I was really looking forward to playing Far Cry 3. The previews sounded amazing and the trailers had me psyched not only for the gameplay but the story. Then I finally slid the disc into the slot on my PS3, loaded it up, and…

...became less and less enthused to make progress.

I invested quite a number of hours into the game, not enough to really put together anything you could call a “review”, and it is possible the game would only “get better”. Yet I knew that my time would be better spent playing a better game. Or at least, a better game for me.

Far Cry 3 wasn’t a bad game by any stretch. I would not have put the hours into it that I had otherwise. It was just too damn repetitive for me, and the hours that it begged I devote to its activities were far too great. The island you inhabit is absolutely huge, or at least it seemed that way to me, and littered with outposts and towers that should excite and entice me. However, I need to enjoy the activities being asked of me over and over again enough that I don’t feel as if I’m just killing time.

For example, Assassin’s Creed is littered with repetition. However, part of the fun is to navigate the buildings and structures, figuring out a pathway up to the top. You see your objective, you just need to figure out how to get there. The figuring out part is what keeps me from noticing the repetition. Each tower manages to feel different enough, even if the pathway is linear and pre-determined.

When you have to climb the radio towers in Far Cry 3, there is no such illusion. They may change the manner in which you climb up each tower, but your interactions with the world in this manner are limited to movement and jumping (you could use “climbing” as a separate verb, only the only difference separating it from “walking” is the use of the generic “action” button). The illusion is broken. I’m doing what I was thirty, forty, sixty minutes ago (or longer).

Of course, this is a first-person shooter. What you should really be enjoying is the combat, right? Well, aside from the beginning segments providing too few tools and abilities for combat to feel in any way satisfactory, no. There are very few strategies to really come up with here. If it’s a story mission the environment is likely quite linear and offers little opportunity for tactics and strategy. Find something resembling cover, stay behind it and aim for the head.

The separate outposts are supposed to be where everything becomes “interesting”. This is where “emergent gameplay” is supposed to make everything exciting as well, the idea that the game world is alive enough that anything could happen. Certainly, there are moments where these non-scripted sequences are pretty interesting. Wandering a jungle only to see a deer sprinting away from a hunting tiger in desperation is a nifty sight to behold. However, trying to scout out an enemy outpost to prepare an attack only to be slain by a leopard or bear from behind is frustrating. What’s more, it also breaks down the game world a bit. Not all predators will attack you upon sight. Are they hungry? Are they more violent because of territory? Don’t a lot of predators try and make noise to scare you off at first? In a video game world, they simply spot you and attack. It doesn’t matter if you’re five or five hundred feet away, they’re coming for you.

It’s about the only interesting decision to make when preparing to take out an enemy encampment. If there is a beast locked up in a cage, do you set it free? Do you shoot the cage open? If so, do you have a silenced weapon so your location is not revealed? Do you hope it goes after your enemies instead of you? Yet more often than not each outpost is merely a group of guards wandering, and the best option is to sneak in and turn the alarm off. From there on you can try and stealthily take each guard out or just go in guns blazing. I’d say stealth is the more enjoyable route, but it’s also the most time consuming.

Did I mention how many of these samey-looking and built outposts there are?

If I chose to do every outpost using stealth, I’d have very few additional tools available to me. Those gated away by the game’s progression system feel as if they should have been present from the beginning. You need to level up in order to drag bodies away, a bit of common sense rather than some perk or ability you’d gain after fighting for some time.

Perhaps that’s one of the first issues I had with the game. I discovered a lot of nice features that most games begin with were gated away from me. I had to complete a variety of these tasks, each that felt balanced towards already being leveled up, before I could play the game as designed. It’s as if the level-up system was an afterthought and thus they decided to just deactivate all kinds of functions until I had played enough of their repetitive locations.

So how about the story? I’ve played sub-par games to complete a decent story before, and I was greatly tempted to do so here. Sure, I could raise some of the same complaints of the game’s opening as others. The opening video showing a bunch of College kids on vacation, cut together with what looks to be professional editing tools, turns out to be an iPhone video that was conveniently put together on said iPhone right before everything went horribly wrong.

It would have been much more effective if you knew nothing about the game, but I actually appreciate what they’re going for. Or, could have been going for. “Here you are, kids,” it seems to say. “All the partying, thrill-seeking, and partying you rich white kids get to enjoy all the time!” It reflected the opening to some reality television show that would inevitably be littered with interpersonal drama, sex, and alcohol fueled shenanigans. Then the rug is pulled out from under you, as these very same characters are tied and caged up by… pirates? I think they were pirates.

I suppose it’s kind of sad that I don’t even know what to call the villains in this game, other than “bad guys”. They’re involved in drugs, kidnapping, and arms dealing, but all I really know what to call them is “bad people”.

What I loved about Vaas, who isn’t even the actual villain of the game it turns out, is that despite how insane he is, he’s actually a great criticism of “first world problems”. The man is certifiably insane, and that manages to make him entertaining. At the same time, though, he’s not wrong.

So here you are, playing a sniveling white frat boy, the exact sort of person that may find themselves playing a game because “Sweet! It has GUNS in it and iron sight aiming! Now I can feel like a REAL soldier!”. A criticism of their ignorance to the outside world and the frivolous, selfish things they obsess about (and let’s be clear, I’m not necessarily better. Here I am blogging about a video game as opposed to, say, the recent hurricane in the Philippines).

Yet the game immediately undoes all of that. If you thought Call of Duty was a macho man power fantasy, wait until you play Far Cry 3. Even though your avatar, Jason Brody, continues to look like one of the slimmest, least capable of holding up a gun males in a first-person shooter, he is swiftly transformed into the ultimate first-world male power fantasy. You barely survive an escape, and as soon as you are discovered the locals utter that they’ve been “waiting for a man like you” to “come and save them”.

Why?

I mean, seriously, why? Or do you simply have the characters confused? Jason Brody’s brother was a marine, the reason Jason was able to escape. Unfortunately, he got shot, but he at least knew what he was doing. Jason? Jason nearly got killed himself. Yet he’s the one you’ve been waiting for? Are you sure you’re not confusing him with his dead brother?

Yet the game continues on with this plotline. Perhaps it subverts itself, but for the hours I played, all I got was “white man come, white man save colored folk”.

I’ll be honest, I get a bit sick of people “playing the race card” or some other such as well. Sometimes I really feel like people are making a problem where none exists (see the initial response to Resident Evil 5 being racist (y’know, before everyone knew they had the most stereotypical African tribe thing going on halfway through the game)). To me, however, this game is a problem. It’s not even criticizing that the player’s values of “being manly” are trivial compared to what men do in some of these third world nations (despite how often he does it, Jason continues to go “ew” after you skin the hide of an animal for your fifteenth or twenty-fifth upgrade).

I just lost all interest in the story. If I want a male power fantasy, I at least want it to disguise itself better. Dishonored, Dead Rising, Batman, these are games that are all trying to do something more interesting than exclaim “White boy is here! Now we can finally be saved!”

Far Cry 3 is just so insultingly blatant that I could not bare to taste its brand of swill any longer.

So I traded the game in. Seeing how Ubisoft recreated a variety of elements shared in Assassin’s Creed, and not all of them done well, I’ve actually gained less interest in Watch_Dogs as well. They themselves have stated they are only interested in open-world games that can be an on-going franchise.

How long can I continue to play the same game? How long will making the same game over and over last?

Well, we’ll see how I feel once I’ve finished Assassin’s Creed 3.