Far Cry

Rating:
Summary: A great game on all levels.
Review: This is a great FPS game. It incorporates everything that I have been looking for in a FPS. I have searched for a decent FPS that includes elements of stealth for quite some time. The enemies in most FPS games just seem to know when you are in the area so you never get that chance to sneak up on them. The stealth element really lets you play the game on your terms. You can run and gun, avoid, or go in for the stealth kills.

Vast environments and vehicles are other great elements of a FPS that are in full effect in Farcry. If you can see it on your screen you can go there.

Even though the game has been out for quite some time now I still find the graphics to be the best. I recognize that this is a matter of personal taste. You may like the sci-fi themes in Half-life 2 and Doom.

This game is a steal, especially now that the price has dropped dramatically.

Rating:
Summary: The suspension of disbelief is complete
Review: Version 1.3

If Far Cry were given a cinematic film adaptation, it would be big, glossy, cliched Hollywood spectacle: an action movie with a nasty, dark sci-fi twist, unlikely set in a beautiful, remote tropical location, full of tough-guy action movie posturing, loud flashy explosions and CG monstrosities; a classic movie for popcorn and drink, for showing off your home theater system, but nothing too deep or memorable.

But this is not a movie. Developed by German developer Crytek, Far Cry is a first-person perspective action/stealth game of nearly unparalleled proportions. You are in the central role of Jack Carver. Accompanying an associate to a remote chain of tropical islands, your small boat is destroyed mid-water by a rocket launched from the shoreline. After you are able to swim ashore and regain your wits, the expansive adventure begins. Your partner-the erstwhile femme fatal Val-is missing, and your prospects look bleak. Then a radio communiqué is received, and a mysterious resident of the islands offers to help you, to lead you back to Val and to accomplish what may have been the real reason for the initial expedition. Seems that there is a mad scientist afoot-one Dr. Kreiger, founder of the aptly named Krieger Corporation-a madman bent on DNA experimentation and mutating the human condition. The vicious creatures resultant from this work are called trigens: hideous, abominable killing machines of nearly unstoppable force. Trigens come in assorted flavors, shapes and colors, yet each has one aspect in common-the immutable, frantic compulsion to rip humanity limb from limb. Yet trigens are of secondary importance to Carver at the onset, as they are not even a part of the game until much later. Rather, there are Krieger soldiers and mercenaries ("mercs") infesting the islands, and Jack must deal with them immediately to survive.

So here we are. What's so special? You've got a typically shallow game backdrop, and the general makings of just another shooter. But then, a couple of minutes into the actual gameplay, you get your first magical, almost surreal glimpse of the outdoor graphics. Whoa. For me, it was a time to tone down my optimism regarding what my computer at the time of this writing could handle with resolution and detail, as the frame rate nearly froze solid when I moved out of the closed quarters at the beginning of the first level and into the wide open light of day. Yet after some tweaking, I eventually found that I could run Far Cry just fine with some decent detail and resolutions, after all. And what a difference it makes. The draw distance, the line of sight, the sheer breadth of the visuals is astounding. You can see virtual miles and miles of real game environments stretching and expanding out everywhere around you, places you can actually go to-or have already been to-with no painted backdrops. Everything is accessible. And the lush, vibrant, living and breathing jungles and tropical plant life are nothing less than breathtaking to behold. Long grass shifts like legions of charmed snakes in the light island breeze, palm trees sway hypnotically, colorful flora and fauna abound, some with a shiny plastic-like sheen to them, rainbow-colored birds swoop overhead and in distant, dark flocks, insect life buzzes in your ears and lights around you, light and shadows play in motion across the muzzle of your equipped weapon as you creep under the foliage, and schools of gleaming fish patrol the water. The water. My god, the water. The water in this game-when set to "ultra high" detail-is nearly beyond description: it is real, entirely real and there. You can see depth, the sand and rock formations beneath, the murky waterlife going about its business. You can see waves and ripples realistically lapping the shorelines. You can see crisp reflections glinting off the surface like a distorted mirror: clouds, mountains, trees, everything. And you can go in, swimming on the surface or beneath. Submerged, vision blurs and audio cues offer a real sense of water pressure and depth. And speaking of audio, the music and atmospheric effects throughout the game really lend themselves to the experience, becoming at once exhilarating and riveting and at other times laconic and peaceful. Sometimes a brief arcing note of sinister, unsettling music will pierce through the air while you're seemingly alone, engulfed by the innate, wondrous beauty of the islands, effectively creating a very real sense of unease and almost tangible tension.

