Far Cry®

Far Cry is one of those iconic titles people within gaming circles often cite in regards to visuals and even its playing style. While it may have its visual merits, it desperately lacks in the game play department. There isn't much more to say that hasn't already been stated from other people. The CryEngine is still impressive even by today's standards, and the guns have a nice kick to them. For such an awesome potential, this game simply falls flat on its face for single player. Now I'm a FPS fan going back to the days of the original MoH and CoD 1, and never have I seen such an insanely difficult campaign. The enemies can practically snipe you with a handgun from roughly half a football field away. Each hit takes nearly half of your health or armor, even at the easiest of difficulties. Last but not least, enemies seem to have some kind of x-ray vision, as I have been spotted several times while hiding behind dense bushes and even a shack. Most of the time I'm taken out after being shot through a wall. Some might argue I'm playing it wrong, that its "sandbox" nature allows you to accomplish objectives in any way you see fit. From my own experience, the mechanics simply won't let you have too much freedom despite the huge and seemingly open outdoor maps. Let's say you need to infiltrate an enemy camp in the middle of a jungle. While you may be able to take a path with the least amount of enemies, their supernatural vision will foil any further stealth approaches once you get there. The only result from such a scenario is you turning into a fine pink mist in a torrent of bullets. Now imagine having to restart at a very far off location to begin anew. Casual buyer beware, you're better off looking elsewhere for a more satisfying game. Don't let the visuals fool you into thinking it's a stroll through a tropical paradise.

On first impressions, Far Cry seems like it's going to be a hell of a lot of fun. Lots of people have talked about the quality of the graphics but it's the setting that really impressed me. Running around tropical islands, gunfights among the ruins of WWII defences, sneaking around the rusting hulk of an old ship, crawling through the jungle sniping guards off the towers at a military base, hang-gliding between islands...great stuff. Unfortunately it doesn't last. Pretty soon you'll be fighting sci-fi mutant enemies who can leap vast distances and kill you with a couple of hits, or soak up damage like brick walls while firing constant streams of rockets at you. They're deadly in the open outdoor environments but fighting them in the enclosed spaces of laboratories and maze-like ruins can be unbelievably unfair. But then many shooters from this era suffered from brutal difficulty levels and I'm still a fan of them, so what makes Far Cry so irritating? One massive, face-palmingly awful design decision. Checkpoints. Yes, you don't get to choose when you save the game. All those incredibly difficult encounters I mentioned? You don't get to beat them, save and move on, you get to play them over and over again. Spend half an hour crawling through the jungle picking off enemies only to get blasted apart from a rocket launcher 1000 yards away? Tough, you're doing it all again. Reach a checkpoint with low health and armour so you have to backtrack for supplies? You'll be doing that backtrack twenty or thirty times. As the spaces between checkpoints get longer, the enemies get tougher and you're forced through the gauntlet of overwhelmingly difficult and badly designed set-pieces the game simply stops being any kind of fun whatsoever. Progress is an utter chore – the whole second half the game is nothing but an exercise in frustration. It was only sheer bloody-mindedness that kept me going at all, though I finally gave up close to the end. And that was only playing of Medium difficulty. There are three more levels above that. So yeah, there was potential here but it was utterly squandered by the checkpoint system and some truly rotten level design. Unless you're a real gaming masochist I'd avoid this one, I'm afraid.

I'm not sure how people can give this game a good review. Yes, it has good graphics, for its time, but it is literally impossible to play without dying a million times. I had to resort to GOD mode, which keeps track of how many times you die. It's A LOT! It wouldn't be so bad if you could actually SNEAK. But, nope, sneaking is virtually useless. And once you have been found, EVERYBODY in that area knows where you're at, no matter where you go. Enemies can shoot you through solid objects or from a cliff half a mile away. Horrible game. I only gave it 2 stars because of the graphics, but it really is a piece of crap. Not being able to save is also a big issue. And it can sometimes be difficult to figure out where you are supposed to go. I hope Far Cry 2 is better!

FarCry is two games in one: The first game is a graphically groundbreaking game with huge, lush outdoor levels and sandbox gameplay, where it's up to you to figure out how to traverse the jungle from point A to point B, and what plan of attack (or stealth!) you want. The second game is the third-rate corridor levels you have to put up with. It's as if they were designed by an entirely different staff of developers: nonsensical layouts, buggy implementation (don't get me started on the map "Steam"), and trigens whose swipes can somehow kill you from across the room. It's as if no one even playtested these levels. Skip them. Just open the console and skip the corridor levels outright. They're in no way worth playing, not even for the story (which doesn't make sense anyway. I mean, not even remotely: at one point you escape from a nuke, only to find yourself in a cutscene where you've been captured). A complete waste of time. In short: play the jungle levels. Play them a thousand times. 5 stars. But skip the corridor levels, which are mediocre at best, and infuriating at worst.

If you buy this game you're going to end up with the most recent version, which is v1.4 The 1.4 patch was mostly put out for multiplayer balancing and functionality. It also COMPLETELY BREAKS some parts of the single player campaign! Specifically, enemies will be able to detect you through (opaque) tent walls. This bug is one of the biggest reasons people complain about the unfairness of the AI's vision. Google a fan-made patch to downgrade the game from v1.4 to 1.3. Like I said, the only things you'll be missing out on are multiplayer related, while you'd be improving the single player considerably.