It’s now that I spot the Komodo dragon. Well, first I hear it hiss, then I spot it. After I riddle it with more bullets than I could have expected a giant reptile to endure, I bend down to skin the beast. And I guess that’s when I do my best thinking – in the idle moments of a game, waiting for an animation to finish – because it struck me how bored I was of skinning animals. Of all these AssCreed-like interactive chores. If I had stopped to take the time to do this in Far Cry 2, I would have been somehow punctured in the chest with a rebar from an enemy hiding in a shrub one hundred feet away. Remember that? Remember how you could never really feel comfortable in the indeterminate African countryside? Not even for ten seconds. Because here comes a jeep, a posse of war-hungry militiamen. Remember how isolated and anxious you felt when you saw the last plane leave the country at the very beginning of the game? How oppressive it was to be surrounded on all sides, not by a pristine azure ocean, but by an unconquerable desert?
Well, I didn’t feel like that when I played Far Cry 3 for the first time. I didn’t feel under threat. I felt safe. And that’s probably the word I would use to sum up my first impressions of the game itself. ‘Safe’. Ubisoft have made a gorgeous, characterful and finely-tuned game. But in doing so they appear to have stripped out what was fresh and vital about its predecessor. I’m just going to out and say it: the buddy system is gone. The most memorable moment of Far Cry 2 for me was running out of morphine and being forced to put my good pal out of his misery with a bullet in the head. (It didn’t matter that he didn’t have a personality as such. So long as he rescued me from death, time and time again, he was my friend). All that is gone, replaced by your bog-standard ‘load-you-back-at-the-start-of-this-challenge’ death. More’s the pity, because it looks like the writers are fully capable of creating some really vibrant characters this time around. And that’s not the only thing they took out. Scavenged guns no longer jam, injuries don’t seem to happen as often… Don’t get me wrong, the second game was far from perfect (and I’m glad to see that when you clear a roadblock in this instalment, the road stays cleared) but it’s like some higher-up execushite walked into the dev studio and ordered them to rip out all the interesting design ideas in time for the sequel because the alternative – to try and build on these mechanics – was too risky. “Play it safe,” says the execushite to the creative. “Play it safe.”
