Far Cry - Game on the month

Dave Day : 05/09/2004

On awaiting the increasingly bleak release of half-life 2, and gradually loosing patience, Far Cry hit the shelves, promising to blind its players with graphical eye candy.

Even playing this game on the KCI Class PC, promises to test the machine's graphical capabilities! The recommended minimum spec your PC needs to run this game is a 1Ghz CPU, 256 RAM and a GeForce 2 64MB Graphics card, but I can honestly say that this game would run like a dog if ANY of the graphical settings were turned up! The KCI class PC I had at the time (and still have) has a 3Ghz CPU, 1536 RAM and a FX5900 OTES 128MB Graphics card, and struggled slightly to run the game at its ultra high settings with ease.

With the settings at "Very High" the graphics were glorious! I actually came away from the game feeling like I had just been on holiday (despite having to shoot and maim soldiers with every ounce of strength!) simply a beautiful game.

THE STORY : You play the part of the character Jack, an ex marine who quit to run a boat charter business in the tropics - Hired by a CIA operative "Val" you take her to an island, where on your departure, you're blown out of the sea and stranded on a bunch of remote islands where a mad scientist is conducting some very strange experiments.

So that's where the story kicks off. It has the classic FPS (First Person Shoot'em) training at the beginning in a dark, wet, dingy cave to test your use of the controls with a great graphical display from the start.

Once the training is complete and you reach the end of the cave, you are presented by an amazing display of tropical beach graphics, with amazing details which games like Half-life and Unreal Tournament never came close to. The hill is smothered in long grass for you to hide in and crawl through. Although Half-life was one of the ground breaking FPS games of its time, it was very much straight lines everywhere - the game engine could not cope with too many polygons per frame - thus when picking out your opponent, it was far too easy - and hiding was nearly impossible!

Far Cry blows this away with grass decals everywhere - and the tree detail is spectacular. So yes, it is actually possible to hide from your opponent, BUT it can also be impossible to SEE your opponent!! Many times I was caught creeping through bushes - not being able to see 2 inches in front of me, to be confronted by mercenaries behind the next leaf!! After some random scattered gunfire, I found myself running in the opposite direction!

GAME PLAY : Here, as much realism has been injected in to this game as possible. You can do the usual running and jumping, but to aid your stealth attacks, you're able to crawl on your belly. Although all fine and good, you have a blue bar on the screen which represents your stamina, this is depleted when you sprint or swim - but all far too quickly :-( You may find it frustrating to simply walk at a slow pace away from your accumulating, gun firing enemies - which I'm sure in real life you'd get your little legs kicking under any amount of gun fire!! Unfortunately, this feature is even carried over to multiplayer mode. For me, this alone hinders it from becoming a rival to Half-life due to the lack of speed during on-line battles.

Other features of the game play are the ability to lean around corners, throw rocks to distract the mercenaries, and a good array of guns to pick up on the way, although, you are limited to carrying 5 weapons at any one time which makes it a little frustrating, but interesting to have to select the right weapon for the next battle. Unfortunately other than the knife - NONE of these weapons work underwater :-(

ENVIRONMENT : One of the sheer pleasures of Far-Cry is its realism - small flocks of parrots swoop past during the game, moths fly around lights at night time, you can even take a dive in the beautiful sea and swim with schools of tropical fish!, but be careful when letting off explosives in the water as your find you've killed all the cute lil' fishes and see them floating on teir poor little sides. If this sight disturbs you, we suggest you whip out your machete and slice them in to sushi quick! Other great touches are amazing movement of the troopers - the A.I. is stunning! Troopers call others in for help if they find or hear you!! and they WILL try to flank you!

If you bump into shelves that have coke cans on them, the shelves rock and the cans tip, fall over and roll off the side very realistically! At one point in the game you come across a dead shark. Shooting the shark not only puts a bloody bullet hole in the carcass, but when you look on the other side, you find an exit wound!

Another Plus is the fact that you can take out mercenaries on boats, buggies and 4x4's and have boat battles with other mercenaries on the sea - although your not able to take over the choppers - that would of been the cream on top!!

All in all - and excellent and extreamly well recomended game for those with PCs that can run all the eye candy - I did manage to get good game play from a PIII 1Ghz with 512RAM and a GeForce 4 64MB Graphics card...but at the lowest possible setting - not even the fish were ale to run!

As a FPS game and single player - this is a game you wont get bored of, and is absolutly beautiful to play. Although the multiplayers out there may crave a bit more from a game.