I've already mentioned that I did some shopping from the recent Steam Sale that's going on. I picked up Far Cry 5 which I already posted my First Impressions of, including some gameplay. I also picked up Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. A game I was excited for but never played and one that I ultimately ended up refunding.

Even with it's small size in mind many people rank this game as their favorite Far Cry game. And I don't really doubt that it's good either. I had fun for the little amount of gameplay I got to experience. What lead me to refund the game doesn't have anything to do with the gameplay. My issue lies with Ubisoft.

^Steam

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First Impressions

Even though I refunded the game I thought I would write down some first impressions.

The first thing that greeted me when I booted up the game was a window telling me the game was trying to connect to the servers. For some obscure reason a single player game, without even the tiniest element of multiplayer, has servers. This blocked me off from interacting with the game and menus for about a minute. Eventually it told me that the servers were unavailable and I was able to interact with the game again. Fine, I didn't think to much about it as I wasn't interesting in any multiplayer features the game might have had anyways.

I start up the campaign which starts off a little slow. They make you sit through a horrible tutorial consisting of nothing but pop-up windows teaching you how to jump and look around. They then make a couple of jokes about how terrible the tutorial is and our characters blurts out a couple of punch lines to close it off. Much in the style of those good ol' 80s action movies which this game is very much based on.

Now when the gameplay starts it's quite good. Loaded up with all the best guns in the game you go on a murderous rampage blowing off heads and brutally murdering anything in your path. At the end of the prologue we meet the big bad guy, like we always do in Far Cry games, and he strips us of our loadout and leaves us to die. But because we are the kickass bacass cyborg supersoldier Rex "Power" Colt we don't die.

We survive the encounter and wake up in a cave of sorts. We have to sneak out of it and we get our first meeting with the Blood Dragons. Giant dinosaur looking beasts that shoots lasers, because why not?

This is also where the problems begin.

^{Games & Junk}

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Discontinued Servers

Remember the popup window about connecting to the servers blocking me from the game? Turns out this thing is gonna popup and block me from interacting with the game every time I open up the inventory or the menu. How cool is that? Having to wait for up to an entire minute every time you want to read a collectible, pause the game or just check your inventory? Such a great feature!

Doing some Googling about the issue I quickly find out that it's been around for a while but has been magnified seeing as they discontinued the servers in 2020. Again, why they even had these servers for a game that is played fully in single player is beyond me. The Google search also revealed that I could put Ubisoft Connect (formerly Uplay) in offline mode as a workaround. Awesome.

I do that and load up the game to give it another go. No window pops up this time. Awesome! My save game isn't there either so I have to start over. Poop! I Google some more and turns out the games first save point doesn't come around until about two hours into the game. Why this wouldn't be in place after the prologue is beyond me.

Being a little bit of a hot head I get mad and close the game to cool off for a bit.

^{Games & Junk}

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Horrible Performance

There were other things bugging me as well, such as the game performing very badly. I was expecting to be able to run this game on Ultra settings without any issues. It barely managed to push 50 FPS and it was dropping constantly. I tried reducing the video settings to high and even all the way down to low and still it was barely pushing 60 FPS and constantly dropping.

This was really weird seeing as I'm able to run Far Cry 5 on high settings and get a stable 50-60 FPS with the occasional drop.

Now this isn't necessarily the games fault. It could be something on my end. I could have tried re-installing the game, re-installing the drivers a couple of other things.

Ultimately i decided it wasn't worth the hassle. The game had already given me enough of a headache so I decided to refund it. I filed for a ticked and told the guys at Steam about my issues and within the hour the refund was accepted. It's the first time I'm doing this and I was really satisfied with how smooth the process was. I guess they'll accept any and all refunds for any and all reasons as long the game hasn't been played for more than two hours.

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I decided to pick up DOOM for $7 instead. I played it for a bit yesterday and I had an absolute blast. The game is bloody brutal and it has some of the best music ever made for a video game. It also runs at a stable 100 FPS on high settings on my PC which is awesome. You can expect to see some first impressions and gameplay footage coming up in the very near future!

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I didn't take any screenshots while playing the game so I had to pick up some images from the web.

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