Late to the Party: Far Cry 3

I’ve been stumbling through Far Cry 3 for the past month or so after picking it up off the ground during a robbery masquerading as a Steam summer sale. First-person shooters have become less my thing recently, so I thought a game in which you don’t just run and gun might make for a comfortable change of pace.

I was incorrect.

Let me be clear: Far Cry 3 is not a bad game. The voice acting’s sprinkled with a liberal dash of meh, but the gunplay is entertaining and the experience system adds a reasonable amount of RPG number crunching to distract you from the fact that your main objective is force-feeding bullets to red-shirted men with strange accents. Good old family-friendly fun.

There are, however, two tiers of leveling. The first tier is that familiar sort of progress in which you do cool things and you get points for it, and then you spend those points to do even cooler things. Simple, elegant, and hard to beat.

The second tier, on the other hand, really wants to emphasize the fact that you’re on a tropical island trying to survive. You don’t have to manage hunger or thirst or any of that finicky crap, but you do have to hunt and skin animals if you want to carry more than one gun, a handful of loot, and $1000. It’s gross, and it’s also hella boring. Hunting in Far Cry 3 is the sort of activity you’d expect in an MMO like World of Warcraft. You go up to the friendly looking gnome and he tells you that, “Hey, guy, I need, like, five wolf pelts. I’d get them myself but I have to stand here and tell some other dope my sob story. Do this for me and get Generic Item of the Mundane.” Since nothing’s ever easy, you have to do it because for whatever stupid reason, you need that item.

Far Cry 3 falls into that very trap, but without the pseudo-social environment of World of Warcraft. You’re not playing Far Cry 3 with anybody—shut up, I know there’s a cooperative option—you’re doing this solo. Man versus the Wilderness. And somehow, it’s really boring. “Killing wild pigs to make a bigger wallet” was a design choice that an actual person came up with and said, “Players will love it.” Or maybe they just said, “Players will tolerate it.” Because it’s this same process that allows you to carry more than one gun.

I spent more time killing goats to make a bigger rucksack just to carry all the junk I pick up than I have fighting pirates which is supposed to be the meat and potatoes of this game. The amount of goats killed would flag my character as a Satanist. Lo and behold, I’ve had to upgrade it a second time within a half hour. And guess what? Now it’s nearly filled to the brim with old syringes, multicolored leaves, single playing cards, and other bits of useless trash that somehow take up an equal amount of volume in my rucksack made of dingoes.

All I ask is for an easy way. The major theme of the game’s “plot” is the walking the path of the warrior, so I get that the game is supposed to be an arduous climb. But why must the fun play second fiddle to the grind? Why can’t I just pay for a new backpack with $500 in blood-soaked cash from my handmade pig wallet? Real RPGs let me do that.