Knights of the Cardboard Castle

I’m feeling somewhat burned out on first-person shooters but I picked up Far Cry 3 not too long ago because I have fond memories of the second game in the series. I have to admit that this was very much a mistake as this game seems to share very little in common with its predecessor.

• Story-wise this is one of the most offensive games I can recall playing in recent memory. There are so many obnoxious things about it that it would probably drive me crazy to list them all. The main reason why this is so personal to me is because the game is set on a fictional chain of islands that appear inspired by Indonesian islands. This means that when the game tries for a bit of local flavour by injecting Indonesian words into the dialogue, any errors immediately raises my hackles. Like when Dennis tries to say “Selamat tengahari” like he’s a real native, yo, when it is the middle of the night!

• The dissonance goes way deeper though. For example, the English voice acting is done with Australian / Polynesian accents which stick out like sore thumbs for me. One in-game character uses the “lah” suffix commonly used in Malaysia and Indonesia in a completely wrong way. The local religion is some kind of bloodthirsty demonic cult. I guess they could pass it as some kind of Hindu demon but it’s still pretty demeaning. Then the’s way that native faces are always drawn unattractively. This game has “Did Not Do the Research” slapped all over it.
• Then there’s the misogyny. Where do I even begin with this? First there’s the leader-priestess of the native resistance warriors who naturally prances around wearing a leather miniskirt and a halter-top. It’s even implied that she uses sex to retain the loyalty of her warriors. Then there’s how the protagonist you control interacts with women. The contrast between two very similar scenes highlight this. In one scene, you’re acting as a gunner while your brother flies a helicopter. In another scene, you’re acting as a gunner while your girlfriend drives a 4WD vehicle. It turns out that your brother has just learned to fly planes and never flown a chopper. So the protagonist is properly encouraging and supportive, saying things like, “Relax, you’ll do fine”, “You’re doing great” etc. But when it’s the girl driving, he says things like “Why aren’t you going faster?”, “Why did you shut down the engine?”. He acts as if every setback encountered during the sequence is the girl’s fault. It’s blatant and disgusting.

• Then we have the sheer awfulness of just about every character in the game. The protagonist and his friends are portrayed as stereotypical clueless Californians who go for an exotic holiday and become embroiled way in over their heads. One’s an investment banker who apparently cheated his way to riches. Another is the son of a hedge fund manager who care only about pot. Considering that the plot of the game revolves around rescuing them, you’d think that they’d make sure the group is composed of people who are actually worth rescuing. The villains are no better with Vaas, your typical rabid dog, being especially annoying since the game likes to have him knock the protagonist out by stepping around a corner, again and again and again.
• All that said, the gameplay mechanics are rock solid and the engine is a technical marvel. The open world is huge, beautiful, with great day/night cycle and weather effects, and everything loads seamlessly. New to the series is a fully developed stealth system, complete with the ability to distract enemies and take them down with a knife. There’s a cover system that’s so subtle that many people played through the entire game without knowing it exists but works quite well. There’s also a skill tree now that people seem to like but I found it uninspired. The radio towers are a clever reworking of the lookout points of Assassin’s Creed.  One of my favourite new additions is the wildlife. There are now lots of wild animals roaming the islands and all of them can be hunted and killed.
• I also found myself pretty obsessed with the collecting game. There are a lot of collectibles in here and you can buy maps that show the location of every single item. Actually getting to them however can be non-trivial and can involve diving and swimming through underwater caverns, some platforming to climb and jump to elevated areas, and even some locations that are accessible only with a hang-glider. Unfortunately the game caps the amount of cash you can carry and this works against collecting everything. If you’re fastidious about looting every little thing, you’ll soon find yourself with too much money and nothing to spend it on.

• The game is also pretty decent about creating memorable, unscripted moments mainly because of the animals and how fire can spread. One time, I was just admiring the view when a buffalo charged up and just knocked me off a cliff. The human enemies in the game aren’t much of a threat. I get killed way more often when I’m trying to snipe soldiers and a tiger or a leopard creeps up to me unnoticed and tries to eat my face. In fact, if you manage to loose a tiger in an enemy outpost, it will likely kill off every enemy soldier there all by itself. And what other game lets you hunt sharks with a bow and bears with a machete?
• Animals aside however, the world is rather boring. The islands are much bigger than I first realized, arguably too big since there’s isn’t enough meaningful content to fill all that space. It’s also all tropical and rather generic in design. There’s just not enough variety in landscapes and interesting locales. Far Cry 2 not only had more variety but the world had more character as well. The optional missions are stupidly written and boring as well. They’re almost insulting in how little work seems to have gone into them. Of the other optional activities, the only thing I found interesting was the poker game.
• I also regret that they took out all of the previous game’s most interesting mechanics. You can carry four weapons now and they never degrade so there’s no longer the desperate sense of having to adapt to adapt whatever weapon you can readily find on hand. The excellent buddy system with its particular dynamics is also gone. What you have instead is a tedious crafting system that has you collect materials from animals and plants to make bags for your equipment and syringes that heal or give you temporary bonuses.

Still the good parts are heavily outweighed by how bad the story is and how offensive the writing is. The entire tone of the game comes across as disgustingly juvenile and shockingly tone deaf. I’m not one to harp on about political correctness but this is schoolboy level stereotyping and stupidity. For example, the data pages in the game, ostensibly to provide information on characters, locations and wildlife, is filled with snarky jokes instead of actual info. When will developers learn that when in doubt, less story is better than a bad story? Far Cry 2 had a much more serious tone, less dramatic storytelling and a much more anonymous protagonist. And it worked. Let’s go back to that and throw this kind of rubbish away, shall we?