3 Reasons You Shouldn't Play the Best Video Game of the Year

4 A Huge, Beautiful, Dense, Forgettable World

Far Cry 3 is a very, very pretty game ... but it's no Skyrim.

Hear that? That's the sound of a thousand custom gaming keyboards being simultaneously hurled through a thousand 36" plasma monitors all across the world. Let me explain: graphically, Far Cry 3 is like little else you'll see this year. It's visually stunning -- jaw-dropping even. But that only matters to the people it matters to: high-end PC gaming nerds who not only understand what a v-sync is, but also have, on occasion, manually synced the v's when they found the official options lacking.

What most of us mean when we say a game is "pretty," or "looks amazing," is that it had a great designer. Whoever conceived of the things the graphics engine is modeling knew how to impress human beings, and it wasn't with sheer pixel count or dynamic sand integration: it was through setpieces. Skyrim wasn't graphically the best-looking game, but it had moments where the player would stumble onto a setpiece somewhere in the open world -- a mountain path framed so that the player came upon a dramatic overlook just as the aurora flared into life; a snowstorm that raged into existence just as a dragon launched from its cliffside perch; a beautiful sunrise just as your horse glitched into an eternal backflip and sent you clipping into the nether-dimension between mountains -- and it took your breath away. I'm not arguing that Skyrim was the prettiest game or anything (for my money, nothing's ever beaten Okami), it's just the latest, most prominent benchmark in design over raw computing power.

Far Cry 3 is beautiful -- it's a technical marvel -- but the islands it takes place on feel empty and flat. They're neither of those things, of course: It's a densely-packed world, and the terrain does vary, but you get the feeling it all could've been randomly generated by a computer. There's no sense of place, as there is in less-impressive, but better-designed, worlds. You don't intrinsically understand a road or where it leads just by walking down it. Amanaki Village, the game's "hometown," is no Whiterun, and Rook Islands are no Liberty City. The world of Far Cry 3 is not technically inferior in any way, but it lacks cohesion and grandeur. You don't build a mental map of it like you would your own neighborhood, and you don't stop to marvel at the crumbling jungle temples or stepped waterfalls. Oh, sure, you'll memorize where things are, but that's familiarity, not intimacy. In short: you can build many houses out of the bones of the sharks you've hit with your jet ski, but it will never feel like home.

3 A Story So Generic It Crosses Over Into Bad

Far Cry 3 does a few things remarkably well. The character designs are excellent. They all have a unique look, but it's accomplished through a series of subtle, simple details, rather than extravagant flair. Sure, fantasy and sci-fi games have more iconic or easily-distinguishable characters, but they get to slap giant swords and flaming panties on their characters. Far Cry 3 manages to stay well within the realm of realism, but it doesn't feel like every major NPC is just a palette swap of some enemy model. The solid designs are complemented by some pretty good voice work and motion capture. The speech patterns are distinct without being obnoxiously overwrought, and the characters all seem to move and carry themselves differently. When you first meet Dr. Earnhardt, the drugged-out island medic, you immediately notice the unfocused eyes and awkward, disconnected movements of a junkie. As opposed to say ... the unfocused eyes and awkward, disconnected movements of every single character in a Rockstar game.

Which is why it's a bit sad that they're all saddled with a story so bland and unoriginal that I'm pretty sure it was lifted from a Roland Emmerich film. It's so cliche that it actually crosses the line into offensive -- if only it could make you care enough to be offended by it. We start off with possibly the least-likable protagonist in the history of video games, Jason Brody, whose only previous work experience was as an Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt tester. His distinguishing personality traits are "having white guy tribal tattoos" and "possibly wearing shorts." I know personality seems like an odd thing to focus on in a first-person shooter, where the protagonists are traditionally mute and essentially invisible to the player. But silent characters like Link, Master Chief, Samus and Gordon Freeman get their personalities from the people reacting to them, and the way people react to Jason Brody is to humbly cup his messianic balls for having the graciousness to show up on their savage, backward island with all of his beautiful whiteness.

