Far Cry is one of those surprise unannounced, unknown titles that one day suddenly took over the gaming sites hype devices, and stole the big articles away from the likes of doom , or unreal tournament. Not only because of their shiny, amazingly great levels, but for it's style of gaming. This game lets you complete the objectives the way you want, there's no defined system of checkpoints to follow like, lets say, the call of duty games. In this sort of games, the environments were crucial to creating the entire pillars of gameplay this game is based on. The whole game is basically one big tutorial level, where you keep on learning new tricks and ways to make your way around the enemy AI, and if you want, to make them fly in the air in many different cool looking ways. I can't make this "game as a tutorial" feature important enough, since it's what makes this game appealing, and so attractive to gamers who aren't hardcore FPS players, or people who like (or can) follow through long tired tutorial lesson levels before actually playing a game, such as me. This game is the complete opposite of that. You can pick it up and play, and you will get killed very often, but on the next load you will find your way to clear that mercenary camp, outpost, or base. It's a tutorial from start to finish, which adjusts to your skill level, and motivates you throughout the game, with it's breathtakingly beautiful visuals. Playing this game indeed is like being on a "vacation". Skip the story, that's not the point of this game, neither are the characters, the tired plot doublecrossing towards the end, and overall cheesyness of the plot. Enjoy the ride, its one big amazing one.
In my review of Blake Stone Aliens of Gold, I incorrectly mentioned that it was released shortly, Doom II. A forum member pointed out correctly that Aliens of Gold had been released exactly one week after Doom I came out. Thanks for your correction. Probably i got the dates of Aliens of Gold and its expansion pack Planet Strike flipped. In any case, the expansion pack to Aliens of Gold, Planet strike did come out shortly after Doom II, about 2 weeks after. By that time, Doom II was the hot killer app to push the graphical power of everyone's 486 computers, and by then Blake Stone with its grid-like maze levels was already a year old and mostly long forgotten by the players. Pity that back then too, brand new graphical effects were the main driving reason to buy games too. Planet Strike brought additional action-filled, puzzle solving levels to the original game. As many have pointed out, in this expansion you actually get to fight Dr. Goldfire. Many of the features of the original game are still here, like the awesome menu-driven map selector, which allows you to go back and forth between levels, backtracking on some if necessary (something Doom II was not capable of doing). The friendly and not so friendly NPCs are there too, some providing you useful items like food tokens that can be used to buy food to regain your health at food stations, sort of like the medic stations in Half life. Some visual effects like fog were added too, as well as moving pillars which acted like doors. Some may say by now that I dont like Doom II for taking the spotlight away from Blake Stone. I like Doom II. It was an awesome action game. It did that very well. But Blake Stone is an action game too, and more. It provided the blueprint which Rogue and Valve used to draft their classic games Strife and Half life respectively. With updated technology of course. Thats the entire point of this review. As an extra commentary and info related to this game, there was a remake of the original Blake Stone levels made for Rise of the Triad released some time back, as some sort of tribute to this underappreciated classic game. It was included in one of the ROTT packs released as freeware. Like most old era games, it's so light in the bytesize area, that you might want to take your GOG version of Blake Stone with you when traveling. This week, john carmack re-released Wolfenstein 3D, the game whose engine powers Blake Stone, for mobile platforms. One can hope that Apogee might do the same for Blake Stone. In the meantime, theres the very cool mobile platform dosbox ports.
Blake Stone was released shortly after Doom II hit the markets, and way after it was at the top of everyone's have-to-buy list. This, plus the reality that Blake Stone was based on "older" technology than Doom II made most players completely overlook this title, a decision based on unfair criteria. Yes, Doom II's technology was superior, but it only had that as an advantage. It was a non-squared wolf3d, with more gore. Blake Stone, unlike it, since it used a more limited technology, relied on addding features to the fast corridor FPS games. Medstations supplying medkits to heal yourself, NPCs that you could talk to, backtracking levels, were some of the new additions that Blake Stone provided to the maze fps genre pioneered by id software. Unfortunately, during its time, people were too busy admiring the varying level heights and map mode from Doom II to see them. Some years later with games like Strife, and much later on, with a game called Half Life, Blake Stone had some sort of reinvindication from these games, which included many of the features that it brought to the table, and made these later games their core gameplay's trademark. Highly recommended.
