Far Cry

The Good
Far Cry reminds me of a lot of games, ranging from antediluvian classics such as Midwinter and Hunter, to relatively recent titles such as Delta Force, Trespasser, and Operation Flashpoint. Like all of those games it takes place mostly in the open air, and gives you considerable freedom of movement and action. You can hide in the bushes, steal buggies, climb up mountains, and sneak around. And you can also blow things up with a small arsenal of explosive and projectile weapons. The basic plot is that you are a beefcake man and you are trapped on an island and you have to follow a voice on the radio and you have a sidekick who is a thin bulletproof woman with hotpants and you have to kill a scientist who is old but muscled (like an old wrestler) and there is a twist and then you kill a second scientist THE END.

Far Cry is a game of two halves. It is rather like Half-Life in this respect. The first half is excellent. Far Cry starts off as an arcade-style variation of the "soldier sim". You are in the jungle and you have to kill mercenary soldiers and blow things up. With a nip and a tuck and more work this could have been an excellent Vietnam War / Malaya Emergency game, although it does boil down to a series of little encampments that you assault one at a time. You cannot run very fast, you cannot run or swim indefinitely, you can only take a few hits to your uncovered body, and you cannot fall great distances. Your weapons resemble real-life weapons rather than science fiction laser guns. The mixture of stealth and fighting is well-balanced, and best of all the baddies are clever. They duck behind cover and wait; they try to run around you, and they move realistically, rather than the aerial flea-hopping of other games. If you alert the enemy, they will come after you, whereas in other games alerted baddies tend to flap about for twenty seconds before returning to their patrol, even if their buddy has just been shot dead right next to them. You can steal buggies and speedboats, and also a surprisingly addictive rubber dinghy that feels fast, because your viewpoint is six inches about the rushing, undulating water.

The graphics are famously attractive and also famously hard on your computer. No matter what you have under the hood, Far Cry wants more; a faster processor, faster and more memory, and a better graphics card. Thankfully the game will run on relatively modest equipment, and although the water effects are simplified, it still looks mighty fine, like a woman. Some of the game's vistas are breathtaking; on several occasions the levels are designed so that you exit a cramped tunnel directly onto a sweeping mountain view. Far Cry's terrain is undulating and the foliage is detailed. The game prompted me to cry a tear for the notoriously unfinished Trespasser. Like that game, Far Cry has lots of plants and trees and a physics engine, and it takes place on an island, but it all hangs together whereas Trespasser fell apart. Far Cry's physics engine is of the standard bouncy-moon-gravity variety, and plays no real part in the gameplay, although there are a few instances when you can push barrels onto the heads of the baddies. It is noticeable that your bullets are not affected by gravity, and consequently long-range shooting is trivially easy.

The Bad
The second half of Far Cry is less impressive. The game can model indoors and outdoors environments at the same time, but generally there is a level load between the two. The indoors segments are relatively uninteresting, because they are like a lot of other, similar games. The maps have lots of detail - not as much as Doom 3, although there is more variety - but they are just standard techbase maps. There are fewer opportunities for stealth whilst indoors, and the immersion is broken when grenades and gunfire do not alert enemies in the next area.

For a game that looks so good, the cutscenes and dramatic sections are very poor. The pre-rendered cutscenes are unattractive and add nothing to the drama. The in-game cutscenes are reminiscent of Resident Evil, from as far back as 1996, in that the actors gesticulate wildly and continuously as they talk. Every phrase is accompanied with hyperactive shrugs and points. I suspect that the programmers wanted to show off their ability to capture realistic motion, and therefore decided to have as much motion as possible, any motion, all the time. The voice acting of the main characters is decent. Our hero Jack Carver seems to be modelled on Bruce Campbell. The soldiers that you fight have a set of stock phrases that they use over and over again. It made me appreciate, yet again, the brilliance of Half-Life, in which the stock voice phrases were sparingly used, or distorted so as to become sinister. In Far Cry, you are attacked by mercenary soldiers who sound like beach bums, and shout "How'd you like them apples!" over and over again, as they attack you. There isn't even a good end-game sequence.

The third strike is fatal, and kills the game for me. As with Half-Life, Far Cry has a stock of inhuman monsters to compliment the human ones. Whereas the monsters of Half-Life were imaginative and well-executed, the monsters of Far Cry move like men in ape suits and look like shambling blobs. They are apparently mutated monkey-men. Most of them can kill you with a single swipe of their claws - from what looks like beyond their arms' length - and they take a great deal of damage before expiring. This kind of instant death gameplay does not appeal to me. The big ones generally stand still, and fire missiles that travel slower than you can run, which looks ridiculous. Some of the monsters can leap like Spiderman, but without Spiderman's commitment to justice and fair play. Some are invisible. They are uninteresting and bore me. And when they are involved, the difficulty level goes off the rails. It is as if a second team of programmers had been brought in for a few weeks, to finish the game off, and these people were angry at the world. The difficulty level goes through spikes, in that there are a small number of extraordinarily hard sequences dotted throughout the game. It is hard, in an unfair way. The big monsters simply absorb too much ammunition before they die, and there usually isn't a "clever" way to get around them.

