant Brody. Don’t familiarize yourself with him; he dies in the first five minutes. The crazy Mexicans name is Vaas. Kind of like the word Vase but not at all. Vaas tells the wonder brothers that he’s going to sell them on the black market because pretty white boys sell well. Vaas has to leave to take a dump or something, giving the Super Brody Bros. some time to take the duct tape off their wrists. Vaas really should have tied them down better. Then Grant kills a man and Jason freaks out. Wait, I’m playing as Jason. This is a First-Person Shooter. I tend to shoot people while playing these. Why am I scared? Well, I’ll answer you, me. This sets up character development. Grant and Jason almost escape from the camp when Vaas finishes doing up his fly and busts a cap in Grant’s neck. Then he lets Jason run away and he yells “Run Forrest Run.” (It’s a quote from that Tom Hanks movie. Saving Private Ryan, right?) Once Jason is far enough away he decides now would be a good time to fall off a cliff into a river… Maybe I play as someone else? NO! That’s not how character development works, me! Jason is plucked from the river by some guy who proceeds to give him some sweet ink. This guy, named Dennis Rogers (he looks more like a Derrick) is the leader of a group of rebels living on this island of crazy talk. Denny’s tells Jimmy-Bro that the rebels need his help to stop Vaas’ pirates and J. J. Abrams says that he still needs to find his friends, the two decide to kill two stoners with one falcon and do both at the same time.

That’s when I stopped paying attention to anything story wise.

Let me tell me *guh* you about what all happened to me in my first hour and a half of playing this gem.

I started off by buying a pistol, like I was forced to do. I didn’t enjoy this one bit but I’m the kind of guy who rolls with the flow so I just went on my way. After falling down countless ravines because I couldn’t see any roads due to my lack of a map, I decided to chart the area, to do such, you have to climb to the top of a radio tower and turn it on, a la Assassins Creed. I set out towards the nearest tower (every icon shows up on your map even if your map doesn’t show up on your map.) After finding out how to climb onto ledges I was all set. Unfortunately, I hadn’t mastered the art of jumping across ledges and I sent Jason Brody on a magical journey straight to the Game Over screen. I finally achieved my initial goal and was rewarded with a zip-line ride down to the earth. I later learned that this wasn’t such a treat as zip-lines are more common on Rook Island than cockroaches on a woman of ill-repute. After mapping the area I noticed that there were symbols on the map that were shaped like animals. Ok, that’s pretty cool. But wait, Desmond had taught me how to craft items out of animal skins. I checked and saw that I needed some deer hide to craft an ammo belt or some crap and decided to head to the area with the big deer picture on it. I searched the nearby area for any deer, but I was having difficulty seeing them as my eye sight was hindered by all these inconvenient trees. But Mr. Rogers had also taught me another skill, creating drugs! Performance enhancing drugs. Performance enhancing drugs that let me see animals through walls. I whipped up a couple batches of my make-shift heroin and pumped it right into my eye holes. I entered a drug induced state and realized that there was a herd of deer standing right behind me. Right as I was about to take a shot with my bow and arrow (I had gotten a bow and arrow by then) I was straight-up mauled by a cougar. Now let me just take a little side trail here. Have you ever been playing Modern Future ‘Merica Shoot Terrorists Simulator 2010 ,2011, 2012 and so-on and ever been genuinely fearful of something happening in the game? No? Didn’t think so. I started running for my life from this animal because I had literally forgotten I was carrying a rather large assault rifle at the time. I’m being serious right now, I had been so scared that I just ran to my jeep and drove away. That’s something very few games can accomplish. After I had a change of pants and partook in a quick face-palm, I decided to go back and maybe teach this cougar a thing or two about straight-up mauling guys who are just trying to make a living on Delfino Island. Surprisingly enough the cougar was still prowling the area, killing all the deer. Thanks chump. Now I had everything I needed to take on an enemy base. There are two approaches to taking on an enemy base, the direct approach, which involves lots of bullets and screaming and the stealth approach which requires precision… I, being the stellar precision master I am, opted for a more direct approach. After reloading my save I changed my tactics to actually scoping out the area. Jason starts the game off with a camera that you can use to tag enemies to keep track of them while you’re sneaking around. The stealth in this game is really good, as much as it pains me to say but the stealthiness in this game might almost be better than in Dishonored.  I eventually cleared out the base and claimed it as my own. Now I could do business there and accept jobs, which is nifty. A while later I was out in the wild with my bow (which I had named Clementine) and caught myself making Hunger Games references. Then I had realized every time I shot someone with a bow and killed them I had said something stupid like “May the odds be ever in your favour” and sometimes, much to my chagrin, I would say “District 12… SWAG!” Then I stopped playing because I needed to wash my mouth out with bleach.

So that’s my hour and a half of Far Cry 3.

I mentioned character development at the start of the story summary, so here’s what happens. Basically, Jason starts off as a pathetic weakling who complains about murder and other stuff but as you progress through the story, Jason turns into this crazy guy who isn’t killing people to save his friends, he’s just killing them to have fun. Which I guess if you’re super philosophical, you could turn into some twenty page paper about the dangers of water buffalo.

Another sign of character progression is Jason’s tatau (Which I assume means tattoo, because that`s exactly what it is.) Jason`s tatau starts off as a little tribal arm band on his forearm and as he levels up and becomes more proficient the tatau gets more designs until it covers his whole forearm. And it looks really cool. I like upgrading my skills just to see what part of the tatau I unlock next.

How about them mechanics? I don’t know, Jason can fix broken glass by pointing a welder at the hood of his car… so he’s pretty good. Wait. Game mechanics? Oh, well why didn’t you just say so. Since I’m on the topic of cars I guess I’ll just start there. Vehicles are a big part of this game, because this game is a big part of this game so getting around on foot would not be so easy. The vehicles handle soundly, it’s a little too easy to get them out of control, but that’s probably because I don’t follow roads and just try to get from point A to point B in a straight line, that includes through jungles, villages and off cliffs. There are also gliders which are fun to use but rare to find, because they’re really only on higher areas. But I guess what everyone cares about when they play a first-person shooter is the first-person shooting, which is solid. Like a rock. Like a solid rock. Not a liquid rock. It’s really easy to move from cover to cover, and unlike in other FPSs, you can actually shoot from cover without awkwardly standing up, which is nice. Since real people are fragile and can’t take bullets until their eyes start bleeding profusely then wait behind a chest high wall for all the blood to recede back into their bodies, Jason doesn’t regenerate health. Not in the traditional sense. You start the game with two bars of health; you can upgrade your health bar(s) which adds to your tatau. But if one of your bars isn’t completely damaged it’ll regenerate by itself, if it’s all gone then you have to regenerate it by yourself, you can use medicine to get a quick fix or you can just fix yourself by yourself. My favorite thing about that system is that each time you manually heal yourself, Jason does a little animation with his hands. This is especially hilarious because I got mauled by a shark and Jason just plucks a shard of glass out of the back of his hand… lolwut? Also, when he’s driving he sometimes bites a bullet out of his arm and then spits it out, like he makes a spitting noise and you see the bullet fly towards the dashboard and it makes clinking sounds… I just find that funny.

Also the game looks super nice, I really like the way the sun shines through the trees and stuff. I guess I have to talk about the bad stuff… Is there a bad stuff? No, not really. The worst thing I can think of is that it and it’s really easy to get caught on stuff whenever you pause it there’s this really annoying bass noise that plays. If those are the worst things this game does then it’s a pretty fricking good game.

My rating for Far Cry 3 is… Possible game of the year. Maybe at the end of December I’ll do an award thingy and you can see which one I pick.