Far Cry®

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.

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.

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.

The game would be great, not doubt about it, but the issues it has just ruins it for me. - Enemies shoot you through tents, as if they have x-ray vision. - The textures of the map are not rendered correctly, and grass grows 2 meters away from the player, even after setting the game to ultra.

There was a time in game history, at the beginning of the years '00, when a gamer had to choose side: AMD vs Intel, ATI vs nVidia, Quake vs Unreal, Doom3 vs HalfLife2. Then, at least for what concerns me, came Far Cry. Far Cry hit the stores before HalfLife2 and Doom3 (which were the "next gen FPS" of the time). Nobody was expecting a game like this. Amazing graphic, sandbox gameplay, fast paced shooting, stealth mode, vehicles. This is one of my top 10 FPS of all time and it is the one that really showed me what kind of depth a "mindless shooter" can achieve. True, Deus Ex and No One Lives Forever came before and they honestly broke the barrier of their genre. But this... It was like a world opened in front of my eyes. Every mission was screaming "freedom". The sequels and the pseudo sequels (Crysis) are just a linear consequence of this one. Games like this are one of a kind, it's like the first Gothic: they come and they change the way you see at a genre. You HAVE to play this.