The first wave of mercs you encounter introduce you to the Far Cry AI. The AI here is not without its flaws, yet most FPS veterans will probably find it as compelling (and sometimes as difficult) as the groundbreaking AI in the original Half-Life game, if not more so. For me, it is simply among the best-if not the best-AI scripting I've encountered in a FPS game to date. The opposition is alert, responds to tactical situations realistically, and employs teamwork. Yet sometimes they will stand idly by when someone standing right beside them is shot from a distance with a sniper rife, or trigens will launch volley after volley of rockets into a wall they are standing right in front of until they bring about their own demise. Still, these instances of flawed AI are few and far between, and by and large the AI behavior is impressive and more than a little intimidating.

You're given binoculars early on, and the usage of them becomes a central, necessary gameplay mechanic. If you can sight enemies in them, they become visible dots on your radar, affording you the ability to monitor their awareness and movements. The binoculars also feature sound amplification, so when you zoom in on mercs from far off you can hear their banter-and it's always entertaining and usually amusing. Yet this feature has its drawbacks too, for when you focus in on what you think is an abandoned stand of trees and foliage, for example, and instead of silence, you're greeted with the earthshaking, inhuman roar of a trigen: vibrating the speakers enough to make them hop around on your desk, sending your blood pressure rocketing into the atmosphere and your mouse skittering off onto the floor.

On most occasions, employing slow and steady stealth-like progression through levels rewards the player with being able to spot foes before they spot you, thusly opening up myriad gaming choices en route to accomplishing a given goal. Nearly all potential outdoor confrontations with mercs and trigens can be approached from different angles and philosophies, and all of them are workable-although some are undoubtedly more difficult than others. Do you choose to rush madly into the fray, all guns blazing, Rambo to the hilt? Do you choose to creep around the perimeter, sight all possible targets in the binoculars, and then begin picking them off one at a time, a process of hit-and-fall-back repeatedly as opposing forces close on your position? Do you choose to pirate an armed merc patrol boat or Jeep and bombard them from a safe distance? Do you choose to try and sneak past them all, avoiding all confrontation, perhaps jacking a glider and soaring dizzyingly overhead and beyond immediate danger? All these options are available to you, and more. The game is wide open in most outdoor areas, a playground of possibilities and tactical experimentations, and as such the replayability is extremely high. To break up the sprawling outdoor vistas, there are segments of levels requiring you to work grimly through dark caverns, underground bunkers, various aboveground structures, bizarre scientific labs and other locales. The indoor portions are sometimes reminiscent of Doom 3-in the slow paced, creeping, horror-tinged atmosphere-although Far Cry was released well before Doom 3.

Time of day also plays a role. Time passes, although not in real time. You start out in broad daylight-endless blue sky, swollen white clouds, luminous water and thick, emerald topography as described earlier-and stay there for quite a while. In time, at the onset of a new level later on, golden late afternoon twilight arrives, and it is equally striking. And you also get night. The dark, foreboding, deadly night. For in Far Cry, the night is truly a realm of nightmares made real. Yet there is still an undeniable beauty present, the thread of realism in presentation that runs throughout and binds the player to the game. Standing on a peak under a bluish-black night sky punched through with eyehole stars, swirled with grayish clouds, the moon, an impassive icon, a brilliant bulb plugged into the sky, casts its phosphorescent white light along countless miles of desolate, rippling ocean to where I'm stargazing. It's all so real, and I'm there, really there. And then the connection is made, the suspension of disbelief is complete, and I begin to realize that if all this is real and I'm really there, then those merc-fired bullets whining and ricocheting around my head must also be real, and the monstrous trigens who can kill with one swipe of a malignant claw must be as well. It's a memorable moment when a game fully draws you in, and fairly defines the term immersion as it relates to the gaming experience.

