WARNING: SPOILERS FOR FAR CRY 3 AHEAD

I finished up Far Cry 3 (Steam version) last night. It was a game I had been enjoying. I spent a ton of time ignoring the main quest line just so I could spend my game time exploring, scaling radio towers, liberating villages, and hunting. Like I said, I had been enjoying up it up until mission 25, which is entitled Payback.

The bad guy on the cover of the game is named Vaas. He is the one who is yelling and threatening you at the beginning of the game. He kills your older brother in front of you and then makes you run for your life as entertainment. He has kidnapped your younger brother and other friends to be sold into slavery. He was even the main antagonist in the live action Far Cry 3 experience. He was the focus of all the marketing, and up until mission 25, he was the only guy you wanted to kill. And you do kill him in mission 25; you get your payback. While this should be satisfying, it really isn’t, for a few reasons:

1. They do the Vaas boss fight in a dreamlike state where the “fight” is nothing but a few QTEs (Quick Time Events).

This robs me of any satisfaction of actually fighting the bad guy and overcoming him with skill. I just press the corresponding button when it shows on the screen. Lame.

This dreamlike state? I had no idea if it was actually happening in the game world or not. When the game ended the dreamlike sequence and Vaas was laying there dead, I wasn’t happy or satisfied. Instead I got pissed and said “Are you fucking serious! Come on!” I felt robbed.

2. With the exception of a few lines of what seems to be crammed in dialogue, there really isn’t mention of another bad guy. That guy exists, his name is Hoyt, but it’s like he was shoehorned in when the realized they Vaas storyline wasn’t going to take as much play time as they had wanted.

So while you do kill Vaas in mission 25, but there are 39 missions in the game. And I didn’t give a single fuck about any of them from 26-39.

I felt cheated by the game. I still wanted to finish it though, so I stopped exploring, stopped hunting, stopped liberating villages, and just plowed through the final missions to get it over with.

And wouldn’t you know it, the final showdown with Hoyt was another dreamlike state full of QTEs. Fucking lame. I didn’t care about it at all, which says quite a bit about the game’s story failures when I couldn’t give a shit about killing a guy who makes his living selling drugs and kidnapping people to sell into slavery.

Far Cry 4 is out and a lot of the reviews are saying it’s basically an improved looking version of Far Cry 3. For the first 25-ish hours of Far Cry 3 I was very interested in checking out Part 4, but the last few hours of part 3 have turned me off on it completely. I’ll give it a year or so and take another look.