After my disappointment with Far Cry 2, I hesitated to try Far Cry 3. My youngest son encouraged me and so I played it. It started out good an then a dreaded series of quick time events. I groaned. I struggled on. And then it clicked. I don't know when or why, but the game suddenly made sense and I started having heaps of fun.
I have three complaints: the cut scenes, senseless quick time events and taking bases got a little repetitive.
It was like two games in one. One was an open world game which varied from great to awesome. The other was a weird, quick time, railroaded, cut scene story that varied between dumb and stupid. I put up with it to further the story along, but got to where I dreaded having to continue the cut scene story.
The second thing that annoyed me were the quick time events that suddenly intruded in the game for no apparent reason. Two that come into mind are being attacked by alligators--come on, just let me kill them--and the point in a key battle where, after a thrilling series of encounters, you drop into full blow quick time mode.
My final issue was with taking bases. Despite much better-than-average enemy AI, I learned that you could often pretty much just kamikaze into a base and blast away. Despite trying to be clever, some based were just too easy. (I got to the point, where I'd deliberately let alarms go off to make it more challenging--besides hitting a jeep with a grenade launcher was just too much fun.)
Fortunately, the look and feel and open world play experience overwhelmed the negatives in this game. The fun level at time was as great as I've ever experienced in a game and I was truly disappointed to have it end.