Far Cry 3... the reckoning (part 2)

More thoughts from within the game as I'm playing it:

- Movement speed is a bit ridiculous. I'm pretty sure (though I'll have to test it) that you sprint faster than Usain Bolt! Especially when you're sliding up hills and whatnot. This also applies to jump height as well.

- The levelling system appears to be quite badly broken. I level up really quickly but have nothing to spend the points on. I'm mainly doing the main missions but basically everything is locked. Sure, I guess I can get around to doing a load of side missions but maybe they should have slowed this aspect of advancement down a little as you are basically being reprimanded for not playing their open world game exactly how they want you to. Add to this the fact that clearing bases doesn't count as a mission and I'm feeling pretty limited on advancement in this game.

- Weapons don't appear to degrade. This is one of the reasons why the initial weapons are so powerful: there's no advantage to having to buy or collect new weapons as they stay good. Especially since all the mercs carry the same handgun, assault rifle and shotgun... it makes economic as well as tactical sense to use those so that you never worry about ammunition.

Of course, I haven't yet worked out whether each ammo type will work across all weapons in that type. Maybe that's a thing. They don't tell you about it though and I didn't bother reading the PDF manual... I mean, is that a thing? Do people read PDF manuals?

Actually, I think I worked out in this latest playthrough that ammo is ammo and applies to the class of weapon rather than the specific weapon. Still, for someone who has at least a passing knowledge of firearms and ammunition, that's not intuitive because in real life these weapons do not generally use compatible ammo types.

- The game engine feels really solid and well put-together. Want to change graphical settings while in-game, along with whether it's windowed or whatnot? No problem at all. Also, Alt-Tabbing is no problem either. I can't count the number of games where these simple things are just not stable or present. ALSO, the game loads pretty quickly.

[Edit]

Last one for tonight:

- The depth of field effect is really badly used in this game. I shouldn't look out over the horizon and see everything coated in vaseline whilst the things nearby are so crispy clear that I can see the lack of aliasing on the edges (or whatever it is!). I get what they're trying to accomplish but, at some point, you have to realise that when the player is focusing on the view of the island, they want to see it in all its pretty glory, not as a blurry landscape, absent of any detail.