Far Cry Review

The game limits you to four weapons at a time, so like in Halo, there's a tactical element present that makes you weigh the positives and negatives of each weapon. All the weapons are taken from the real world, including the M4 carbine and the G36 assault rifle. It takes a bit of time to familiarize yourself with each weapon, especially since each has different characteristics, such as recoil. The G36 is hard to aim while firing, and the P90 submachine gun has a high rate of fire but does less damage. Hit location is also important. Headshots usually result in kills, while mercenaries have body armor that makes them resistant to hits to the torso. There is a rudimentary physics engine in the game that lets you knock over objects and hurls bodies in the air, but it's not as fleshed-out as it could be. For instance, a wooden crate will float in the water, but it won't shatter, even if you fire a minigun at it.

You can drive vehicles from a third-person perspective, which is easier.

Far Cry features a loading technique that's similar to the one used in Half-Life and Halo. There's generally one long load at the beginning of each chapter. Then the entire level, no matter how large, plays seamlessly after that. The game only pauses for a fraction of a second every now and then to autosave your progress. Otherwise, there's nothing that takes you out of your suspension of disbelief, so you always feel as though you're actually exploring a tropical archipelago. The game uses a checkpoint-style save system, so you can't manually save your progress. If you die, you'll start back at the last checkpoint, which only takes a few moments to load. The inability to quick save the game isn't as annoying as it seems, since the checkpoints are generally spaced within reason. However, there are a few moments where it feels like the checkpoints are few and far between, which can be frustrating when you die and have to restart. At any rate, publisher Ubisoft reports that a quick-save feature will be added in a downloadable patch for the game.

The single-player campaign packs more than 20 hours worth of gameplay, which is an impressive amount in this day and age--when most first-person shooters feature campaigns that are half this length. And the developers manage to do this without making it feel like they're recycling themselves through the campaign. As you slowly uncover the plot, there's always something that will awe you, stun you, or scare you. Just when you think you've seen it all or you've gotten to the point where most games would end, the designers keep on going and up the ante even more.

The multiplayer portion of Far Cry is competent but not nearly as spectacular as the single-player game. There are only three game modes--free-for-all, team deathmatch, and assault--as well as a limited number of maps for each mode. Moreover, all the maps are quite large in size, which means that if you only have a handful of players, then you'll spend a lot of time looking for someone to kill. You'll also spend a lot of time just moving around the map because sandy surfaces restrict your movement speed. Additionally, movement speed is reduced by the specific weapon you're carrying. There are a few vehicles in multiplay, but they're not too useful during combat. The jeep, for example, has an open-air driver's compartment, which means there's no protection at all from bullets. And there are not a lot of places to drive because the thick foliage and rough terrain limit vehicle usage mainly to roads. Some of the weapons also feel horribly unbalanced. For instance, the rocket launcher does a tremendous amount of splash damage, and the sniper rifle can dominate a match over long ranges. There are also a handful of other oddities in multiplay. Most notably, if you pick up a weapon of a certain class that you already possess, the new weapon disappears as though you picked it up, but you won't actually have it in your inventory.

The lighting and shadow effects in the game are incredibly impressive.

As expected, you're going to need to have some serious hardware to run Far Cry as it's meant to be played. While the game will run on lower-end machines, you'll have to tone down detail settings. And with older video cards, you won't get much of the graphical eye candy in the game. From our experience, we recommend a 2GHz machine with a DirectX 8.1 or 9.0-compliant video card. However, Far Cry could very well be the killer app people have been looking for to justify upgrading, because it looks that good. And, frankly, running the game with a lower detail level means you lose a lot of the jungle foliage, which reduces your level of immersion in the game. It should be noted that Crytek's execution is superb. Aside from the multiplayer quirks, we experienced no stability issues and no bugs. This is an impressive accomplishment considering the complexity and ambitious scale of the game. The potential for this technology is exciting. Not only do we expect third-party developers to license Crytek's engine to power their own games, but Crytek also includes editing tools with Far Cry, so modmakers will get to develop their own ideas.

Far Cry is a stunning game in so many ways. It certainly raises the bar for graphics to new heights. And yet, it's not just a technology demonstration. In Far Cry, the graphics are just one of the ingredients that submerge you into the experience. The developers exhibit a growing sense of maturity throughout the game. It's as if they themselves were learning how to use the graphics engine in conjunction with the AI, sound, and level design to create a superior gameplay experience--one that starts out impressively and, for the most part, just keeps getting better. The result is an awesome thing to behold, and it's an even better thing to experience.