So I finished the game yesterday and here's a short review.
I've brought up these concerns about the game in this thread before, but let me just echo how much of a let down the main missions of the game are. The story itself is fine, above average even, but the way they handle the gameplay aspect of it is just horrible.
When not playing the main missions you have a lot more freedom, you have this nice island to explore with dangerous wildlife and somewhat less dangerous enemies. It's a pretty good sandbox. And then you start one of the 38 main missions and all kinds of restrictions are placed on you.
You get a zone that you are not allowed to leave, or the mission fails. You have big yellow checkpoints at every turn telling you where you need to go and you can't skip them. Some missions even restrict you to a completely linear path inside caves.
For example during some missions you can't leave an area before you've killed all the enemies. If you try, the mission fails and restarts at the last checkpoint. Problem is, there is no reason given why you should kill them. You are perfectly capable of avoiding them or just running and hiding. It makes no sense.
Also, every "boss fight" is just 1 vs 1 knife fight with quicktime events. Yup, I'm totally serious. How ****ing hard would it have been to just give them strong armor and powerful weapons, hide them in a bunker surrounded by lots of heavy soldiers and flame thrower guys?
Aside from the main mission the game is more enjoyable due to the freedom you have, but it still gets repetitive. For example, liberating outposts is fun at first, but after you've done it a couple of times, it becomes a chore. It's still a lot more fun than the main mission, but due to the rather poor enemy AI, it's not challenging and thus gets boring.
Talking about AI, I remember in FC2 when you were attacking an enemy compound from afar with a sniper, they would get in a car and drive to where they last saw you. That only happened to me once or twice in FC3. What they do when you snipe them from afar is yell "sniper!" and hide. If you are close enough a few of them will try to come towards you, but all you have to do is change your position a little and hide in some bushes. They will soon turn around and start slowly walking back towards their original patrol route or location.
Another problem is that once you've liberated a compound no more enemies will spawn in quite a large area around it. If you liberate all the compounds then outside of missions you will never run into enemies anymore. I feel this could have easily been solved by having enemies attack and try to take back the compounds you have liberated. You would get a call telling you that a compound is under attack and would have an option to go and help defend. Of course this should be rare enough to not become tedious.
6/10 (remember, I'm using a 1-10 scale, not the industry standard 7-10).
