Why Far Cry 3 Is Not Game of the Year

The game auto-saves at certain critical points in the game’s story, and you never really know when the last save was.  There also is no “load” feature, so the only way to go back to your save is to kill yourself (by letting pirates or various wildlife have their way with you).

I was going for an ability which is unlocked if you liberate two outposts without being detected, so I wanted to restart if anyone saw me.  Unfortunately once I was seen I had to let the band of knife-wielding  pirates carve me up, run into a brush fire, or have tigers gnaw on my virtual skull until I died.

When you do go into the menu and manually save, then your respawn point is not where you were standing at the point of save, but the nearest “saveable” location.

In the game you have to skin animals in order to fashion bags for more item and ammunition slots, which requires a decent amount of hunting.  It happened on several occasions that I skinned the required animal, crafted the bag, and was then mauled to death.  I had to re-do the difficult hunt to create the bag again; and this happened way too frequently.

Since the save system is linear, you really can’t explore multiple options when carrying out an assault.  Do you open a caged tiger and let the animal run amok in the camp, or do you mark everyone for death and snipe them, or do you sneak in, disable the alarm, and silently knife everyone in the neck?  You don’t really get to explore every option because of the limited save system.