It’s happened to all of us. You’re out with your friends having a good time, being loud and obnoxious, drinking, jumping from places you shouldn’t be jumping from, stumbling into places you don’t belong… wheee! We’re drunk, who cares?! Then, all of a sudden, you and your friends are being taken hostage by pirates, thrown in cages, and tormented by your captor.

Enter Vaas. The lovable psychopath I’m sure you’re all familiar with by now, and if you’re not – you will be very soon.
 You take control of Jason Brody, a semi-privileged party bro, and with the help of your army grunt brother, Grant (grunt Grant, grunt XD), escape your cage. After a few short tutorials and a plot point or two, you wake up to a man tattooing your arm. Dennis is an upbeat rebel against the pirates, a Rakyat Warrior that wants to reclaim the island for the natives. He’ll be your mission guide for awhile and show up throughout your time on the Rook Islands.

First task: climb a radio tower and remove a signal scrambler so as to reveal some of your map – yes, like Assassin’s Creed, but with a gun and more ladders. Taking down scramblers also unlocks weapons… for some reason that I never fully understood, but who cares? Guns! This first tower also gives you a beautiful bird’s-eye of the Northern Rook Island, the sun breaking through the clouds over a distant mountain, almost makes you forget there’s a madman holding your friends ransom.

After a few more tutorials and learned skills, you help Dennis liberate an Outpost in search of your girlfriend, Liza. Outposts are pirate controlled strongholds dotted over the two islands, taking them over unlocks Fast Travel points, Weapon Shops, the occasional memory card, and Side Quests (more on that later) – as well as makes it a bit safe to travel in that area. Shortly there after, you are free to do as you wish – explore the island, liberate more outposts, hunt wild animals, assassinate target pirates, treasure hunt, maybe do some jet skiing or hang gliding – you could spend hours without thinking about your captive friends.

The islands offer plenty of distractions, most of which reward you with XP to improve Jason’s skills like running faster and longer, enemy takedowns, weapon accuracy, and health slots. Jet skiing, sadly, does not dole out XP – unless you run over sharks! Crafting new gear for Jason is also an entertaining aside – hunting down specific animals to make new munitions pouches, weapons holsters and even wallets, can be a giant time sink, especially when going after rare animals. Path of the Hunter missions task Jason with tracking down rare and more deadly versions of the island’s animals to craft the best items available to Jason. Each Path of the Hunter mission can only be accessed from liberated outposts, and are only found on the Northern Island, meaning that crafting will be limited to collecting plants for medicine once you’ve hunted the last of the rare animals. Any animal skins collected can be sold for cash, but there are so many loot chests around the islands, that you’ll likely never need to hunt again.

Rounding out the activities, there are 14 side mission given by townsfolk, checkpoint races, hidden letters and relics, assassination missions, and Trials of Rakyat that challenge you to earn top score killing dozens of enemies with a given weapon. Finding letters of the lost and relics rewards you with weapon and crafting unlocks as well as with game exploration, sometimes deep into the islands’ masterfully designed environment – underwater caverns, giant sink holes, WWII bunkers – the Rook Islands aren’t just thick jungle surrounded by white sand beaches, you get an authentic island experience with the added bonus of pirates!

Meat and Potatos

You may have noticed that we’ve covered a lot and haven’t mentioned the main story much. Two reasons: 1. there’s a lot to do in FC3 and, 2. the main story is such a great experience, that talking too much about it could spoil some of the most enjoyable moments. So, without getting too involved – Jason is determined to save his friends, girlfriend and brother from pirate leader Vaas. Through Dennis, he meets and aligns with Citra, warrior goddess of the Rakyat and coincidental sister of Vaas. She hates what her brother has done to the islands and the natives, and enlists Jason’s help, seeing him as the reincarnation of the Rakyat’s mythical warrior ancestor. Vaas isn’t the only game in town, Jason finds that some of his friends have been given to Hoyt Volker, a human trafficker and leader of a small army of Privateers (pirates with better guns and armor) on the Southern Island. Ubisoft wonderfully orchestrates how the story unfolds, and how the characters you meet during your journey interact. It’s easily one of the best adventures in this generation.

Big adventure and minor details. Far Cry 3 delivers an expertly crafted, authentic world filled with intriguing characters that ebb and flow like the islands the inhabit. Vaas and Hoyt are the perfect villains, Jason’s allies are charming and inspiring – and then there are the villager, mostly forgettable as you don’t spend a lot of time in the villages. However, while in the middle of a side mission, I saw something I hadn’t expected to see. I was spying on a woman’s nefarious husband when suddenly gun shots rang out and villagers were screaming. I thought pirates had rolled into the shanty town, a villager fired past me at the attackers – I turned expecting to see a jeep spewing red-clad enemies, but there was only a bird. A big bird. A group of three cassowaries came in and started shredding the townsfolk, and now they were coming for me. They got in some good shots but my rifle put out plenty more, dispatching the birds. Taking a moment to recover from the surprise attach, heal and reload – and curse the jerk birds – I heard something new, crying, and after a short search I found it’s source. The cassowary attack had left a string of dead villagers laid out in the streets, one of them cast aside on the steps of a house – beside him, a woman sobbing uncontrollably.

It’s the small touches, the minor details, that Ubisoft puts into their games that make them feel that much more real. Among all the scripted events, the set pieces, QTEs, it’s the smaller things that bring the islands to life. A flock of seagulls swarming above, swimming with a pair of rays, crabs on the beach, hostages hung from palm trees – it’s the love and care that make Far Cry 3 so memorable.

