Far Cry 3 was published in 2012 by Ubisoft and was developed by in-house studio Ubisoft Montreal. It's a first person shooter action game and features the excellent Michael Mando as Vaas, one of the most highly revered video game villains of recent times. Far Cry 3 was my first Far Cry game, so it had a lot of new things going for me.

For one, I hadn't got tired of the "Ubisoft Towers" yet because I had only played a few games with those in. Only Horizon Zero Dawn comes to mind (which is brilliant by the way).
In fact, I rather enjoyed the towers here. It's quite calming jumping up a tower, with no combat or fake "Aaagh I'm gonna die!" set pieces. Getting to the top and ziplining or gliding down is always a joy as well. They also didn't get very repetitive, especially if you did them as you went along, rather than all at once.

The story is fairly basic but a cast of wonderfully colourful characters helps a lot: Vaas (who is not in the game near as much as he should be), Willis, Buck and Sam are all highlights.
Speaking of characters though, Jason Brody, who you play as, is fairly boring. As you progress in the story he has the standard moral dilemma of "What have I become!? I killed so many people!" This certainly isn't helped by the fairly bland voice acting performance. A lot of lines aren't delivered with enough impact or just feel off. It's shame because most other performances in this game are brilliant. In addition Jason seems to know how to handle a gun perfectly even though he states in the opening sequence that he's never even SHOT a gun before. This doesn't really add up.

So, onto the gameplay. The gameplay is a lot of fun. The gunplay is a nice balance between realism and arcade and the variety of weapons available keeps the combat fresh and exciting.
Taking outposts is by far the most enjoyable aspect of the game. Scouting out the place and marking enemies with your camera as you approach, finding an entrance and picking off the enemies is all good fun. This process is a lot of fun and as your gain more skills your stealth options increase to where you can stab one guy, immediately stab the guy standing next to him pick up his knife and throw it to a guy who just saw you all without alerting the rest of the outpost. Just awesome.

Speaking of skills, there are 3 skill categories: The Heron, Shark and Spider. The Heron deals with mobility and takedowns, the shark deals with your strength and the spider deals with stealth and looting. Some skills have requirements which helps mix up your gameplay, such as get 3 kills with one grenade or get kills with a mounted machine gun. Overall a lot of the skills are fairly boring, just improving health, or detectability, but some, like the takedowns are a lot of fun to get and experiment with.

Unfortunately while outposts and the main story are quite fun the other mission types are really repetitive. Every single Wanted Dead mission has you kill 1 or 2 specific dudes specifically with a knife and the Hunter quests have you kill animals with a specific weapon type.
Sometimes you'll be killing a rare animal which is very useful for crafting. Crafting is another important aspect of the game. When you kill animals you can loot them for their meat which is used for crafting more inventory space, more ammo space, more wallet space, etc etc.
I am not a fan of this. There is no skill involved and it's just an excuse to gate you off of having a large inventory straight from the beginning, and let me tell you inventory management is painful in the beginning. It's just so irritating not being able to fit everything in my inventory. So instead of collecting meat as I go along I have to go to specific places that have the animal I need. And since I don't know what each tier of crafting needs I don't know how much I'll need. It's just such a pain.

I 100%'d this game, and while a lot of it was fun, some of the collectibles are stupid. There are 120 relics that you can find, but none of them are in any particularly fun locations.
They are all standard fare collectibles, scattered about in caves or behind crates, pretty disappointing.

Finally a few little things:
1: Crocodiles and Snakes are the jumpscare kings, I hate them. Especially the damn crocodiles, they're so camouflaged that they caught me by surprise every time.
2: The fall damage in this game is ridiculous. You lose so much health from tiny falls, it's really annoying.
3: There were a lot of weird hallucination sections that I really wasn't expecting, but they gave some nice variety. In particular I liked the boss battle part way through.
4: Fire spreads, and that's cool