Zombietron and I had a chance to play a four player Far Cry 3 co-op mission with a couple random other guys on the show floor, and it was an absolute blast. You have a choice of a handful of different loadouts, these were preset for the demo, but will be fully customizable in the final game. You’ve got your standard fare assault rifles, shotguns, heavy machine guns, whatever. But there are also a set of special co-op skills you can choose between: battle-cries with different effects like damage boost, defense boost, and area of effect heals. These encourage the team to stick together and work as a group instead of everyone running off on their own. The co-op really forces you to stay together and work together; positioning becomes really important when heavy armored enemies show up, because someone needs to get around behind them. Far Cry 3 will rock a a six-hour co-op campaign completely separate from the single-player story.
The first section of the demo was pretty straight-forward: storm a compound with gun-wielding “bad guys” dug in all over the place, repair a train with a magic welder to get it out of a tunnel you need to pass through, and shoot everything everywhere. If you take too much damage and fall to the ground bleeding out, an ally can revive you Borderlands-style by walking over and picking you up—don’t think about it too much, just accept the mechanic and move on. The second section was a sniping competition to see which player could get the most sniper kills in a handful of minutes—bonus points for headshots. The third and final part was most interesting (and the one we got a look at during the pre-E3 press conference). the team has to work together to haul three heavy bombs to key points on a bridge then demolish it. The bomb-carrier can’t sprint, can’t crouch, and can’t shoot, so the team needs to work together to defend the carrier from waves of enemies swarming in from both sides of the bridge. Far Cry 3‘s co-op mode isn’t exactly breaking new ground, but it’s a damn fun co-op experience which is always good in my book, they’re too few these days.
As you’d expect from a Far Cry game, it looks gorgeous. The lighting and atmospherics look great, animations are just a tad wooden, but the textures are gritty and impressive. The enemy AI was pretty good, the enemies were good at tactically positioning themselves, and often popped out unexpectedly waving a machete at you—this was a beta build, so the AI is probably still being tinkered with. Far Cry 3 is set to hit shelves September 4th for PC, PS3, and X360.
Screenshot gallery for your viewing pleasure:
[Connor Cleary is an author, video game columnist and critic, and a freelance web-slash-graphic designer. He is a reviewer at GameShark and an occasional opinion and analysis columnist at Gamasutra. His freelance design business is Four Stair Multimedia and Design. You can follow Connor @The_Blue_Key, or at fb/TheBlueKey, or check out his writing archive on tumblr, The Blue Key.]