Welp gave it my all, honestly. I think 12+ hours is more than enough to judge this game. I don't really know how to approach any kind criticism towards this game but I'll write my disjointed thoughts anyway.... After a dozen hours of game time I feel like I had barely done anything. That could be due to me spending the first 2-3 hours of the game just trying to get it to run and look like a normal game but even then 8 hours of game time rivals the entire length of your average AAA-game, during that time entire games have started and ended yet I feel like I didn't do a single thing in this game.
Technical issues and performance woes aside this has got to be one of the most shallow games I've played all year. It's as if they spruced up the visuals of an MMORPG, tossed you into the starting zone with a first person camera, a gun and let you loose.
I got bored with the skinning and picking flowers one hour in. The inventory system was extremely restrictive and annoying, yes of course 5 leaves take more place than 4 buffalo hides in your little rucksack. Having belts, pouches and quivers for every single type of weapon, throwables, syringes, etc is extremely redundant.
There is no incentive of doing anything in the world yet it's filled to the brim with a plethora of monotonous, boring and ultimately useless actions :
- Finding relics, memory cards and letters. Why? Other than XP, why bother? It's not even close to interesting. The definition of busy work. Yeah you'll unlock one weapon or so for every 50 things you accomplish...gee.
- Speaking of XP oh boy is it a shame that a lot of interesting skills and traits are arbitrarily locked away for the sake of padding. Imagine in Crysis 1 if you didn't unlock your suitpowers until X,Y and Z hours respectively into the game. Also, following the norm for the game, a bunch of the skills are redundant and boring.
- "Liberating Camps", "Thank you Jason for liberating these roosters, pigs and rusty containers from those 2-3 evil redshirtwearing dudes, your reward is the ability to teleport here now go liberate 150 other camps" - No reason to do this, the entirety of this concept could be cut just in the favor of a regular Fallout-esque fast travel system and nothing of importance would be lost.
- Turning off Radio Tower. Did someone think this would be fun? Especially after 5 times just to realize you still have another 35 towers to go? Turning one off "reveals" three random points of interest - which ironically are so uninteresting that I thought I surely was missing something but no sometimes it's just a moldy shack, containing a chest with a meth pipe.
- Challenges/Trials, in a game that revolves to 99% of killing people - here are some challenges where you kill people but this time with a time constraint!! Other games do this infinitely better, dare to expand and mix it up a bit ( maybe there are other kinds of challenges but the handful I tried were all kill-based ).
- Medpack delivery, just add this in the pile of things that wouldn't even be interesting in a mini-game collection for the wii.
I know it's a tropical island, but other than palm trees and the occasional cave I don't think I saw anything else the game is visually repetitive, hell Just Cause 2 had snowy mountains, flower filled valleys and everything in between.
I don't remember any music other than some actual dubstep kicking in during one of the missions, I couldn't believe my ears at how out of place and awful it was and I LIKE that genre, my heart goes out to those who don't. Outside of some of the weapon sounds this game has very flat audio, I can barely hear the NPCS, there's virtually no ambient sounds and that could've helped the atmosphere immensely ( think Dark Root garden in Dark Souls ).
The story started out very interesting but 1 mission into the campaign I quickly realized it was heading towards muddy and convoluted nonsense. I couldn't care less for any of the protagonist's friends they could all die for all I care, who are they? Why should I care? Oh, there's a datafile I should read? Learn how to tell a story instead, but then again it's par for the course for a game that's almost mmo-like in nature. I will however say that Vas as a character and voice actor is phenomenal, and sticks out as a reminder of how awful everyone else is.
For a game that's apparently so proud of being a vast open world the world itself is surprisingly static. The entire game is the perfect example of where quantity over quality goes wrong, so much useless stuff that doesn't even come close to fun gameplay wise. Just because you can have a 10 000 square mile island doesn't mean you should especially considering there's nothing to be gained from it when it's as barren as this island is.
Now I probably comes across as if this is the worst game I've played. Definitely not, it is however the epitome of average, it's like any other shooter, it does nothing to stand out yet it has been hailed as some kind of groundbreaking openworld game that engulfs the player.
I'm extremely disappointed. I tried over and over again to let the game show me why it's one of the highest reviewed games of 2012 but one or two hours would pass and I would grow sleepy out of boredom.
edit : Uplay is awful, the ui is horrendous, the tutorials are mind numbing etc I'm beating a dead horse by now.
