We were pretty excited to play Far Cry 3 at E3 this week but we got even more excited after learning at Sony's E3 2012 press conference that the open world first person shooter sequel would have a separate campaign devoted to a four player co-op mode. We got to play a small piece of the co-op campaign at Microsoft's Xbox 360 E3 2012 booth this week.
The first thing you do is find and select a character, along with a loadout of weapons you want to use. You can be a big bruiser with lots of heavy weapons or someone who concentrates on speed. While this sounds an awful lot like the Left 4 Dead series, the big difference is that Far Cry 3 has what are known as "Battle Cries." These are basically bonuses that one of your four teammates can summon up. In our E3 2012 demo, our team members were able to activate a Battle Cry that increased health regeneration for all four members. Other Battle Cries will be revealed later.
The small co-op mission we played had us first repairing a train so it could move out of a tunnel we needed to enter. Naturally, the island setting was full of AI enemies that either fired weapons or charged our team with nothing but machetes in an effort to stop us. In the second part of the demo we entered the tunnel and came out onto a bridge where all of us magically received sniper rifles. The goal was to shoot our approaching foes at long range.
The final part of the co-op demo had us finding several packets of explosives that we were supposed to set up at various points on the bridge, with the goal of detonating those packets. Of course, our AI enemies were not keen on that plan and tried to stop us but we managed to stay alive long enough to blow the bridge to kingdom come.
The co-op mode's main problem, at least from our perspective, is the AI for our enemies. They tended to just charge us rather than seek cover or do anything else to make themselves less easy to shoot. There was one larger character with a big min-gun that took a lot of damage and time for all four of us to kill off.
While some might call Far Cry 3's co-op mode derivative, we think that there is no way to get enough co-op in our lives gaming and having a separate campaign, away from the main storyline of Far Cry 3, should make this game even more fun to play. We will find out if the final product is as much fun as our E3 demo when Ubisoft releases the game in September.
Image via Ubisoft
NeoGamr and Neowin's coverage of E3 2012 is sponsored by War Inc. Battle Zone.
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