Far Cry 3

Far Cry 3 is my ideal Christmas game, because this time of the year, I fantasize a lot about stabbing people in the neck. Far Cry 3 delivers in the neck stabbing department, and it has all the other markings of a great game, but its flaws reduce the final score noticeably

Island helladise 
Far Cry is as sandboxy as it gets. You get a huge tropical island to play with, and it is filled with pirates and tigers. The rest of the fauna is equally impressive. There are mountains and streams (full of pirates), lots of palms, ancient temples and Japanese bunkers (which are also full of pirates). But everything comes across as samey-same after a while. There are only a few distinctive landmarks which give you a sense of place. Other sandbox games give you strong visual cues were you are, but here, it all drowns in the same jungle green, so you are going around at high speeds, but you never have the feeling of arriving at a special place.
Nonetheless, Rook Island is beautifully realized, breathing a heavy mixture of undiscovered island paradise and third world hellhole: the rusty cars, the dwellings right between upscale alternative tourist destination and leper colony, and many, many micro-junkyards between the palms. And AK-47s for everyone. Ubisoft really can do tropical islands. It's just not very variable and comes across a bit bland.

Unreliable narrator
This game has a strangely weak and somewhat offensive plot. You are Jason, a douchy American tourist. You and your douchy friends went to this unspoiled island, were a lesson in skydiving suddenly became an exercise in surprise adoption (kidnapping is such a harsh word).  You got away, the nice (black) islanders crowned you their warrior king just because, and you are off fighting (black) pirates and freeing your friends.
"Colonialist subtext" is a rather mild word for what appears to be happening here. So you are the great white dope who has to set things right? And it involves shooting so many black guys that the whole American police force shakes with impotent envy? There have been attempts to color the whole experience as the view of an unreliable narrator, i.e. that the protagonist is subverting or hiding the "objective truth" of the narrative from the recipient, making the whole game a delicious puzzle, as we try to ferret out what Jason really did and why. The problem is: I don't buy it.
This is mainly a problem of the medium. A first person shooter offers a strangely unmediated access to the narrative, even more so then a first person narrator in a novel. The medium is also based upon a contract between the player and the game: You as the player are directly able to influence the world according to the rules of the game. These rules might be changed, and control might be yanked away from you for short periods of time (e.g. cut scenes), but basically you are able to do stuff, and your actions have direct consequences which are "real" in the game.
Thus it is easily possible to posit an unreliable first person narrator in a novel who boasts about liberating this island paradise from pirates while still leaving enough markers to appear unreliable, it appears far more difficult in the medium of the FPS.
Secondly, Jason lives through various hallucinatory experiences which are clearly marked as such. While his normal stay on the island is depicted in the highly realistic and physical glory that a high-end PC can render, the dream sequences stand out as such - strange colors, milky vistas, dreamlike visions, gravity twists and so on. This is also true for their beginnings and their ends: Thus, after the dream sequences, we are explicitly put back into the "normal" reality of the game. This makes it more difficult to ascertain a third, additional level, where Jason experiences Rook Island differently from "subjective reality" or where he makes up a reality of his own.
There are a lot of nice small touches which could elevate the narrative from FPS boiler plate, but some of them fall flat. Jason starts out as a whingy bro with a bro haircut: In the starting mission he is a bag of nerves and close to a breakdown because of all the violence, but the game mechanics undercut a slow evolution from nervous wreck to apex predator. The whinginess returns in some of the later cutscenes, but it feels false then, because I have been killing bears with rocket launchers for hours when that cutscene arrives.
But as said before, some subversive touches remain: Glimpses in Jason's recent past show some unsettling potential for violence and create a very unflattering image of white tourists in the Far East. The "bad" ending is apt to twist the whole perception of Jason's role on the island and the islanders who made him "king", but many players won't get that far, or will choose differently. The scavenger hunt for Japanese war letters, the communications of a drug ring and the tribal relics insinuate that Rook Island has always been a place of violence, and replacing all your starting gear with the pelts of all the animals you have slain is nicely atavistic. On this note: I think I have driven the leopard past extinction into reality deletion. I have shot so many of the big cats. I am sorry. Speaking of which:

Fun parts
Hijacking a patrol boat, going around the whole island and peppering every pirate stronghold with the turret machine gun. Running a machete-wielding pirate over with a quad bike, after the seventeenth attempt. Becoming neck-stabbing king of stabneck mountain. Running over bull sharks with a jet ski. Shooting a bear with a RPG-7. Driving a two-ton truck off a cliff. Burning down a football field of ganja plants and inhaling the fumes. Cleaning out one pirate outpost all stealthy-like, the next from really afar, and the third one by just walking up and hosing it down. Note: You can do nearly all this without entering into the plot - a real strength of the game.

Little stories
The effects of the ecosystem and the sandbox: So I drive up to river where I see a small, cozy hut and a fence between me and the river. One of the nice islander stands at the river, partly hidden by the fence. I get out of the car to say hello and look at the hut, when the islander suddenly says "ack!" and disappears behind the fence. I run up to the fence, look down on the river and see a fat crocodile. "So that's where the islander went" I think, but then there is no more fence and my screen is full of crocodile jaw. And that was the first time I died.
Or: I am busy crafting healing drugs by the road (you take so many drugs in this game) when a jeep full of pirates  rolls up. They get out, but then two cassowaries join the party and peck the shit out of them. After that, I shoot the cassowaries and turn them into a nice new wallet matching my leopard leather case for all the needles I've been using. Other players will have completely different stories to tell.

Mandatory instafail stealth mission
This game has it. One full point automatically deducted.

Vaas Montenegro
My favority madman in gaming right now. Excellent voiceacting, this guy really steals the show every time he turns up. I would like to have seen more of him. The next deathdealer hordeboss is going to be Vaas, with some new grotty paint on.

4 of 5 stabbed necks, -1 for mandatory instafail stealth mission, for an effective score of 3