[image=left]http://www.alternativenation.net/photos/data/543/74698128-thumb.jpg[/image]Far Cry (PC) Ubisoft/Crytek
Far Cry is a first person shooter for the PC brought to us by Ubisoft and German developers Crytek.
The game begins with you; Jack Carver stuck on a boat in the middle of a luscious, beautifully rendered paradise. The sky is powder blue and you can see island after island stretching into the distance. It will take you a few minutes when you finally fire up the boat to take in the sheer beauty of the opening screens. Of course, this is only if you have a beast of a PC. I ran this bad boy on a P4, with 1GB memory and a 128MB graphics card... and was still required to keep the settings at next to minimum!
The opening level is set on a series of huge, sprawling islands were you are required to reach some sort of building to further the quest (sorry for the brief outlay but this is due to the plot deficiencies... I’ll get to that later). The beauty of the game is that it’s as close to Halo with regards to freedom as we are likely to see until Halo 2. You can literally take 3 or more routes to achieve your overall goal.
You can opt to go in gung ho style, killing all in your path, but this is very tough even on the lower difficulty settings. The stealth aspect isn’t Splinter Cell but there is a certain splendour in taking out a bunch of mercenaries from 200 yards away. I'm not a fan of stealth personally, as soon as you let that first round out you’ll see the guards all adopting defensive positions and waiting for your arrival.
One of the more interesting aspects of the game is that if you manage to get to a high viewpoint you can use your binoculars to home in on the enemy's camp. The binoculars in this game can also pick up sound which allows you to eavesdrop on the enemy before deciding your best route of attack.
As mentioned previously, the levels are HUGE! To help in getting around the lovely guys at Crytek have included a barrage of vehicles including your bog standard jeeps, buggy’s, trucks and boats, but also a paraglider! Believe me, this is one of the best modes of transport ever utilised in a FPS.
So far, so good, but it's not all positive news. Now I’ll focus on the negatives of this otherwise great game.
The weapons are a disappointment, nothing more than your average FPS selection (except the BFG obviously, nothing average about that baby!).
Plot wise I’d love to share it with you, but all I gathered is that you fight some mercenaries and then later you fight some monsters. I tried my damndest to follow the plot but it was so weak and non-descript that I can’t really remember the overall context (get the girl, kill the baddies probably).
Where Far Cry really lets itself down is the indoor sections, which become a huge part of the game in later levels. The paradigm monsters I can handle, but when you couple this with dull indoor sections then my enthusiasm waned. When will developers learn that Doom and Half Life have done the sneaking about corridors and having little critters jump out on you better than anyone else ever will?
Overall Far Cry deserves 9 out of 10 for its first half but slowly degenerates to an disappointing 7. A shame really when the graphics and non-linearity of the outdoor sections are truly breathtaking.
Console owners can look forward to ‘Far Cry – Instincts’ towards the end of this year, hopefully Crytek will include more of the outdoor and less of the indoor by the time of its release.
www.farcry-thegame.com T. Connelly 2004
