 "Only Half Life is better in the shooter genre" | 2009-10-04 |
| - Reviewed By User: A2KIWW4WKIQ08Z |
Far Cry is the best shooter ever, except for Half Life 1. (Half Life 2 was just OK)
I have played all the best shooters and this one leaves most of them far behind. It has the best water graphics I have seen in a game with realistic waves and foam and even little fish swimming underwater. And the terrain graphics are also pretty, with sandy beaches, rocks, cliffs and palm trees, the island setting is wonderfully realized.
The story is outstanding and draws you into the game, with great voice acting and nice twists along the way. The ambiance is all there in spades, and the AI is very good as well.
A couple misfires though - it does get too difficult especially near the end of the game. I had to use cheats to get through a few tough spots, and used god mode. It would have been very frustrating if these cheats had not been available, but since they are easily found I can't complain too much about the difficulty. The ending of the game feels anti-climactic and could have been done better. The game may be too long, in todays 5-10 hour shooters this one is around 20 hours and can start to drag a bit near the end.
Besides those minor points, Far Cry is a top class game and a must own for any shooter fan! |
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| "FPS perfection" | 2009-09-18 |
| - Reviewed By dallas_dredske |
This title is another game I waited several years to play and now after finishing it I completely regret waiting so long. What an amazingly fun game! I play a lot of FPS' and this one definitely stood out as memorable in many ways. Here's my take;
Pros
- Brilliant graphics, even by today's standards. The Environments are lush and gorgeous and character models are top notch.
- Clever AI. Enemies have no qualms about staying where they are and shooting you if you're in sight. If they don't see where you're hiding they will come and find you.
- Good variety of weapons and gadgets to use throughout the game. The binoculars were extremely useful and the guns all had a realistic feel to them.
- Plenty of vehicles to use (similar to what made Halo fun). The various boats are especially fun to control.
- Open ended and expansive environments allow you to approach your objective from just about any way you want. There are no invisible walls in the game either which really adds to the immersiveness of the environments.
- Great musical score. Even though some of the tracks are looped and mildly repetitive the overall score is excellent in its entirety.
- Lengthy game campaign. Much longer and engaging than most other FPS' out there.
- Gameplay mechanics are solid.
- Respectable voice acting.
Cons
- Story is somewhat contrived
- Dialogue can be a bit cheesy at times
- Land vehicles are tough to drive and have some control issues
- Ending was completely anticlimactic. I was extremely let down with how the game finished.
- Some overly difficult parts, especially sequences with numerous helicopters or mutants.
- Enemy sight distance can be a bit too long at times allowing them to spot/shoot you before you ever even see them.
Far Cry is a gaming achievement and the developers should be commended for creating such a great FPS. To get so much right and so little wrong in a game like this is a rarity. If you haven't played it yet, don't wait any longer. Pick up a copy and enjoy the FPS fun. |
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| "A classic first-person shooter" | 2009-09-18 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1CQGAPQMN41LV |
Deep in the Pacific Ocean lies a chain of isolated islands which the reclusive Dr. Krieger has taken over in order to pursue his enigmatic 'research' into genetic engineering. Ex-special forces agent-turned-boat-captain Jack Carver is chartered to take an unusual young lady to the islands, but his boat promptly gets blown up by a bazooka. Before he knows what is going on, Jack's been drafted by the CIA and finds himself having to fight his way through multiple islands packed with heavy weaponry-wielding mercenaries and bizarre genetic mutants as well.
Far Cry was released in April 2004, with newbie developers CryTek getting their first game out ahead of that year's eagerly-anticipated Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. With the help of a demo tactically timed to come out two months before the game, the title blindsided many players who hadn't even heard of it before, but with its (for the time) awe-inspiring graphics and unusual amount of freedom for a first-person shooter, it quickly won over many fans. Although enjoyable, Doom 3 didn't really bring anything new to the table and its graphical thunder had definitely been stolen by Far Cry, and whilst Half-Life 2 did become a major success thanks to its tense, dramatic storyline and memorable characters, its extreme linearity did limit replayability.
Far Cry, despite a generic, corny story and a meathead protagonist, works so well because the game basically just sticks you on a boat or on the beach of an island with an objective, a gun, a hearty clap on the back and then lets you get on with it. There are multiple paths to each objective, some employing stealth, some allowing for a running-in-with-all-guns-blazing approach, sometimes with vehicles available for use, sometimes not.
This allows Far Cry to tap into the primeval appeal of the first-person shooter genre: running around with a gun shooting bad guys. All too often this very basic component of the genre is overlooked in favour of gimmicks like bullet-time or physics puzzles, but Far Cry puts it front-and-centre. Running around in the jungle outflanking squads of mercenaries, making use of cover, or shimmying up to a treehouse and deploying a sniper rifle to pick enemies off from 3km away is tremendously satisfying, as is executing a well-planned attack on a fortified enemy position after a careful and painstaking reconnaissance of the enemy position. You can use binoculars to 'mark' enemy troops on your radar which makes absolutely no sense in a literal context but gives you a feeling that recon missions are actually worthwhile. You also have a remote mike you can use to eavesdrop on enemy soldiers' conversations, which sometimes results in plot-advancing information or a random comic exchange, which adds to the game's atmosphere.
