This weeks retro review is on yet another Ubisoft game, Far Cry 3. It was nominated for game of the year for 2012 and best first person shooter by Electronic Gaming monthly.

This game is close to being a masterpiece, but there are some flaws we’ll hit on later. For now though let us jump into the story. The protagonist of the game, Jason Brody, is a rich American tourist who came to the fictional Rook Islands with his two brothers and 3 friends. After the opening cinematic ends you find yourself in a cage getting interrogated by one of my favorite video game villains of all time, Vaas Montenegro. You then escape and launch into the tutorial where it teaches you probably one of the most simply but best stealth mechanics in a game. You find one of your brothers who was locked up with you. In a daring escape you and your brother get split up and you get knocked out unconscious. After waking up you mingle with the locals then you get your first gun. This is where the real fun begins. Like most sandbox games this one also starts off right away with little to no restrictions. The one thing I’d advise for this game is that try your hardest to unlock all the radio towers or you’re in the dark a majority of the game, plus it gives you free weapons to buy in the shop, like the the powerful Recurve Bow.

Besides the campaign, There are tons of side missions. There’s hunting, assassination contracts, racing, poker, knife throwing, and that’s just scratching the surface. The one thing that makes the game shine though is the base liberation side missions. They allow you use any tactic that you want. If you want to stealth around, marking targets, and taking them out one by one, go right ahead. If you want to ram a truck through their base, slamming it into a building and murder everything that moves, well that is acceptable too.

    Throughout the story you meet Vaas time after time and he tells you his definition of insanity, “Do you know the definition of insanity, it’s doing the same thing over and over and over again expecting it to change…”  This game was an amazing experience and I totally recommend it. The real question is, have I told you the definition of insanity?