Most Overrated Game of 2012...
Goes to Far Cry 3.
Yes, Far Cry 3 was a good game. Fans of the game, please don't feel the need to leap to its defence and tell me why you thought it was better than everything else, and how revolutionary it was. I enjoyed Far Cry 3, which I why I completed it (finally) recently. However, as much as I enjoyed Far Cry 3, I couldn't help but feel much of the game's much touted strengths were actually weaknesses.
I'll begin with its map. It's massive, yes, and I happen to like the fact that its massive. But the problem is, it's a massive lot of mostly the same thing over and over. Much of what you traverse over looks very same same. There's not much variety in Far Cry 3. I actually felt like I was playing the first person mode of Just Cause 2's poorer cousin. It seemed like they set out to do something similar, but didn't nail it. For those familiar with Just Cause 2, it too has an expansive, massive map to explore- actually much bigger than that of Far Cry 3. The difference between the two of course, is that Just Cause 2's island of Panau is absolutely full of places to explore, things to find, variety to keep you interested, (not to mention all the easter eggs and shit to blow up). After about 4 hours on Far Cry 3's map I'd seen basically everything it had to offer. A jungle here, a temple there, a small town over there, a beach somewhere else. Thus it simply became tedious filler between missions. In the end, fast travel became my mode of travel of choice, because I just got sick of the lack of variety.
Another sore point is how the story is told. Yes, the story is actually quite good- but the constant monologues about sanity, blurred lines of morality and warrior hero crap eventually bored me to tears. By about half way through I was sick to death of the speeches. I was just hoping for variety, and more often than not I didn't find it. Each character lead me on a same same quest with a little explained objective, and I didn't feel really feel I was being compelled to do a lot of the missions, rather, they became slog I didn't care about.
But finally, the thing that annoyed me most? The 'hallucination' sequences. Obviously borrowed from Batman: Arkham Asylum, these sequences were some of the most annoying parts of the game. I get it, my character (as much of a little bitch as he was) was loosing his grip on 'reality', but these were some of the most annoying sequences I've played in gaming- and they were also overused like no tomorrow. It became the last straw for me, when perhaps one of the most pivotal parts of the game was told in one of these annoying sequences.
Far Cry 3 did a lot of things right. But to me, it became a grind. I stopped enjoying it as much as I should have about half way through. I still played it, and enjoyed it to the end. But a sign for me of the most memorable games are the ones I keep coming back to again and again and complete soon after getting them. Far Cry 3 was not such a game, and I was glad to finally finish it.
Frankly, that's how a lot of open world games seem to be. They make their worlds big enough so that they can say that their world is so big and fanatics can say that there's "100" hours to get out of it (and if you get 50 hours out of it doing EVERYTHING in the game, it means you "didn't enjoy/savor it enough" and you're a 'fool' for not wanting to go back and play the exact same game again).
If only a game like Crysis could have such variety...