The game has a day-night-day-night cycle. During the night-time you can only see with your torch, which is ineffective in the open air, and with your night vision goggles, which run out of power after a few minutes. Thankfully they recharge, but this is a slow process. The game therefore often becomes a cycle of advancing with night vision, waiting for a few minutes, and then advancing again, as you cannot afford to blunder around in the dark.

During the final quarter of the game you have a sidekick. She is not as stupid as most other computer game sidekicks, but she is nonetheless not the brightest star in the firmament. A lot of the time she waits for you to clear out the next area, which is fine by me, but the concept of sidekicks reminds me too much of those old levels from "X-Wing", whereby you had to protect a damaged Rebel Alliance cruiser / hospital ship against wave after wave of TIE Fighters and - oh dear - after half an hour it would be destroyed by a sneak attack and you would fail the mission.

The Bottom Line
This game is part of an evolutionary chain. At the beginning of this review I mentioned Midwinter, a British computer game from 1990. Midwinter was set on a frozen island, which was rendered in solid 3D with attractive, undulating terrain. You were a resistance leader, and there were several ways you could retake the island, most of which shooting at or capturing people and vehicles. Far Cry is much the same, but less grandiose, with a level-based structure, and modern technology. There will be others like it. I wonder what will come next?

The Good
Far Cry is one of the most revolutionary shooters in a long time. It's difficult to classify a game like that, a game that allows you to experience a complete freedom in your actions. We're talking about a FPS game, but you can play it as a perfect tactical shooter.

What makes the game different isn't the diversity of the environments in the game. What makes the game different of another FPS game is its own essence. We're used to play games (not just FPS games) where everything is planned. When the programmers set the enemies on the stages of a game, they set them thinking about the best way to get rid of them, like if everything was planned. Far Cry is the opposite. This game has huge stages with many enemies but we can feel that the programmer didn't mind about how we take care of them. He had no plans about how to kill them when he set the enemies there, they're only there and nothing more. How to take care of the enemies is something that depends just on your decision.

Talking about that, you can kill the enemies in many ways. You can sneak and kill them with your knife (well, some of them...) or just going berserk and killing everything that you see on your screen from a stationary place with a rocket launcher.

Graphics are good, with a high quality physics for everything. We have many stages including heavenly places where to spend your holidays. There are also some inside structures stages, ruins, factories and many more (even a volcano!) that will increase the game's length, which will be increased by game's difficult too (specially in the harder difficulty levels, we will die a lot of times 'till we pass through).

There are many weapons but you can carry just 4. Choose those weapons that you like more because none of them is specially better than the others, it will depend on how do you want to play the game. For example, if you want to be noiseless you'll need the knife, but if you want to kill everything fast you won't need it. There are different vehicles too, from the classic jeep to a hang glider.

Storyline is a bit typical and it reminds me the 80's movies. The main character is something like a superman who may kill a whole camp without messing his hair up (even if we needed 10 attempts...)

The Bad
Checkpoints are a good save system for a game that needs it. To use a manual save system could have ruined many games because it'd be easy to save your game in an inappropriate moment. However, the game is really difficult and that's why you'll hat the checkpoint system many times. Every time that you see the "Saving game" you'll think "well, that's a relief!"

The sound should have been better, specially the radio communications because the default volume is really low. It's the same problem that we have in other games like Bioshock. Even if you're in silence it's difficult to hear what they say (there's no need to say what happens if you're in a middle of a fight). No subs available.

When you start the game you don't know exactly what you're playing. You don't know if you're playing a classic shooter or something more tactical (anyway, you don't know in any moment of the game), that's why in the beginning you'll feel like you're not playing the game as "it should" be played. For example, you take cover on a determined place, hidden in the grass or behind a rock, and you kill a mercenary, the rest of the mercenaries of that area will go there to see what happens and then you start killing them one by one (well, it's not as easy as it sounds, but it could be done), taking care of a whole camp with that strategy. That sensation is something that only happens at the beginning when you don't know what you're playing, but once you've understand how the game works you won't feel it anymore.

Sometimes you want to move stealthily, and of course you go on crawling, but he's too slow. When you try to kill some bad guys that way, you could fail on your attempt, and it's possible that you've spent like 20 minutes to go there with that strategy. If you die, the next time you try, you won't do that again because it needs a lot of time and you'll go there killing everybody as fast as possible (it doesn't mean that you'll survive if you do that way, of course...).

There are many weapons, that's true, but most of them look the same. There are many different machine guns and just one shotgun and one rocket launcher.

The Bottom Line
A really different FPS from other games of this genre. It has many elements of the tactical FPS games but it's not a tactical game at all (but it could be if you want, that's the magic of this game). It's a good choice if you're looking a different game with an almost perfect AI of the enemies and many different ways to progress. If you have no patience don't try unless you want to lose your temper.

The Good
I marveled on the graphics when i first saw them and I still do now, even though I don't have the best computer they still look damn good. The game was also very fun, I loved how you could be stealthy, or (for most of the game) just go in guns a blazing. The story, characters and voice acting were also good.

The Bad
I thought this game was overly hard in some places and I had to keep trying in the same place over and over again.

The Bottom Line
This game is worth the purchase because it has great gameplay, great graphics, and lots of big explosions. If you haven't got it, get it now!!!