A tropical paradise seethes with hidden evil in Far Cry, a cunningly detailed action shooter that pushed the boundaries of combat to shocking new levels.Freelance mariner Jack Carver is cursing the day he ever came to this island. A week ago, a brash female reporter named Valerie had offered him an...
A tropical paradise seethes with hidden evil in Far Cry, a cunningly detailed action shooter that pushed the boundaries of combat to shocking new levels.Freelance mariner Jack Carver is cursing the day he ever came to this island. A week ago, a brash female reporter named Valerie had offered him an incredible sum of cash to take her to this unspoiled paradise. Shortly after docking, however, Jack's boat was greeted by artillery fire from a mysterious militia group swarming about the island.
With his boat destroyed, his money gone, and the gorgeous Valerie suddenly missing, Jack now finds himself facing an army of mercenaries amidst the wilds of the island, with nothing but a gun and his wits to survive. But the further he pushes into the lush jungle canopy, the stranger things become.
Jack encounters an insider within the militia group who reveals the horrific details of the mercenaries' true intentions. He presents Jack with an unsettling choice: battle the deadliest mercenaries, or condemn the human race to a maniac's insidious agenda.
A unique sandbox FPS that allows you to complete your objectives in several different ways
Challenging A.I. that dynamically responds to your actions
Beautiful graphics, even by today’s standards, that can be upgraded even further by fan-made content
Frustrating. Infuriating. Just plain bad. Some of this game's more egregious failures include: a checkpoint system instead of free saves, meaning those difficult battles have to be fought over and over and over; an AI with not only the usual ESP of a poorly-designed shooter, but also an inexplicable tendency to forget where you are even if the enemy is looking right at you; monsters who combine a flea-like ability to jump over half the map combined with an attack that can kill you with one or two hits, and pretty much always attack from an unfair ambush, meaning you get to start over again; rockets that travel almost as fast as you can walk; a huge arsenal of weapons that all do pretty much the same thing--badly; human enemies who take an entire clip to the body at close range and keep coming (you can't do this even with full armor); vehicles that are nearly impossible to control, since you can only travel at full throttle or not at all; a character who moves so slowly you can feel him age; a nonsensical reload requirement that is terribly slow and inconvenient, and totally pointless since you can just scroll the mouse wheel and instantly be holding a new weapon. Poor design, unfair enemies, boring plot line and only so-so graphics. Don't waste your money or your time.
I don't believe in giving games 5 stars, and suspect that the judgement of many gamers about old games is often distorted by nostalgia. For me, nostalgia doesn't apply here. I played it in 2012, albeit on 2004 hardware, and it blew me away. The stunning graphics; the huge, detailed, varied (although the entire game occurs on a small group of tropical islands) environments; the smart, difficult and (later in the game) frightening enemies; the sandbox approach (there are engagements that can be avoided). Real environments, real enemies, real fear, real challenges. If you play fps's, then this game is a must. If you don't play fps's, play this to alter your view.
Far Cry is among the worst PC shooters, if not THE worst, I have ever played. Never have I had the displeasure of bearing witness to such a clumsy sham of a game. Let's start with the incorrect "sandbox" tag this game receives. This is not a sandbox game, it isn't even similar. Far Cry is not composed of a single, giant world that you are free to explore like in a real sandbox game, it is made of a series of linear environments you progress through in a similar fashion to any other FPS. The only difference is that FC will give you larger, prettier places and every once in a awhile you will have the option from maybe two, or even three on one occasion, paths to take that lead to the same destination. This is a half-step from everything else, but it's no sandbox.
Then there's the issue of the gameplay mechanics, mainly the issue that they're all broken. FC, surprisingly, is mainly a stealth game. Which is too bad because the stealth is implemented in a amateur manner at best. Enemies can see you from all the way across any island, even if they're out of your level of detail sphere and you can't see them. Which means they can shoot at you with inhuman accuracy, sometimes killing you almost instantly. They can also see right through any tree, grass, bush, or shrubbery foliage, and shoot you with unadulterated efficiency which makes combat as well as stealth a chore. The best way to hide from anything is to just drop to the ground, which may or may not even work due to the random nature of the AI. Since stealth is everywhere in this game, they pervade ever corner of it's design, turning every moment of this game into frustration, tedium and trial and error.
Speaking of which, trial and error is the only way to get anywhere since you generally must die anywhere from 5 to 20 times to get past any battle. On normal difficulty, the enemies deal so much damage it only takes a few bullets at most to put you down. Don't even get me started on the monkey zombies that can kill you without even touching you, even if you're around a corner or behind cover. Which may have been fine, if the enemies didn't take 15 bullets or a head shot (unless they have a helmet)t to kill, and health packs are very poorly strewn throughout the game. Some areas have more than you might need, some have none. The sudden, constant deaths might have been okay with a forgiving checkpoint system or at least a quick save, but you forget about either of those. The check points are spread thin, and so poorly placed they often occur in mid-battle or in one case, less than a second before my jeep exploded. That was probably the worst of them.
Then there's the bland weapon system. In FC, you can carry 4 weapons. Okay, cool, except you will generally use the same 4 weapons throughout the entire game. You will have your choosing of a smorgasbord of generic assault rifles (all 5 versions of them) a generic pistol, a knife(useless), and a the obligatory sniper rifle and rocket launcher. The last of which is almost as useless as the knife. Any shooter you could possibly play has a more inventive selection than this.
The AI is strange, because the enemies are ultra-deadly, but terribly stupid and buggy. They will get caught on terrain, walk right off of cliffs and ledges, instantly forget where you are while staring at you, or pursue you half-way across the island, run around in circles, run back and forth, run at you then stand next you and yell at you until you shoot them but never fire a shot themselves, etc. etc. For a supposed "best shooter since Half Life", this is simply unacceptable, and hugely inferior to HL's AI in every way.
FC may be a gigantic, beloved failure, but it's still a decent first effort from CryTek, and it's certainly ambitious enough. At least it served as the technical benchmark for gaming rigs for years, most of the reviews don't even talk about anything past the visuals anyway. So if you want a pretty test to your PC's awesomeness go at it, just don't expect a good game along with it.
I bought this game in 2020 and it would not start on my Windows 10 AMD Ryzen 5 laptop with Vega graphics so I kind of just forgot about it. Then, in 2022, I felt a jolt of inspiration. I used to go to great efforts back in the day to make lesser games run on far worse hardware with good results. Why couldn't I do that now?
After a bit of Google-fu, I found out that all it needed to start was to add the line 'r_ShadersPrecache = "0" ' to the system.cfg within the Far Cry directory and boom, it runs at full settings on my laptop!
It's a pretty fun game. Keep in mind it's from 2004 so don't expect it to play like a modern title but as long as you have an open mind, it's a solid shooter with nice visuals and it'll run way better than it did in 2004 haha.
Imagine you're being shot at by multiple enemies that you can't see, who are unerringly accurate even from great distances, and that a few hits mean you're dead. Repeat ad nauseum; and that is basically how Far Cry starts and continues. Maybe it's a good shooter, I don't play enough of the genre to make an informed comment, but for the casual gamer this is a no fun, tedious grind. Avoid.
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