Far Cry stands above the rest

Far Cry has got to be one of the best first person shooters I’ve played since Unreal Tournament. I had a chance to play Doom III for about half an hour and was not impressed. I thought the whole flashlight thing was pretty lame. What I really love about Far Cry is a lot of it is set outdoors on a beautiful tropical island, complete with waterfalls, bright green grass, mountains, palm trees, and lots of hapless mercenaries waiting to be gunned down.

The game opens with a nicely done CG video showing your character and a young woman on a sailboat outside a lush tropical island. Suddenly, gunfire and rockets come from men on the island and the sailboat is blown up, sending you hurling through the air and into the water. Shortly thereafter, you wash up on shore and the girl is nowhere to be found. This is where the game begins. First you must secure a weapon and some equipment, then you find a cell phone where a strange man starts to navigate you through the rest of the game. As the story unfolds, you’ll eventually meet a beautiful CIA operative who dresses like Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, and you’ll find out why the island is so heavily guarded.

Far Cry’s AI (artificial intelligence) is lethal! The enemy soldiers and monsters will hunt you down, hide behind objects, and flank you while snipers will pick you off from great distances. It isn’t too hard to sneak around while preparing for the attack, but once you’ve been spotted, all hell breaks loose. The best strategy is that when you can, hang back and let them come to you. If you try running up in the middle of an enemy encampment, you won’t last five seconds. Once the enemies are onto your location, they will relentlessly chase you to until either you or them are dead.

There are a lot of weapons to choose from in this game, but the really good ones come with very limited ammo and you can’t carry more than four different weapons at a time. In games like this, I always prefer to use the sniper rifle and pick off enemies as far away as I can, but with Far Cry, you will be lucky to have more than 10-15 rifle bullets on hand at any given time. Even if you were able to stock up on sniper rifle bullets, you still wouldn’t be able to wipe out entire encampments of enemy soldiers and monsters. A lot of them hide inside buildings and behind places that require you to get up close and personal to take them out. Most weapons let you right-click the mouse to zoom in a bit (aka ‘aiming’) and the amount of the zoom depends on the range and accuracy of the weapon. It seems like you can hit most anything with any gun, but at great distances you can’t even see the target, so you are really just wasting ammo and exposing yourself to enemy fire.

I have heard that Far Cry offers the longest distance shots in any first person shooter, and I believe it. If you climb up onto a tower or mountaintop, you can use your rifle scope or binoculars to see all the way to the other side of the map. The binoculars are one of the most important parts of the game because they allow you to pinpoint enemy soldiers. They have some kind of detection technology built in that will show you the location of every soldier and even let you listen to what they are saying. Without them, you’d be blindly walking into every gunfight. Once you locate the enemy with the binoculars, their location will show up on a small radar screen to give you a better idea of their relative location.

The graphics and animations in Far Cry are stellar and the detail level given to the characters, buildings, vehicles, and locales are all excellent. I have an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and was truly impressed with the water effects. Since you are on an island and water is all around, they had to make the water look good. The game moves flawlessly between brightly colored jungle exteriors and darker industrial interiors. The only real bother I had was that when moving through thick underbrush, it is hard to see out of it, thus making it a fairly ineffective hiding place if you are looking for a good sniper position.

Far Cry makes excellent use of sound in games, and you will have to rely on the sound to get through some areas. If you think an enemy is nearby, just stand still and listen for footsteps. When the monsters get close, they will growl at you before attacking, and that gives you about a 2-second warning before they are on top of you. Each weapon and vehicle has its own unique sound and most of the enemy soldiers will shout and curse at you once they know you are there.

Given the incredible amount of detail and the vastness of the maps, I was surprised at how well Far Cry runs. I am using a pretty beefy system (Athlon XP 2800+, Radeon 9800 Pro, 512 megs of RAM) and I have most of the video detail cranked up and it still runs without a hitch. The only slow-down I get is when I start the game and load the first saved game, it will hiccup for just a second on the first shot fired, then it’s smooth sailing from there on out.

If you dig intelligent first person shooters and are tired of trudging through dark brown hallways in games like Quake and Doom, then you should definitely check out Far Cry. It’s among the best of its kind.