The game being five years old, it is now possible for most modern PCs to run the game with settings rammed up to the maximum. With the 1.4 version patch installed with new particle, smoke, haze and HD lighting effects, the game still looks jaw-droppingly good. Not as face-meltingly brilliant as Crysis with everything turned up to eleven, of course, but still pretty awesome. The sheer sense of scale is also incredible. These islands are vast and if you can see a location, you can probably travel there, whether it's by boat, car, hang-glider or on foot. In short, heavy weapons-driven ultraviolence has rarely looked so good or been so much fun.
There are several downers. Almost immediately noticeable is the total absence of a quick-save system in favour of a checkpoint system. Most of the time this is fine and it actually achieves its goal of making you genuinely think hard about your decisions, knowing that getting killed aimlessly will result in a 5-minute trek to get back to where you are right now. However, there are a few times when the checkpoints are way too far apart with several intense firefights and no health kits in between, and getting past those bits without ripping your monitor from its mount and hurling it through the window in rage can be quite difficult.
Rather more famous is the fact that whilst the mercenary enemies are clever, intelligent and satisfying opponents, the mutant enemies are a complete pain in the backside. Even the lowliest mutant grunts can jump about thirty feet through the air and kill you with one hit, and by the time the invisible ones armed with machine guns show up, the joke is starting to wear a little thin. That said, the mutants aren't actually the game-destroying factor they are sometimes represented as: unlike Crysis (where the human enemies vanish quite soon after the even more annoying aliens show up), the mutants and human enemies remain interspersed throughout the whole game, and the mutants actually disappear for quite long stretches of the later levels, but they are fairly irritating. Vehicle handling is also a bit on the oversensitive side and in some parts of the game walking is actually quicker than driving slowly so as not to wrap your jeep around the side of a tree.
As I mentioned earlier, the story is quite corny and your main character is a pretty unlikable dunderhead, but oddly this works in a sort of retro-1990s FPS flashback kind of way. Carver is cut from the same cloth as Duke Nuke'em (not quite so ludicrous though) and the fantastically-named John Blade from SiN, and his macho antics are almost endearing in an age of dark and tortured game heroes like that guy from FEAR and whatshisface from Splinter Cell.
But Far Cry is all about the gameplay, and the gameplay is superb. I played the game through from start to finish for about the fifth time for this review, and I was still finding new routes, new tactics and new combinations of weapons and vehicles to beat each map. Far Cry has greater replayability than almost any other FPS I can think of (discounting pseudo-RPGs like STALKER), even more than its quasi-successor Crysis. It is simply, an excellent and slightly underrated game.
A couple of words of clarification: there were several semi-spin-offs released on consoles with names such as Far Cry Instincts, which used a cut-down version of the main game engine and were not developed by CryTek. There is also an 'official' sequel called Far Cry 2 which has absolutely nothing to do with Far Cry at all and has had a very mixed reception. |
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| "Intertaining" | 2009-09-12 |
| - Reviewed By User: AAN4LNXAAF4J1 |
| If you like first person shotter PC games,this is one to have. It`s not it`s not one of the newest PC game but, is great fun and a real challanging as PC and Video games go. Amazion had a good listing and the seller shipped fast, item was as discribed. |
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 "Great til you get so far" | 2009-05-21 |
| - Reviewed By User: AIUFWO076UNLJ |
| The game is really cool until you get to these things that have cannons on their arms, then everything gets impossibly hard. |
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| "Best PC Shooter to date" | 2009-05-06 |
| - Reviewed By chernyvolk |
Definitely one of the best PC shooters ever - it's a shame the sequel sucks.
Huge, wonderfully done maps, no set way to get through some of them (gone through one way the first time, another way the next, giving you nice replay ability), excellent AI, beautiful graphics.
Even nicer, you don't need a monster machine to play this - I've actually managed on a P4 2.4 Ghz with just 64M of video... but to get the most out of the game you'll need something better, especially for video.
Vehicles... loads of vehicles to drive in this, inculding an armed Dune Buggy, a heavily armed 4WD, an unarmed Big Truck, an inflatable boat and a heavily armed Patrol Boat. Not to mention a Hang Glider and a Forklift. Yeah, a Forklift - okay, it doesn't move fast, and it's unarmed, but it's fun. Even better, the vehicles move like the real thing - if you hit a bump, you'll bounce, and you can do your favorite spy movie jumps with them.
The AI is some of the best I've ever seen - enemies not only outflank you and move in different directions, but they cooperate with each other, which can put you in trouble.
The weapons are fairly standard, but they do have good physics to them - recoil, blast damage, etc.
The maps are lush and beautiful - some of the biggest maps I've ever seen in a FPS. And unlike some, it's not all darkness that you can't see through - a lot of the levels take place during broad daylight in the beautiful south Pacific.
The storyline is fairly standard spy stuff, but still fun - and the character interactions can be interesting.
The graphics are just a hair below games like "F.E.A.R" or "Quake 4", but that's not to detract from them - they are quite vivid and beautiful.
All in all if you're looking for a top of the line PC shooter with plenty of replay ability and terrific AI - and one that doesn't require selling your soul for a top of the line machine - then you'll definitely want to grab this. Just don't bother with "Far Cry 2".
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