Revisiting Far Cry 3 after nearly 13 years since Ubisoft recently updated steam achievements for the Far Cry series. I maintain this is the best Far Cry from a story perspective even though it’s the Far Cry that started Ubisoft on the path of recycled game mechanics involving skinning and climbing towers. If they had stopped here, Far Cry 4 would probably be a different game.

The story is the perfect analogy of the everyman hero, which is a trope often displayed in film and other video games. The best video game of all time uses this trope to no end- ‘random everyman ends up an action hero and saves the day’ with little or no skills to do so. Far Cry 3 explores this idea at what cost to the main playable character Jason as he slowly rescues each one of his friends who has been kidnapped by a pirate lord Vass, who is planning to sell them into slavery.

Playing this game in 2025, I encountered dozens of crash to desktop events, which I later resolved by using Large Address Aware software. It would have been nice if Ubisoft actually tested the game on modern hardware along with updating the achievements.

Graphics and gameplay wise this still holds up in 2025, though the animations are what can make a frustrating experience at times. There is an animation for everything! Vault over a log 2 feet off the ground: animation. Skin an animal: animation. Heal while in the middle of gunfire: Super long animation. There is so much stunlock in the game you will need to adjust your run and gun playstyle.

Far Cry 3 is probably where the Far Cry franchise peeked and though the franchise will probably live on, we will likely see some changes to the formula in the same way Ubisoft changed Assassin’s Creed. A change now is welcomed.

Far Cry Ranked

1. Far Cry 5
2. Far Cry 3
3. Blood Dragon
4. Far Cry Primal
5. Far Cry
6. Far Cry 2
7. Far Cry 4

Maybe because I didn't play Far Cry series back in old days, and played FC3 for the first time 13 years after it's release, I can't say unfortunately that I really enjoyed this game. Let's go through good points first:
1. Shooting and action gameplay. Indeed, I have enjoyed all firefights in the game, especially the main storyline quests where you either have to fire from a turret on a chopper or a car, or when you need to fight your way through whole groups of enemies. Guns have a good variety, possibility to upgrade them and they "feel" well when shooting.
2. Movement. It's fast and there are many ways to do it - on foot, by car (which are freely available, flooded on the map), with a wingsuit, with a glider or just fast-travel. The movement, sprinting, jumping animations really "feel" and immerse you enough into the game.
3. Unique design of enemy outposts. I enjoyed most of the game capturing enemy outposts, by analyzing enemy positions, looking through the layout of them, planning the stealth way to capture some of them, sometimes using the explosives or animal cages to distract enemies. This was really nice and simple tactical "minigame" for me each time I was capturing an enemy base.
4. Music during action scenes. It had good rhythm as well. Also liked the inclusion of "Ride of Valkyries" in some of the game quests.

Now the bad points:
1. Presence of custom launcher. I did not have many problems with it as others are writing in reviews, however forcing player to not only download another launcher, but also create an account with absurd password requirements that will be re-asked each game launch is stupid. We already have Steam, stop adding these.
2. Crashes. With all respect, you had 13 years to fix most of the crash issues with the game, yet it still crashed for me when I just wanted to take a screenshot or, more critically, during main missions, forcing me to replay them after restart.
3. Repetitiveness. Well, I understand it's a Ubisoft game but still. Whole map full of same-type side quests that I quickly became bored of. The main quests are surely more interesting, but half of other game content is the same copy-paste.
4. Weak character design, despite of relatively good acting and motion-capture. Nobody except probably Vaas, Doctor Earnhardt, Sam and Buck really interested or surprised me as characters. Liza portrayed as silly hysterical partner, not doing anything really useful; Hoyt is a typical movie-level cliche villain, being represented in game as "root of evil", while Vaas being far more insane than him. It's portrayed that Citra is in love with the main character, but I couldn't care less about her death in one of the endings. Jason came for combat support, not for love, being seduced or joining a cult. I had zero feelings for her as a character.
5. Plot holes. Either it's lazy story-writing, or it was just rushed, or maybe even there is some hidden deep meaning that I am not seeing - but explaining how did Jason survive certainly fatal encounters with key antagonists using "drugs" or "hallucinations" is not right. How did he single-handendly unarmed take out multiple Hoyt's guards during the poker game? Why everyone ties so easy to release knots when capturing Jason, so he can just break them with his arms? How did Vaas fail to kill Jason so many times while having good opportunities? I can write many more....
6. Terrible UI. The inventory is accessed through a pause (?) menu, same as the skill tree. UI buttons are disproportional in sizes, sometimes hard to click, the inventory management is a mess, the save system sometimes works sometimes not and other minor issues.
7. Unimmersive artificial game limits or unexplained events. Again, I understand it's a Ubisoft game and it was 2012, but forbidding me to use a boat to travel from North to South island just because I am "out of bounds" is lazy game design - make me run out of fuel then, or be shot by some patrol boats, etc. instead of just putting a hardstop timer. Also, after I capture an outpost, the Rakyat arrive almost immediately after the flag is risen. Where they were when I was fighting 5 pirates at once at this outpost seconds ago? Make them arrive a minute later at least, maybe?, it's not difficult anyway.
8. Other minor problems like same-repeating green-grass terrain, unbalanced economy and upgrades, enemy AI bugs, empty points-of-interest on the map, etc...

In summary, I am putting thumbs up as I would still say that good points outweigh the bad ones, also as an expression of respect, considering that it's a 13 year old game in a very famous franchise. However, even compared to games of the same time, there are plenty of outdated and archaic mechanics in the game, and many things that could've been done better, in a way that would allow calling FarCry3 a "masterpiece", which is not fair to do today.

This is still my favorite entry of the entire Far Cry series, but this PC port is atrocious. The game constantly crashes, and minor quirks/bugs from console seem to have been amplified into a larger issue in the PC version.