Far Cry 3 adheres to the story archetype of the Aryan Savior, as previously seen in movies like Avatar and The Last Samurai. Jason Brody shows up on a tribal island to party with his white friends, assuming, by virtue of his birth, that the whole world belongs to him, and here's the game's narrative twist: it totally does! Rich, entitled white people rule, bro! After they get into some richly-deserved trouble, the natives take Jason in, instantly adopt him as the king of their warrior clan, and bestow their mighty native secrets onto him so that he, in his whiteness, might save them from the failings of their own society. If it sounds familiar, that's because it's the exact same plot structure as the British Colonial Empire.

Now, to be fair, the lead writer for Far Cry 3 has gone on record as stating that this was intentional -- that they meant the game to be a kind of parody of these white-guy-saves-the-world stories. But at no point do you get that impression while playing. Yohalem, the lead writer, says the "clue" that you shouldn't be taking these cliches at face value is that the game starts with an Alice in Wonderland quote about going down a rabbit hole. Which is possibly the most cliched "you're about to go for one hell of a ride!" way to start any story this side of "we're not in Kansas anymore," or Sam Jackson's philosophically-complex "hold onto your butts." If you go into the game thinking it's a parody, you'll spend the entire runtime wondering when the turn is -- when it suddenly starts introducing new and novel observations that lay bare the framework of the hackneyed story you're accustomed to. But it never really happens. Repeating a cliche with an ironic tone of voice does not make it less cliche. That's what hipsters do, and it's why we feel justified in slapping the Kombucha Lattes out of their hands outside their pun-based coffee shops. Sometimes, irony is just a way of deferring responsibility for a subpar effort.

Without getting into spoilers, supposedly the "bad" ending is the big plot twist that ties it all together -- but I've seen that ending. It plays out like another one of those "shit happens" moments that we've been getting in every single shooting game since CoD4:MW first nuked its protagonist. That kind of plot twist was powerful the very first time, but it loses something with repetition, and it's not jarring enough in Far Cry 3 to retroactively subvert all of the blatant tropes and banal cliches that came before it. I really hate saying anything negative about somebody else's creative work (especially since, from the Penny Arcade article, it does seem like Yohalem and his team were trying to do something worthwhile), so I'll just leave it at this: it is highly possible that I just don't get it. The same story can mean the world to one person, and nothing at all to another.

That being said, it is not only my job to over-analyze media, it is my curse -- it's the thing that has driven countless potential mates and the occasional impatient dog out of my life; it's the reason I can't enjoy Back to the Future anymore, and the reason the nickel arcade won't let me anywhere near the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles machine (something about screaming Freudian schema into the faces of any child foolish enough to play as Donatello) -- but I did not get anything out of Far Cry 3, save for that white people are way better at being your race than you, other races.

2 The Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very-Bad User Interfaces

Ubisoft are both the developers and publishers of Far Cry 3.

If you have any experience with PC gaming, that's enough for you. You are out of this bitch. This whole thing should have been one sentence long: "Ubisoft made it." Then I could drop the metaphorical mic and leave the house reeling, and you could all go about your business. If you're a console gamer, this doesn't affect you at all, but I'm going to give everybody this warning anyway, on the off chance that there's somebody else in the world like me: an impulsive asshole that throws three wadded up $20s at my screen at the first hint that I might be able to ride a Cassowary. (Sad note: You can't. You can only stab them; stab them with tears in your eyes.)

Ubisoft makes this game, and they have fucked up the back-end like they always do. Their own brand of always-on DRM, Uplay, permeates Far Cry 3. Which means that, if you buy the game through a service that is, itself, essentially pure DRM -- like, oh, say, the largest digital game delivery system in existence -- you get to eat an entire layer-cake of frustration every time you boot up the game. Starting up Far Cry 3 through Steam is like throwing an Inception-themed orgy: Everybody's not only fucking you, but also each other, and themselves, locked forever in an eternal cycle of meta-boning.

