Although Far Cry 3 can be appealing in many ways to a variety of players, it's essentially the same tired formula.
Far Cry 3 came off as another fps game with a lot of swearing and guns. The game is started off with an "intense" moment of being held prisoner by a "insane" man that apparently can only swear and spout nonsense that only the most immature of audiences could find satisfying. The proposed villain came off as "trying to hard to be a bad guy," while everything else in the beginning played out as exactly one would anticipate.
Then the actual game-play starts after this brief introduction. The spoon-fed tutorial is insulting to the average gamer. Frankly, everything I was being "taught" at the beginning were things I had been taught in other games from years and years ago. It was obviously designed to appeal to the masses, which is part of the problem with the video-game industry these days; however, I digress.
After successfully escaping the "madman," the shooting can begin. It's literally the same old story, same old song & dance at this point. Get a gun, aim it, pull the trigger on the controller, shoot, kill, so on and so forth. There's "loot" to be found like "used needles" and "meth pipe(s)." For some reason, the first vendor in the game feels that these items are worth cash. When they are sold the cash is stored in a wallet that, for no good reason, has a maximum capacity, and a rather low capacity at that. The game more or less forces the player to "hunt" for materials to "craft" a bigger wallet, despite the fact that a lot of enemies drop wallets themselves (that can't be used by the player). Also, it just seems like the character should be able to "line his pockets with gold," as it were. Most of these little things come off as just busy-work. There is another publisher that comes to mind when I think of needless busy-work to "entertain" its gamers (hint: Starts with "blizz," and ends with "ard," and has the word "entertainment" attached at the end). There was plenty of room to make these simple tasks something interesting. At least on a medium level.
I gave co-op a decent play. While I did have more enjoyment playing with a friend, ultimately the co-op felt tacked-on and full of tired mechanics as well as glitches.
That's really all I have to say about Far Cry 3. It's typical and doesn't do anything special at all whatsoever. It's a hyped, facade of a good game.
Side tangent: Games like this are exactly why video-games these days are becoming monotonous. There is absolutely nothing special about games like this to separate them from "everything else" out there because "everything else" out there is only trying to copy the "big-dog" of the industry. The video-games people buy, that do very well financially on a mass scale, primarily aren't video-games anymore. I can respect games like Super Meat-Boy because it's actually a video-game. It's challenging and fun. It may not be for everyone under the sun, but the developers weren't thinking about everyone when they made it. I can respect games like Dark Souls or Demon's Souls because they are literally keeping that true video-game experience at heart. All of these examples are games that are not only unique, but they are incredibly enjoyable. Every game out there shouldn't appeal to the masses. A video-game should be treated as a work of art. Unique in its own expression yet entertaining in its own way to its audience. Much of my love goes out to the indie-developers making truly unique video-games and developers like FromSoftware keeping the essence of what made video-games so great back in the day. We don't need these mindless shooters or hack'n'slashers anymore. Where's all the fun gone?