It's been a long time coming but the next Far Cry has arrived, and unlike Far Cry 2, this was worth the wait.
It feels like a mix of the first 2 games, the Pacific Island setting of the first, with the open world mission format of the second, and it works well to create a solid gameind experience.
The story is good, you and your friends get kidnapped by pirates / drug dealers after arriving on a remote Pacific island, you escape, and have to then rescue your friends with the help of some local rebels, aiming to take the fight to them.
Their are a few twists, but you know where its going and it keeps you interested.
The gameplay is great. The Island is well imagined, dotted with villages and compounds, high mountains, rivers, roads and populated by armed pirates or friendly locals. There are a good viriaty of vehicals to get around on, cars, jeeps, trucks, quads, jet skis and boats, and as you liberate villages and compounts you unlock "fast travel" to those areas.
They have also added a full ecosystem of wild animals, most of which you can hunt, and you'll find you have hunt to to fashon larger rucksacks etc to carry more guns, ammo, money etc, which works quite well.
There are a lot of side missions to the Main story which you can do at any time, such as assasinations, animal hunts, shooting challenges, and even suprisingly satisfying poker games!
The weapons are great, you unlock new ones as you go along, and can pick them up off fallen enimies. They feel soild and satisfying to fire and you can coustomise them with attatchments and paint jobs.
Attacking compounds is great fun. Usually 8 or 10 enemy, you can charge in guns blazing, but if one gets to an alarm several jeeps of reinforcments arrive, so firefights can get intense. You can always go for stelth, scilencers can be fitted to most of you wepons and your default is a knife which performs a kill move if you manage to creep up on an enemy.
I have liberated many bases from range with my trusty supressed 50 cal sniper rifle, knocking the unsuspecting pirates off one by one. There is often a caged tiger or bear somewhere in the compound, so for more chuckles you can shoot the cage, and watch as the goons run around in panic.
No real proplems of faults come to mind, there are hand glides at various high points which are cool, and the vehicals are great, but a helecopter some where would have been fun (I still havn't quite completed it so theres still a chance!)
The enemy A.I is competent, your allies could be more helpful though, they have a slightly annoying habit of turning up after a firefight you've just won and making commets like "i'm the man", which after a while started to grate on me and caused a couple of "friendly fire" incidents!
The characters are for the most really good, although one character did start to annoy me, so my eventual dispatch of him was well overdue.
Overall, 4.8 out of 5, a Great game, certainly for me the best multi mission shooter, I prefer it to the linear Black Ops II, and better than the similar, very good (if buggy) Dead Island,
Well worth buying.