Co-op & Multiplayer

Co-op:
The fight isn’t over once you’re done with Jason. In fact, there was a fight fought before his fight first found fists. Far Cry 3’s Co-op mode is a blast. Stripping away the open-world aspect that made the solo mode so amazing, Co-op’s linear structure makes itself fun by adding in 1-3 of your friends for a tasked-based romp around a new pirate invested island. The story follows 4 jilted shipmates through 6 chapters on a quest for revenge, their captain made off with all the crew’s money but not before selling the ship and it’s crew to the pirates, that wanker!

Playing as any on the 4 characters, you’ll choose your weapon loadouts, which you can further customize as you level up – adding weapon attachments, armor or grenade upgrades, and battle cries that act as teammate boosts. These custom loadouts carry over to the PvP multiplayer as well, so if you’re dying a lot in PvP, you can come over to Co-op and level up your weapons and loadouts.

Co-op missions are fun and fast paced, moving teams from objective to objective just as quick as they can complete the tasks set for them. Team work is paramount,
A typical co-op mission contains sections where you have to cover your teammates while the take object A to point X, all out firefights, and each mission has a competition around the halfway point. Competitions make for a nice break from all the killing, sometimes with more killing – pitting the players against by seeing who can get the most sniper or rocket launcher kills, or deliver the most bombs to point X. Then it’s back to more team based fun, and caring whether your teams are alive or not. Like many co-op games, Far Cry 3 opted for timed teammate revival, not making it to a buddy means their out until a checkpoint is hit – if everyone dies, then it’s back to the previous checkpoint. Completing chapters rewards you with XP and an assortment of data devices to decode for bonus XP or weapon mods.

The Co-op campaign takes around 6 hours to complete from start to finish, however, you’ll very rarely get into a public Co-op match that goes from beginning to end. So, if you want the full experience, grab a friend or three, order some pizza, and play through the co-op campaign in offline split-screen or an online private session. Becoming host on a public session is luck of the draw, if and when the host leaves.

Multiplayer
Kill ’em all! Far Cry 3’s multiplayer is a blitzkrieg-paced bullet-fest. Teamwork pays off, but it’s hard to find a group that sticks to any kind of plan – not that that’s anything new to the quick match PvPs.

There are 4 match types:

• Team Deathmatch: The old standby, we’ve all come to know and love.
• Domination: Take over a node and hold it for points, reach the target and win!
• Transmission: Same as Domination, but once you gain a specific number of points, the node moves, and you’ll have to recapture it to gain more points. Team with the biggest score wins.
• Firestorm: Teams compete to set their opponent’s supply depots ablaze, once a team has lit up both depots, a firestorm is started and a radio transmitter spawns on the map. If the team that set both of the opponent’s supply depots on fire captures the transmitter, they win and a plane comes to pick them up. However, if the team with the burning depots captures the transmitter, the plane doses the firestorm with a load of water.

Modes are fast paced, and you’re likely to spend a lot of time dead or dying. Just a few bullets can bring you down, and though your teammates can revive you, your cries are simply baiting a kill trap. Seeing a downed teammate serves as a warning, telling you to flank the opponent, rather than storm through the choke point. It should be noted that, while they are used in single player regularly, there are no vehicles to speak of in multiplayer. With players eating dust after just a few bullets, vehicles wouldn’t really pay off, but the option would have been nice.

As of Sept. 2013, MP lobbies are still packed with players ready for to help or hunt you. There’s also Far Cry Outpost, an app to track daily challenges like killing Xnumber for people with a certain weapon, but it’s also shows you stats, lets you customize loadouts, and has access to The Gird mini-game and decoding features. The Gird is a slide based puzzle game, that rewards you with data devices for decoding – which is more easily done via the app than it is in-game. Far Cry Outpost is available online, and through the Google Play and App stores.

Map Editor
This review refuses to end – but it’s not my fault, Far Cry 3 just has so much to cover.

The Map Editor is ridiculous. If you can dream it, you can most likely build it – it might look a little jungle-y, but you can build it. Once you’ve built your masterpiece, you can share it with the world for them to cover in digi-red. The one glaring smack in the face is that you can’t add AI to your maps. AI meaning animals and pirates, but vehicles and even weapons also make your map ineligible for the multiplayer modes. It makes me sad, there’s so much potential for the Map Editor – why limit maps to Multiplayer? Why not allow players to build mini-mission single player maps and share them? Will my dreams of sharing the Die Hard tower populated with enemy AI ever be full-filled? Or my replica Woodland Park Zoo complete with breakable cages, so the animals can help reclaim the zoo. Or the Alcatraz level… that I haven’t built yet, but it’s on the list… Anyway, you can still share the levels without all the cool AI, and it’s feasible that you could build your dream single-player mission map, have it meet all the requirements of one of the MP modes – then somehow include a link to online instructions telling players where to place AI elements so they can enjoy your hard work… Or maybe we can just wait for Far Cry 4, Ubisoft wouldn’t ignore the complaints of it’s fans… would they‽

The Good: Where to begin… Read everything above. Stellar Solo-campaign, solid and entertaining co-op, fast paced multiplayer with custom maps – full package.

The Bad: While the map editor is amazing and gives you a load of freedom, the limitations laid down seem cruel.

The Ugly: The wait for Far Cry 4.