Impressions:
- Combat feels good. The shotgun feels less like a bad video game shotgun and more like an actual shotgun. Well, about... 40% of an actual shotgun. But it has a respectable range.
- Graphically it looks pretty good. A mix of Just Cause 2 and Crysis in terms of colour and saturation.
- You know how everyone hated the respawning enemies in Far Cry 2? It's exponentially worse in this game. Holy shit. While you can now take over outposts and stop enemies respawning there, the game has compensated by making infinite respawning roaming jeeps. It's insane. It's terrible. At least when assaulting areas in FC2 you got to be smart about it and have a little fun by taking advantage of terrain and buildings. Now, every 1-2 minutes, I'm attacked by a jeep patrol on the road. And by the time I kill them, assuming I'm going for stealth kills or want to loot their bodies or do some hunting / gathering, by the time that happens, more jeeps have appeared. I had reached a beach crossing as I was going to an objective, and two jeeps passed by as I was hiding in the bushes. I sneak past after they've gone, and then I get hit by some roaming foot patrols. I kill those guys, start walking, then a jeep shows up. I kill those two dudes, start moving, another jeep shows up. I kill those two dudes. I start moving, notice some guys in the distance, and see I'm close to a jeep that has a gun on the back. I jump on the gun, shoot down the two foot guys, and holy shit two more jeeps show up. I wasn't even near a plot area or anything, just on my way to it. I kill those two jeeps, and just fucking sprint. Along the way I notice some guys who had been taken hostage. I kill their captors, and start running towards them. Midway through, I look behind me to make sure there's no more enemies.
- Everything disappears. All bodies and jeeps had disappeared. I was only about 400 metres away. The only thing that remained was the one jeep I got in to shoot. I turn back to the hostages I rescue, and they'd disappeared too. I can't tell if this is a bug or if the game is seriously in need of that much memory. (About 200 metres later I run into two more parked jeeps and a few more foot soldiers.
- There is no quicksave.
- The UI is obnoxious. ESC is both the main menu and the 'get information about the newest alert / tutorial' button. And most alerts seem to be nested four levels deep into a menu. So if I want to press ESC to pause the game I get put into this really deep menu instead of at the expected options / save game / etc ingame menu.
- The inventory management is a pain. There's an assload of junk loot, which gets put in the same area as your crafting loot. In order to craft more slots, you need to kill very specific animals (you need a pig for a wallet, a goat for something else, a weird black animal I forgot the name of for a larger loot pouch), which isn't enitrely painful except for the endless relentless jeep attacks. The problem I had early on was that I had too many items in my loot bag. So I go to sell them, but I can't get rid of them because I have too much money to fit in my wallet (which can carry $2,000 worth of banknotes and coins). So I have to manually delete individual junk items, which is super tedious due to the poor UI design. Then go off and hunt the respected specific animals, craft the thing I need... I dunno. It's an issue that probably won't come up too many times but all the same I found the process ridiculous.
- Lots of loot markets on the minimap that don't have any loot there to collect. Either the loot is hidden (perhaps I need a shovel or something?) or the loot markers are fucked.
- I've encountered a few invisible enemies driving vehicles. Don't worry, they can still be killed. They still try to run you over, too.
- The music is kind of droll and garish. But whatever, you can turn that off if you like atmosphere.
- Ironically Far Cry 3 has better climbing puzzles than Assassin's Creed 3. I genuinely enjoyed climbing to the top of the two towers I've gone to, even if they are incredibly simple tasks.
- There are a lot of New Zealand accents in this game. For what it's worth they sound genuine. I have no idea where the game is set so maybe it makes sense that they're mixed in with a bunch of other accents.
- I like that you can get a decent inventory very early on if you do a lot of hunting. Makes the game feel a lot more open.
- I like that you get to select your FOV, and I like that it goes up to 110 where most games cap it at 70. It's kind of weird that the number is a two decimal float, though, and you can't manually set it to a specific number. So at the moment I can set my FOV to 89.65 or 90.2.
- I enjoy a FPS where my character speaks.
So, in all, my immediate impression is that I'm a bit baffled by the high review scores. First impressions are that this game is pretty fucking janky, but not in the ways I usually like. I was a big fan of Far Cry 2, but I'm not really feeling it so far.
That being said, the combat is genuinely enjoyable and I'm interested in where the story goes. Plus it feels like as a player I have a respectable amount of agency to wander around and do what I want.
Except for one early on mission that I failed because instead of fast travelling back to the quest giver, I decided to drive there. And halfway to the guy it just failed me without warning for being 'too far from the quest objective' or some shit, despite driving in a straight line to the guy. That wasn't cool.
Would love to hear some other impressions, though. Hopefully I've just had a bad experience and the game is actually as good as people are expecting.
EDIT: For transparency's sake, I am a bit over two hours into the game. So don't take this as like, comprehensive opinions. Just initial.