Shoot to kill.
Travel.
Shoot to kill.
Travel.
Shoot to kill.
Repeat for 19 more hours.

I’ve been playing games for about 19 years. I’ve played a lot of games that are very similar to Far Cry 3. I was hoping that the story and characters would be intriguing enough that it would encourage me to keep playing. It wasn’t.

Far Cry 3 is an open wold first-person shooter made by Ubisoft. After a vacation goes horribly wrong, you’re friends get kidnapped and you, as Jason Brody, have to go rescue them. Brody is not an interesting character. The game begins with him not having ever shot anyone in his life. Given the amount of people you get to kill over time, Brody becomes a maniac and starts to LOVE killing. In a lot of ways, Brody’s character is a commentary on video games’ nature of giving you a gun to interact with the world. The general population enjoy playing games that give them the opportunity to shoot things. That’s what Brody stands for. He does exactly that, and he loves it. The more you play the game, the crazier he becomes, and the less relatable he gets to his friends.

Brody’s transformation is Far Cry 3’s only intriguing aspect.

Far Cry 3 doesn’t do anything new. It’s a sandbox shooter with a gigantic world that is extremely uninteresting to explore. The easiest way to explain what it is would be to say that it’s an Ubisoft sandbox shooter game. The funny thing about saying that a game feels like an Ubisoft game is that, at least to me, it carries more of a negative connotation than a positive one.

One of the reasons why I had such a disappointing experience was because of high-expectations. It’s not my fault though, I initially expected the game to be exactly what it was, but the game community seemed to praise it so much that I had to give it a go.

The game was exactly what I didn’t want it to be.

There are towers that unlock parts of the map (like every Ubisoft game). You get to kill enemies by shooting them or stealthily killing them. Each kill carries absolutely no weight. You feel like you’re shooting at bots. They don’t feel like their own characters. They’re just there for you to kill. They have no personalities, have repeated animations, wear the same clothes, and look and say the same things. When they don’t notice you, the A.I seems very fond of pissing in lakes. Yes, actually pissing in lakes and random corners of the environment. Seeing it happen once is funny, but seeing it happen over and over again takes you out of the experience.

“But isn’t every game like that?”

That’s my point. I’ve done all of this before. This game has nothing that separates it from all the other sandbox shooters that I’ve played. None of the characters are even relatable. Regardless of gameplay, if the story is captivating enough I will continue to play it. Spec Ops: The Line, Final Fantasy X, and Heavy rain, all games with uninteresting gameplay elements, yet all highly praised for their story and characters. That’s the thing about Brody, he’s purposefully made to be relatable in a sick way. He enjoys shooting virtual people, and Ubisoft’s target audience enjoy that too. That’s exactly why I can’t relate to Brody: I don’t enjoy shooters.

The older I get, the less time I have to play, and the more I beg the game industry to give me games with meaningful experiences. Indie games like Limbo, Journey, and The Unfinished Swan are games that take you on a “journey”. They’ve all provided me with meaningful experiences. I actually felt something.

I want more of that. Much more.

Follow me @Marwanalshafei where I spark rainbows within people’s subconscious and make the world go round n’ round.