Far Cry has little employment of the much-ballyhooed physics aspects of such games as Half-Life 2, Deus Ex: Invisible War or-to a lesser extent-Doom 3, yet what it has works well enough within the scope of the game. The actual combat is tight and intense, the weaponry arsenal par for the course but well-implemented, and the ability to carry only a limited amount of weapons does force some tactical decisions upon the player, as well. The save system Crytek has installed is a topic of some controversy: an automatic checkpoint save that the player cannot control. The first time I played, I came to terms with it, yet it did force a more conservative approach to playing. However, after becoming aware of the ability to quick-save anywhere in the game at any time by entering a particular console command, I found Far Cry much more user-friendly, yet no less challenging. For challenge there is, to be sure. Portions of the experience-particularly near the end-are among the toughest gaming moments I've ever faced. Yet with tactical experimentation and much repetition, there were eventually ways to surmount the seemingly insurmountable.

In the showdown of the "big three" shooters of 2004, Far Cry gets the nod from me, outclassing the higher-profile titles Half-Life 2 and Doom 3. It's easily my game of the year for 2004, and is now among my favorite games of all-time. It's that good. If it were a movie, it would be a quick, flashy, almost throwaway experience. But when you get to live the movie, the choices become yours, the virtual reality becomes your reality, the cliched story somehow becomes more interesting, and the whole experience changes from two-dimensional to three. Until the distant, far-flung day when we all have our own holosuites and holodecks to virtually live out every whim with utmost realism, this is as close as we get to being in the movie.


Rating:
Summary: Incredible, fun game
Review: I would like to add my comments to some of the reviews I've read on this site, which for the most part are accurate: The graphics surpass the state of the art, the gameplay is fun and engaging, the environment is expansive and free-roaming, the enemy AI is awesome and the tactical/strategy aspects are very well done. This is an incredible game, and for no reason should anyone deprive themselves of the opportunity to play it based on the criticisms laid out on Amazon.

The major complaint I read about here is the saving system. I actually don't mind it so much, and believe such systems are nice in many ways. They can help to avoid long and frequent load times, which in this case are only present when you first run the game. They also do force a bit of care on your part when playing. The only problem I have with it is you don't know when a save-game is coming, it just happens... and you could be hanging onto a mere shred of health. It would be nice to have the option to save now or save later at a checkpoint... that way you could at least attempt to bolster your health before your game is saved. This is an extremely minor problem with the game in my opinion, and it actually hasn't really detracted from my ability to enjoy it, it would just be a nice-to-have.

Rating:
Summary: FAR FROM CRYING
Review: ONE OF THE BEST GAMES ON MY COMPUTER.
FAR CRY is ONE of the BEST GAMES I have ever played. The atmosphere is tense and if you have a weak heat don't even try this game.

JUST TRY IT!

Rating:
Summary: Experience: Mediocre at best
Review: First off I'm not a big fan of first person shooters so I am heavily biased in this. I actually purchased this game under the assumption that I'd be impressed, initially I was. The first 1/4 of the game I was mesmerized: the graphics, the gameplay, enemy intelligence, it had it all. But then it got redundant, as most FPS's do with me. I got so sick of killing trijans (?spelling?) and continuously pulling the same evasion tricks on the enemy that 3/4 of the way through I took it off my computer and it's now found itself on ebay. Anyways...Overall: pretty good game, although I feel had they cut the length of the game down by half it would've made for a much more compelling experience rather than repetitive. Thanks for reading...

Rating:
Summary: No 3rd Person View Option. . .
Review: This game would have been great if only you had the option to play it in 3rd person view. Good story line and the graphics are great , but the lack of this feature directed me in the way of (Splinter Cell) instead.