Game Review: Far Cry
I know I’m way behind the curve here to go and post a review of a game that came out in, like, spring of 2004, but what the hell. Far Cry is a first-person shooter game where you play the role of Jack Carver, a former “special forces” guy who is now a charter boat captain in the South Pacific. The basic jist of the game is that his boat gets blown up, his attractive client disappears and people start shooting at him. Needless to say, plot isn’t a really important part of the game. It’s a real shame, then, that there are still cutscenes and (horribly-acted) dialogues that wind up detracting from the game, when there isn’t really much going on to support a plot. Better that that stuff get left out and we play the game for what it is – a classic FPS with some nice technology and a couple of fun innovations.
First, the scenery. Crytek really breaks new ground here with beautiful outdoor landscapes that legitimately convey the vast distances of the ocean. I really thought it was well done. I wish my hardware had been a little more up to it. (I have a Dell Inspiron 8500 with 512MB RAM and an nVidia Geforce 4200Go) Sooner or later, I’ll get myself a bigger rig with an nVidia 6600 or 6800 and install it again to see what the game is really capable of. The long-distance effects that you see in some games where things suddenly become unclipped and appear in the distance was pretty minimal. There were some artifacts, but not enough to detract significantly. My biggest complaint was that I had a lot of crashing the first time around. I had to remove and reinstall the game to finally get it working consistently.
I am a fan of the stealthy/snipe-y kind of FPS where you can really slink around and shoot people from a long way away. Far Cry really gets this bit right. It introduces the innovative “stealth-meter” which gives and indication of how aware enemies are of your presence. You can really see the effect of using cover and crouching or going prone. Plus it makes you think pretty hard about weapon selection, as some guns really give your position away and others are quite effectively silenced. The AI of the bots is really impressive as well. You might think that you’re hidden pretty well and are sniping away at some guys in the distance, when some others will come around behind you.
More good stuff: I loved the open-endedness of the levels. Even though there was a clear objective, it was quite free-form how you should go about it. The islands are big and quite traversable such that there are plenty of ways around. Plus, there are various vehicles at different points in the game and you can choose to use them or not. Sometimes you can do things that you wouldn’t expect a game to let you do. For example, in one of the later levels, it is nighttime and there is a big island to traverse, with lots of nasty things hiding all over the place. You are dropped off on the shore and have to get to the other side. To make things worse, there are a couple of patrol boats with spotlights cruising up and down the shoreline looking for you. This would be a pretty difficult thing to do and pretty linear – hide from the boats and get to the other side, but the game lets you do it however you want. One approach I did that was pretty effective, for example, was to hide right next to the water and wait for a boat to come by. I killed the two guys in the boat and it coasted to a stop. I waded out to the boat, jumped in and then cruised around the island to accomplish my goal. I had a big machine gun on the boat to to expedite things. It wasn’t clear whether or not the game developers had that in mind, but it worked great and added a real sense of creativity to the game to have the opportunity to solve the problem in different ways.
Bad stuff: Again, the plot was stupid and I get really tired of the “wandering around a dungeon killing anthropomorphic monsters” motif (in this case mutant monkeys). Can’t we come up with something different? The pieces were almost all there.
