Hey Ladies and Jerks,
Been a few minutes since we last spoke and this time we're talking about Far Cry. Far Cry is a game from 2004 by Crytek (of Crysis fame) about a man with a gun shooting lots of other men with guns in order to rescue a girl.
Far Cry 3 is game from 2012 by Ubisoft (of Assassin's Creed fame) about a man with a lot of guns shooting even more men with even more guns in order to rescue TWO girls and even a couple dudes.
Progressive, right?
Click through below to find out if there's really more to it than that.
Spoiler: There's not.
So, Far Cry the First. It was really one of those games made to show off Crytek's then-new CryEngine technology which rendered a 3D lush tropical island with staggering draw distances. It ate my computer when I first played it until I cracked open the .ini file and tweaked the settings. I could have done the same thing through the menus they provided in-game but I'm too hardcore for that.
As a result of the game being essentially a technology demo made by a bunch of tech dudes the story in the game was your bare bones "save the princess" type thing, except in this case the princess is the woman who hires you to take her to a remote island so she can investigate the weird research going on there for whatever reasons.
So of course she gets captured and you get shipwrecked and stranded so you have to explore the island and fight off a bunch of private army types protecting the genetic research laboratories that are conducting the super secret genetic research.
It was all very "action movie" type plotting and it worked okay for the time. I was just there to shoot dudes and explore those big, wide open levels (the game wasn't truly "open world" yet at this point).
You had to stay hidden in the jungle foliage and spot bad guys with your binoculars to mark them on your heads up display. Coming upon a base and doing this kind of reconnaissance work before moving in to deal with things either as quietly or loudly as you felt like was a cornerstone of what made the whole game so entertaining.
Of course this being Crytek it also meant the game went off the rails about halfway through when they started introducing non-human enemies that simply were not that fun to fight. Up to that point it was all pretty solid and just some good old fashioned subtly-and-probably-not-intentionally homoerotic shootman entertainment.
After doing Far Cry Crytek kept working on their CryEngine technology and developed another game to show it off which came to be known as Crysis. Crysis was a lot of like Far Cry except it was set in North Korea instead of Micronesia and featured stupid alien enemies at the halfway mark instead of stupid genetically altered apes.
Ubisoft picked up the license and started making Far Cry games for the original Xbox. At first they kept with the dumb genetic mutation theme but refined the whole stalking your enemy type of play.
Eventually in 2008 Ubisoft put out a true sequel, Far Cry 2, which was set in Africa and tried to be more of an immersive sim in the vein of Deus Ex while still sticking to its action movie roots. The result was a bit mixed but everyone agreed the game should get points for trying so it's remembered fondly.
Far Cry 2 was fully open world and explorable from the start, it didn't feature any dumb non-human enemies that weren't any fun to fight and it did a lot of stuff with the first person perspective that made me respect the hell out of it because I like it when games do stuff with their perspective.
For instance, in Far Cry 2 whenever you bring up your map it's not just a map menu but an actual object your character holds up with his own hands and looks at right there while the rest of the game is going on around you. Vehicles, which were in the first game, returned and driving in first person while looking at your map was awesome because it obscured your view a little.
As part of the story hook the main character you played as had malaria and had to pop a malaria pill every so often but nothing was actually done with this mechanic. You always had an endless supply of malaria pills for instance so it was just a minor annoyance whenever you had to take one.
The game also featured a diverse set of wildlife and a flamethrower that you could set pretty much anything on fire with. Setting a grass fire and watching it spread into the enemy compound you were staking out was a fun thing to do in Far Cry 2.
So Far Cry 2 was an interesting experiment of a game. It kept the stalk and kill aspect of the original and refined it somewhat and made the whole game truly open world.
Four years later in 2012 Ubisoft released Far Cry 3. Far Cry 3 is more conservative than Far Cry 2. It keeps the same formula of letting you explore an open world tropical island setting and it gives you a flamethrower to burn everything with but it drops a lot of the interesting first person stuff. Your map in this game is just another menu you pull up.
The island itself is big and vast and it's full of caves and ancient ruins to explore and scattered far and wide with collectible cruft. The wildlife can be hunted and skinned and the skins used to craft holsters and slings so you can hold more weapons and items. There are several different types of plants you can harvest to craft health syringes and the like and the main character earns experience that can be used to upgrade his abilities.
Like in Assassin's Creed the map is hidden from your view until you access certain control points, in this case radio towers, that fill in your view a little bit. You have to explore and find these towers before you have a full map. Likewise there are tons of settlements that are controlled by enemy pirates that you have to clear out to take over, at which point they offer you a safe house, a fast travel point and a job board to pick up side missions.
The real meat of the game is in exploring the island, activating the radio towers and taking over the settlements. The story is absolutely terrible. It's so terrible it's almost offensive.
You play as a young adrenaline junky college kid named Jason Brody. In the beginning you're traveling through Southeast Asia with a group of friends (your girlfriend, your brother, another friend and his girlfriend, and maybe another brother I can't remember). While out clubbing Thailand or somewhere you get the tip about a secret island that's only accessible via skydiving. So of course your little troupe of spoiled trust fund kids and frat boy douche bags all decide to check it out.
You get there and start having a good time only, whoops!, this island is controlled by a pirate gang led by some business man and his psychopath muscle. You all get kidnapped and the pirates start planning on selling you into slavery when you and your older brother, who's former military of course, break out of the place. Along the way Jason Brody's brother dies and he takes his first life.
Much like in Tomb Raider 2013 taking that first life in Far Cry 3 is presented as a big deal for the player. Then five seconds later you're taking lots and lots more lives, human and animal, and you think nothing of it aside from a few comments from the main character here and there.
Along the way Jason forms an alliance with the islands native people, the Rakyat, who show him the way of the Rakyat warrior and give him some really sweet tribal tattoos for every skill point he spends. After you rescue all your friends Jason decides he's not going to return to the world with them but instead stay to live among the Rakyat and help them rid themselves of the pirate menace.
It's some real "White Guy Acts As Savior For The Helpless Natives" type shit with a good dose of "White Guy Goes Off The Reservation To Live Among The Natives Who For Some Reason Fully Accept Him Into Their Culture". I know games like this are just male power fantasies but who the hell fantasizes about this shit? Frat kids who play Call of Duty?
Tired tropes aside I was really hoping in the beginning that I could just not do anything and let all my idiot friends get sold into slavery but nope, even though there's a big rush to do this you can actually take as long as you want getting around to it because Video Games. Everything narrative-wise will just stop and wait for you indefinitely until you're done collecting dinguses and doing land races.
So Far Cry 3 is even more Far Cry than Far Cry 2 but thankfully does not have any genetically modified mutant enemies, at least not in the first half of the game.
Ultimately it doesn't matter because in 2013 Ubisoft released an expansion to Far Cry 3 called Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon and it made up for every stupid thing Far Cry 3 did or did not do.
In Blood Dragon you play as a futuristic cyber-soldier voiced by none other than Michael Beihn (of Terminator fame) and you have to explore a neon-soaked hellscape of an island inhabited with amoral scientists and a rogue general's cyborg army. It's all very "1980s scifi action movie", it doesn't take itself seriously at all and it has awesome music to boot. It's probably my favorite of the Far Cry series and the only thing that would have made it better would have been if it was as big and as lengthy as regular Far Cry 3.
So that's my assessment. Far Cry 3 is okay in my book because without it we would not have had Blood Dragon and Blood Dragon is probably one of the best FPS games to come out in the last five years or so. Seriously if you like first person shooters or anything that references the 1980s you should play Blood Dragon. It's a real treat.
Thanks for reading.
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