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This is a magnificent game. Completely new gameplay, great art and impressively polished. It gets properly difficult, as well. I am pretty much in awe of how they instituted a new genre.

It might be me, since I've not seen a game I'd call great in this genre for quite some time. T2 in my opinion fails in the same way the first one did. It's way too easy for the most part and it gets unbearably dull after five or so hours. I didn't finish it, I just decided to get off the treadmill after falling asleep a few times. Also, I've found performance lacking (even in single player), which is hard to pardon given the visuals.

Would have rated this as 6 a year ago for incosistent difficulty and need to backtrack, but the developers really polished it since then. Now, in 2013., it's a wonderful game. Great visual style, brilliant soundtrack, plays really quickly, no fussing to get to the point. Also, sandbox mode editor is great DLC.

Simply the finest platformer I've had the pleasure of playing. The engine is remarkable, all the assets (art, music, animation) are remarkably well-made, cute and clean and consistent. The scoring and difficulty are perfect and in local co-op it really shines. With some gamepads, it's a beautiful and fun kid-friendly game. One of the favorite games I have on Steam.

Excellent. No gimmicks, fluid controls, great gameplay, excellent design, well-managed difficulty (that goes into hardcore difficulty and still cuts the novice some slack) and you'll want to lick the graphics off the screen and stuff your ears full of soundtrack.

The people praising this game are right, there is "plenty of **** to do" here. If only that wasn't so literal. It's just as shallow a pretty sandbox as Far Cry 2 was. Good shooting mechanics, nice graphics. But while 2 was a decent shooter with unparalleled immersion-enhancing lack of HUD, this one at its hardest is Baby's First Shooter that adds all the boring **** that's wrong with games nowadays. There's several types of missions. Story missions are rather scripted, but contain some of the best and most elaborate fights against numerous enemies. Hunting is fun for about 10% of how long you're expected to do it. Tower climbing was sold as puzzles, but it's just climbing. No two towers are the same, that's true, but so far (11 hours in, 60% of map cleared) no thinking was required. Missions where you have to kill a specific guy with a knife tend to be rather good, but pose no real challenge. Driving missions are short and tend to be very easy. Missions in which you help the local populace are shallow fetch quests -- go a hundred meters to the east and kill three dogs, please, hero who liberated 75% of our island and killed hundreds of our enemies. Driving feels better than in 2, but racing and supply drop missions are way too easy, failed them just once or twice. Collecting plants is a chore, and it's not even necessary (seriously, you have a skill that heals four bars with no medicine necessary, just adjust the wrist and off you go). The best part of the game is emergent gameplay, the weird interactions between the wildlife, enemies and friendlies, when you're on foot, setting traps to patrols and attacking strongholds. Also flying to a new location and exploring. Once you liberate a new place, the interesting part at that place is pretty much done. The HUD, what's to say? Creeping to stab a guy in the neck, "HEY GO TALK TO BUCK" reminder dances in the corner. Real immersive, good job failing basic game design. I'd certainly forget about the main mission if it wasn't for your helpful and **** reminders obscuring my vision. So thanks for that, Ubisoft Montreal. It's too easy, like it was balanced and playtested only for playing with the gamepad. Hardest difficulty, I never use medicine, never buy armor and can take two or three outposts without refilling on bullets. There's never any real pressure, I die only if I'm messing around. The 3D marker + wallhack is ridiculous. The second Far Cry was, in my opinion, great. I viewed it as Space Invaders, jump in and have some arcadey fun -- it was repetitive and shallow, but SO trim, only shooting and no fat anywhere. If FC3 was the second and FC2 was the third the critics would be all like "they distilled it to what matters" and "finally the ancillary RPG junk is gone" and "the UI is a stroke of genius, removing the minimap makes things so tense". This game is like a kitchy dumb blockbuster consoly guilty pleasure. I couldn't put it down for about ten hours, but there was so much pointless grinding and the fights have gotten SO EASY, I could have just gone anywhere guns blazing, bombs exploding, bear cavalry clearing the way. I needed to set myself restrictions to have fun - weapon spotting and reticle off, never once using the camera, no fancy arrows, just molotovs and grenades, no armor. Still too easy, shouldn't have crafted so much ammunition pouches. Perhaps autoleveling enemies' weapons in FC2 was a good idea and it certainly had a better UI with the physical map and no text on screen. It's a far cry from the refined gameplay we were promised and all the junk they squeezed in there is grating. I also made a mistake of choosing skills that sounded useful, so I could move faster crouched, bring up iron sights faster, heal four bars without having any resource (!), reload while sprinting. Death is completely optional in this game. I think I'm going to play Stalker: CoP next, I can appreciate its dangers much more after the sterile kiddie playground of Far Cry 3. The glowing reviews for this game seal my opinion that professional reviewers can't tell **** from shinola. I can't see anyone with a history of shooters playing FC3 for more than five hours and giving it such a high score. The tension and difficulty are simply gone. Didn't mention the story. It's crap, but I expected crap and that's perfectly fine. It took a HUGE step back from the second one in this department as well - the Jackal tapes were masterpieces of videogame writing: ****/wiki/Jackal_Tapes , while Vaas and the gang are plastic figurines of caricatures of tropes. It's a stupid blockbuster that didn't manage to kill everything that was good about FC2, but comes damn near. The honeymoon lasts for some ten hours if you press on and disregard the stupid minigames and shallow sidequests, then it's ten more hours of boring grinding if you don't abandon it.

Great game. It's a "point A to point B" platformer, but with significant gameplay innovations - four characters with different capabilities, two "layers" of world that the player can switch between. Some levels require speedruns, others allow for exploration. Great pacing, fluid controls, excellent music, leaderboards. Nicely tuned difficulty progression, good amount of content. Some Meatboy moments with replaying a certain part, but there are sufficient checkpoints that it's not a problem. It has a certain "je ne sais quoi" in presentation that gives it away as not being a typical safe AAA industry fare -- it allows the player to figure some things on her own, when it comes to both the story and gameplay mechanics. Refreshing quality in this genre.