Playing A Game Far Cry 3 PC

This one was a bit of a surprise for me. While Watch Dogs excelled in its main missions and fell flat in its optional extras, Far Cry 3 feels like the reverse -- the only fun I really had was ignoring what the game told me to do.

At its best, FC3 revels in some of the same mechanical strengths as its standalone expansion, Blood Dragon. Capping fools in the dome is great fun, as is sprinting up to their throats with a knife. And in theory, crawling the map for upgrades and emergent adventure is a blast. In practice, unfortunately, the open world just isn't very inviting -- the frequency of random enemies and killer animals, and the infrequency of automatic saves, makes it all too easy to lose significant progress. A hopeless death that undid 20 minutes of my upgrades left me pretty sour.

Some of the controls are terrible, particularly driving, which is borderline unplayable. The menus were clearly an afterthought on PC, with a number of functions being unintuitively bound to double-clicking (a clear holdover from a highlight-then-select controller-oriented interface). And there are some distressing graphical problems, especially considering my rig's relative horsepower -- significant slowdown due to excessive foliage, and noticeable pop-in on the horizon. In short, it's a PC treatment that makes AC4 and Watch Dogs look well-done in comparison.

But for me, the nail in Far Cry 3's coffin is that the story isn't interesting at all. Not just dumb - the plot's Poe-ish attempt at satire is fairly well documented - but I have no sense of curiosity about it. What I've done so far isn't memorable, and I have no interest in seeing what happens next. Blood Dragon's over-the-top narrative was hilarious enough to drive the game along; here, that motivation is completely lacking.

I've got way too many games in my backlog to be spending my time giving Far Cry more chances to impress me.

Progress: Gave up in Chapter 2

Rating: Meh