What’s interesting about
Far Cry is that it is a linear game without being overly linear. You have to address all of the problems and puzzles in the game in a specified order but how you address them is up to you. You can go the sneaky route or you can attempt the guns a blazin’ method. Early on in the game you have to retrieve a boat from an old aircraft carrier, the boat is stored on the top of the carrier so you have to fight your way up to the top of the carrier in order to retrieve it. Sounds simple right, well it turns out there are a few dozen bad guys with bad attitude who want to keep the boat to themselves. You can either go up there and fight them (and their friends in the attack helicopter) or you can simply dive into the water and shoot the chains holding the boat in place. Both solutions get the job done so it’s up to you to choose how to do it.
While the bulk of the focus is on the single player mode,
Far Cry does have a decent multiplayer system with three modes; deathmatch, team deathmatch, and Assault. The first two are self explanatory but the Assault mode is very reminiscent of the Assault mode from Unreal Tournament where you have two teams, one attacking and one defending. The difference in
Far Cry is that each side has three classes, Sniper, Grunt, and Engineer. The classes are what they sound like but the engineers are cool in that they can build up base defenses and walls around the targets. I don’t think the multiplayer modes are going to be pulling users from
Unreal Tournament 2004 but it’s a nice add on to a solid single player game.
I did have a few nits to pick with the game. The first is the game is really, really hard. I’m talking
Ninja Gaiden, kill you before you turn around hard. This coupled with the console like save point system will mean that you will be spending a lot of time working your way through certain parts of the game. Even with the cheats (no God mode) the game is still exceedingly difficult even on the Easy setting.
The second issue people may have is that all of those pretty graphics come at a price and you’re going to need a pretty kicking system to be able to really enjoy the beauty of the game. I would recommend downloading one of the demos to ensure that your system can handle the game at a reasonable clip.
My final nit is a personal one and that’s the game moves very slow, slower than even
Battlefield Vietnam. It was very tough coming from a game like
Unreal Tournament since the speed at which the character moves is so slow. Is this more realistic? Probably, is it a lot of fun all the time? No not really since it takes a while to cross parts of the map and it sucks even worse when you get there only to be killed and are forced to repeat the long trek. The vehicles help but not much. This is a personal preference so your mileage may vary.
All in all
Far Cry is a fantastic experience if you have the hardware to play it. The folks at Ubi and Cry Tek have done a great job of creating an immersive environment for you to explore and enjoy. Is it as good as the original
Half Life? I don’t think so but it’s probably one of the best single-player FPS games to come out in quite some time.
More On:
Far Cry Companies:
Crytek A-
One of the best looking games on the market, Far Cry is beautiful to look at and a lot of fun to play. Some people may be turned off by the system requirements and difficulty though.
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