Far Cry 3

I was a very big fan of the original Far Cry Instincts on the xbox, which is not the original Far Cry but it was the first on the xbox. It took a pretty common genre and threw a fun covered wrench into it to make it amazingly fun. Then Ubisoft decided they were through with the player having silly amounts of fun in their series so they released Far Cry 2, which took out all the fun bits and replaced it with a serious attempt at realism, the only really good thing being that they left in and improved upon the stealth. Don't get me wrong, it was a good game, it just should have been named something different, instead of Far Cry 2 it should have been African Mercenary Adventure or AMA for short, see how catchy that is? Would have made loads of money without disappointing anyone. But hey, I'm not here to talk about that game, I'm here to talk about it's much better sequel(?) Far Cry 3.

Single player is the focus because in my opinion Far Cry related multiplayer has never been good but I'll get to that later. So the story follows Jason Brody while he quests to not die. Basics are he and his friends are on a tropical island filled with pirates who want to kill/rape/sell into slavery/torture them all. Jason gets caught up in the island "politics" and starts practically leading a rebellion. What is fun is...well everything. You level up by doing normal stuff like completing missions and killing dudes and other fun stuff, put points into new abilities which are all wonderful and useful, and your skill is shown by a tattoo growing on your arm. You kill wildlife to upgrade your equipment such as weapon holsters to hold more weapons, ammo bags, arrow quivers, etc... Speaking of the arrows...you can get yourself a bow which is probably the best weapon in the game, if you get decent at using it you literally need no other weapon, as a bonus you can pick your arrows back up from the many corpses of your enemies. "But what if a truck tries to run me over?" well attach a grenade to the arrow...kinda...it works. The stealth is great, you can hide in a bush, throw a rock nearby to get a guard's attention, then stick a machete though him.

Multiplayer is not...horrible...but it's not really great. It follows the usual *shoot guys and level up your weapons* thing that every FPS is doing these days. Bow and machete stabby move seem a bit overpowered but hey, use it to your advantage I suppose. I don't really know what else to say on this matter so I'll move onto co-op.

I haven't played the co-op yet, yayyy! But I have watched numerous gameplay videos of it and from what I understand is that it plays like a merging of single and multiplayer, but borrows more from single player which I like. So you and three of your friends are all people with questionable but violent pasts and are all working on a boat together, however the captain decides to sell you into slavery or something like that, either way you are upset with him and wish to do bad things to his genitals. So you get a few missions, less than ten I believe, to kill a bunch of pirates unfortunate enough to be between 4 human characters and the end of the level, and do some mini games in between real missions. It also follows the rules of kill guys and upgrade your weapons but at least you share weapons between game modes.

So I'd give this game a 9.5 out of 10 with the multiplayer being kinda meh being the reason for the .5 deduction. I'd highly recommend it to anyone who is a fan of the series, enjoys stealthy fps games and enjoy run in guns blazing fps games because it is both.