Far Cry: Cry for the beauty.

Ah, the game that took me so long to start playing, and finally I have. I must say the game is very good and deserves one of the top ten games of the year it came out.

My recap great game with some bugs and issues, any notes I have I put a * in front so you would know.

Plot: You start out on a boat with a woman, somewhere in the middle of the ocean. As you come up to some islands you suddenly get attacked and the next thing you know you wash up on an island. As you start exploring you get a walkie-talkie sort of thing and start talking to this mysterious guy and he tells you that the woman has been taken capture by some mercenaries. You decide that you want to go save her than get off the island as fast as possible. Eventually in the game you find out why there are all these people on the island and the plan to create a serum to enhance people, though it starts out just on monkeys.

Game play: This game as taken great strides above the games before it, Doom, Half-Life and produced a very nice game. There are the main weapons you would come to find in any first person shooters. There is the shotgun, submachine gun, pistol, machete, and sniper-rifle. The pistol and machete wear out there welcome fairly early, as they don’t do much for damage and range later on. As well as this you are also given armor and health. My gripe is this is very realistic, it doesn’t take long for you to be at half or no armor when you just had full. So you have to be more strategic in places and not want to lose a lot of armor or health.

Along with this there are also different vehicles to choose from, from hummers, to patrol boats. Most of the vehicles are fairly easy to maneuver, it is expected in a jungle that you will get stuck a lot even with the trails. So in my opinion most of the vehicles have very little use unless you find open flat land, else you going to be hitting trees and getting stuck every 5 mins. Plus the boats are only good if what you are doing is near water.
A nice thing I found in this game is the enemy AI was very good, much better than previous games I have played, some made after this. With all of the terrain surrounding them, bushes, rocks, it is only natural you would expect an enemy to be ducked behind it firing at you. This is nice because of if you hit one of the members in a group, the others will look for cover. Also since the game is more realistic, if you crouch and walk they won’t be able to hear you whom allow you to move around stealthy and not have to fight all of them. I tend to take the shoot them all approach, which usually means I have to do a level over again.

A good thing about this game is they gave you binoculars which function in more than just allowing you to see things that are far away. They also highlight troops that are within your field of vision but you might not be able to see because there are trees in the way. This can help a lot because of the amount of jungle terrain you play in, a lot of areas become hard to tell if there are guys there. So you can just switch on the binoculars and see. Also the binoculars work in the way that they not only allow you to see far, but hear far as well. If you zoom in on a certain area, you can hear people talk or move around.

However there are some gripes I have about the game play. First off is the ridiculousness of some of the enemies in this game. It goes beyond having good AI I have been shot from like 250 meters through brush and trees and what ever else could block there vision. I’m not talking about random spraying, I telling you they hit me and killed me with out ever seeing me. This game it seems that at times you will notice they enemy has beyond good aim, they are almost perfect.
Another problem is the saving system, in which you don’t save, but in fact they save for you. There are about 5-10 unmarked checkpoints in a given map. You have to cross some magical line and it will save for you to be able to load later. The main problem I think is if you go around an area you can miss a save point. So rather than saving it every 5 mins it could be another 5 mins before you get a save. So no longer can you save at your own pace you are at the will of the game. I’m sorry after certain very hard areas I would like to save it before the next one.

Graphics: Oh, the game has shown me the light. This games graphics are superb, well for me at least they were after I got the patch, before I had spots of missing textures and some places wouldn’t be drawn at all it was very bad. But once I patched the game it ran beautifully. The water is so well drawn I couldn’t tell if it was a picture, or if it was rendered. The trees and bushes, rocks and dirt, it all pulls you into the game. Everything looks like you are right there in the jungle with your guy. I could go on for hours telling you how nice it is when you are walking through the water, or staring at the trees. I could but I won’t cause you get the point. This game is beautiful, and beyond that it is realistic. As well the people in the game are drawn very well, only problem is they don’t have as realistic damage modeling, such as you can shot a guy in the head as much as you want, and it never comes apart or pops off. This just helps bring the game more realistic which is nice, however not really necessary.

*Get the patch, just incase your graphics appear funky like mine it fixed it right up, I also turned on v-sync and that helped I think. Check the requirements at the end and my computer to see how things check up.

Sounds: Another step in the right direction for this game. The characters acting were done very nicely; emotion is communicated through their voice and words. Just another way the game pulls you in. The sound effects are brilliant; nothing is off key or raspy, shotguns sound like shotguns. You can hear the enemy mercenaries walking or talking, also if they are a trigen maybe even growling. The binoculars take great advantage of the sound system by letting you listen in on conversation or listen to areas of the wood for the moans of a trigen. The sounds also are able to come in through 5.1 speakers, meaning you have surround sound. You can tell if they are coming up from behind you or in front. As well as sound effects there is also a nice background song, which are mostly just acoustic rock, and it doesn’t play all the times just in certain situations.

Multiplayer: Not the main reason to get this game, if it was even a reason to get it at all. It is uneven and isn’t that good, no real missions, just boring and sniper rifle has an unfair advantage. Not worth buying the game solely to play it online I would recommend sticking to single player and getting a different game if you want to play online.


Some of the problems in the game I have already mentioned, from ridiculous accuracy by the enemy to lack of saves spots. Another one is what most FPS games suffer from and that is a linear playing mode. Meaning there is one place to go and one way to do it. This game expands a lot but there is still almost only one way to do just about everything, you have to get explosives and place it where it tells you to get into the base. There isn’t any climbing the walls or blowing something else up. This isn’t to big of a problem, I just like to see more games get past this, allow you to make more decisions, give you multiple ways to go in the game, don’t save a person in the time limit? Than you have to go to these set of missions. Or if you do save them than you go to these other missions. Not to hard I wouldn’t think.

Last section: Requirements and Graphics Settings.

Required:
OS: ME, XP, 2000, 98
Processor: AMD 1ghz or Intel 1ghz or higher. (2ghz of either system or higher recommended)
RAM: 256mb (512-1gig recommended)
Video Card: 64mb directX 9.0c compatible
Hard-drive space: 4 gigs.

My Computer:
OS: Windows XP Pro Service pack-2
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3500
RAM: 1gig
Video Card: Radeon X800 Pro 256ddr
Hard-Drive: 160 gigs.

Graphics: (it will auto test but it was wrong for me)
I had everything set at high and it ran fine I could easily move it up to very high and one to ultra. Vertical sync on.
I suggest trying to chance all the scales to medium, if that works move to high. Don’t set it to high or it will move very slowly.

*Note it set my settings to low in all of them, as it recommended.