Posted on 05/27/2013 at 08:28 PM
| Filed Under Blogs
Nice review, and welcome to the site I think this is the first time I've seen your writing here. I really enjoyed this game, it was one of the best times I've had in a shooter in a long while. It was fantastic as an open world and stealth action game as well.
My favorite gameplay loop that they offered was activating towers so I could get new guns for free (it always felt rewarding to unlock new weapons), then find all the new outposts on the map and liberate them through stealth so I can get the +1500 XP bonus for eliminating the guards without being spotted, then upgrade my weapons at the outpost and hunt the surrounding areas so I can upgrade equipment.
Liberating each outpost is like a perfectly bite-sized stealth mission all by itself. I sneak up to each new outpost and try to get a good vantage point on a hillside nearby and I use my camera to mark and track each enemy in the outpost, and then I start taking out the guards one at a time trying to stay unnoticed. I throw distraction rocks to bring one to me and take him out with the knife. Some I snipe with the bow or silenced rifle, and sometimes I can get really lucky and lure in a wild animal from the surrounding area to do my work for me, which is always the most satisfying thing to watch.
The only parts of the game I didn't like was the southern island experience where you hunt down the main slave trader. During that time you have that privateer costume and nobody attacks you on sight because you're undercover. So there's considerably less firefights outside the missions and the only way you can get pirates to attack you is by antagonizing them. The southern island gets pretty boring, so the northern island where you start out the game is the most fun place to be, especially when there's still a lot of outposts left to attack. The game gets more quiet as you liberate outposts and make travel safer. When the map is all red and the outposts are still occupied by pirates it's dangerous to travel. So the best part of the game is when you play the first island and there's a lot of outposts left.
One thing I love about this game is that the craziest things that can happen to you in Far Cry 3 will happen to you when you're doing nothing. When you're in downtime between quests, when you're traveling from point A to B and not planning on anything, that's when an alligator will attack you in the river, or a band of pirates driving down the road will spot you and attack, or a huge fight will break out between Rakyat and some pirates and you'll get stuck in the middle, and a fire breaks out and spreads across a whole hillside and there's total chaos. I love the sandbox nature of the game and the way the systems are designed so that they can interact in emergent ways and allow unscripted gameplay.
The most exciting firefights and stories actually happen outside the main and ancillary quests when you're out in the wilds simply exploring. Fantastic game and design.
JD wrote a nice blog about his thoughts on it and I'm going to take my comment I left him and repost it here as well.
I told Julian on twitter this morning that I'm not down on One, I'm actually quite impressed by it, I'm just not interested. We still have to see all the games at E3, but at the moment I'm certainly leaning towards picking up PC gaming as well as a PS4.
Kinect 2.0 and the multimedia speed and accuracy is beyond impressive, it's the kind of stuff that a lot of people will really enjoy and use. It looks like a fantastic multimedia living room device, it's the type of thing Microsoft has been trying to do this whole time. It isn't a fight for games alone, M's strategy has been a fight for entertainment in a broad sense and it's a fight for the living room and they are succeeding at it very well. It's a strategy we have all known about since before the launch of the 360, but people seem to have forgotten about it or tried to pretend Microsoft didn't "mean" it. Anybody who has been following Microsoft's foray into gaming and entertainment since the original Xbox shouldn't be surprised by any of this, they've been very clear about this overall war plan for a long time. The One device is the kind of thing that Apple has been trying to create to dominate the living room but hasn't quite been able to do yet, the One might be attractive enough to a lot of people to actually be that trojan horse to dominate their living room and entertainment needs. The 360 was already that type of device for a lot of people, and now the One is a more refined and aggressive attack into that strategy.
It could end up working out really well for Microsoft, because these days the sales of PCs are way down, meaning sales of Windows is probably down as well, and it sounds like they need to adapt to a changing market. The Xbox One could be a really profitable idea in the adaptation. Lots of people want that kind of simple, single, sleek (note that I didn't say attractive, I don't think it is) multimedia device in their living room that works incredibly fast and does any random thing they tell it to do on the fly. It's very tech heavy and forward thinking, it seems like the kind of thing kids and many adults will eat up and learn to use very quickly. It isn't for everybody but it seems like it'll sell really well if the price is right and the marketing is good come later this year.
It isn't for me, but it is really impressive, and it seems like it'll be an excellent way for Microsoft to continue their long known strategy to be the go to device in people's living rooms.