And once you do get into the game, you have to deal with another wholly-botched user interface: the heads-up display in Far Cry 3 looks like your grandpa tried to open a porn site. Just pop-up after inexplicable pop-up, cluttering the screen so badly that you literally didn't see the tiger that just ate you, because the game thought it was more important that you saw how many plants you have left to collect while simultaneously reminding you about the crafting tutorial for the 50th time.

But all of those problems pale in comparison to the big one: Far Cry 3 is an open-world action RPG with a linear save system. Open-world games are about freedom and exploration. Role-playing games are about immersion. Both of those things are irrevocably broken by a checkpoint-only save system. Speaking generally, the inability to save on the fly does nothing to affect difficulty, unless the entire point of the game is the challenge of repetition, like in Mirror's Edge or Dark Souls. But if repetition isn't the point -- if the point is the aforementioned exploration or immersion -- then being thrown back to an arbitrary save-point every time you die, abandon a quest, or shut the game off only serves to discourage good ol'-fashioned fuckin' around. This, combined with your extremely limited save slots, creates an atmosphere that greatly discourages experimentation in a game where the single strongest point is the excellent freestyle murder system.

An example: you're in the middle of taking over a pirate fortress. You've got a man in your scopes, but don't think you can take them all on, once you pull that trigger. Suddenly, you notice movement in the bushes. A tiger! He doesn't see the pirates. Maybe you could snipe the tiger -- just graze him a little, piss him off -- and he would storm in and start wrecking some pirate booty. Wouldn't that be awesome? It would! But man, when was the last time you saw that tiny white "Save" icon flash up? Could've been a minute ago. Could've been two hours. There's no telling when your last checkpoint was. Better play it safe this time. So you end up ignoring the tiger to snipe and hide, snipe and hide, as usual. Hey, it works.

And somewhere, that tiger is sulking off into the jungle with a broken heart; somewhere, a monster truck just got a flat tire; somewhere in the world, Slash just forgot a guitar solo -- all because you took a little bit of awesome out of this world with your bullshit back-end, Ubisoft.

1 And One Very Good Reason You Should

It's a crazy amount of fun.

That's it. That's all the good I have to say about Far Cry 3. But isn't that why you buy games? If you can look past the shortcomings, and there are many, Far Cry 3 is a goddamn riot. Here, look at this sample gif of some game play:

Holy shit, that's like everything you wanted to do in a video game, isn't it? Ah, but it's probably bullshit. It's a Quicktime Event or something. They always turn out to be, don't they? It never feels as cool, while you're doing it, as it looks in the promos. We've all been burned by games promising that we can use our skills to go full Die-Hard on a motherfucker, only to find the reality is just "press A to Die-Hard for a minute."

But Far Cry 3 uses a great immersion trick, in that it makes you "earn" and "unlock" the ability to use petty skills that would be available from the start in any other combat game. The ability to "cook" grenades, for example -- to hold them for a second so they detonate earlier -- is one of the first skills you have to earn. The ability to slide a little bit is another one. The ability to kill from above, or below. It sounds like a pain in the ass, but in practice, it really works to slowly familiarize yourself with your chosen brand of awesomeness, so that you actually pull off stuff in-game that rivals that gif up there. They may all be actions you could accomplish in other games, but you were never slowly trained to put them all together in the coolest possible configuration, like you are here. When Far Cry 3 pulls that trick off, it makes you feel like you developed into the biggest badass in gaming, rather than starting out as one and failing hilariously to live up to the reputation.

So, yes, the intellectual part of me can be found just a few paragraphs up, bitching about racial sensitivity. But you know what? Fuck that guy. The crazy drunken murderer in me is way more fun and likable, and he's down here saying this one and simple truth: in Far Cry 3, you can hang-glide from a distant cliff-face out into the jungle, drop from 50 feet up in the air, and knife a bear in the face as you land on him.

I don't know about you, but to me, that's right up there with whiskey-and-a-python night.

Buy Robert's stunning, transcendental, orgasmic science fiction novel, Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity, right here. Or buy Robert's other (pretty OK) book, Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody: The Terrifyingly Real Ways the World Wants You Dead. Follow him on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook.