A Technical Shooter Masterpiece
Good: Tense and difficult strategic shooter, Excellent enemy AI, satisfying weapons, beautiful locale, Interesting stealth mechanics like the ability to throw rocks to distract enemy guards, realistic health for both enemies and yourself on hardest difficulty,
Bad: Weird change to more of a run and gun shooter in the last third of the game, Sudden onslaught of unrealistically strong enemies at the end
Far Cry is the game that technical shooters have been waiting for. The enemy AI is excellent on the hardest difficulty; they use many of the same tactics that you use on them. While a single mercenary is relatively easy to sneak up on and dispatch, groups are much more fun. They will flank you in the jungle and use grenades realistically. They have realistic health, a shot or two in the vitals will kill them, and the same goes for you. Enemies also will dodge out of the way of rockets and hide from sniper fire. Bullet holes and knife cuts show up on various scenery and some enemies from firefights and whatnot leading to a more immersed feel.
You have a few items and mechanics that give you a bit of stealth edge. First off, your binoculars can tag enemies and then show their locations in you immediate vicinity and the binoculars also have a directional microphone to listen in on conversations and hear footsteps and such further away. Also, you can throw small rocks to distract enemy guards, but too much and they will spot your real location. In addition, when using the sniper rifle, you can hold your breath for a bit in order to steady your aim, like in real life.
The tropical locale is gorgeous. The jungles look and sound good and present many different solutions for battling your foes. The foliage presents realistic visual cover, with tense stealth scenes like hiding from search parties and patrols and concealing yourself from circling blackhawk helicopters. The weapon sounds pack a punch and are very satisfying. The enemy dialogue is a bit comical/graphic novelesque, but not in a bad voice acting way, more a of a stylistic way. The enemies have funny little conversations that you can listen in on when sneaking around. As the game progresses, they discuss various havoc that you have been wreaking on the island and whatnot.
While you have access to a few different vehicles in the game, such as gunboats, humvees, and even a hang-glider, they are sort of means to get from one area to the other, with a few good chase scenes, rather than being a focal part of the game. I liked this, because the game really excels when you are lurking around and stalking the enemy on foot.
The game saves via a checkpoint system, which is frustrating at first coming from a dedicated pc-only viewpoint. However, the checkpoints are pretty well spaced to avoid having to play tons of parts over again, and the game saves every checkpoint you reach, and thus you can start over from many checkpoints back if you decide to play something differently. Thus, I didn't feel the need for on demand saving, and it added some stress and consequences during hard sections. Certain encounters were frustrating due to being shot by the last enemy and such before a checkpoint, but I got over it.
The later parts of the game are much different from the sneaking-around-the-jungle gameplay. Your run up against mutated and enhanced enemies rather than mercenaries. These take a lot more ammunition to bring down and some of them move very quickly. They are not quite as smart as the mercenaries. This leads to a more traditional shooter gameplay, which I found less interesting, but it is not poorly done. What I really didn't like was the ending sections which started to pile more and more of the tough enemies on to the point where it was a bit ridiculous, for instance, on the hardest difficulty, the lesser of the new enemies takes over a full clip of M-4 ammo to kill, while you still die from a couple of hits.
In all, the graphics and gameplay really suck you into a long and technical game. When it came out, Far Cry needed a pretty good machine to run it at the high levels, but now it is pretty easy to run. I did have a bit of trouble getting it to run on a 64 Vista machine, but I haven't installed recently. It is definitely worth the sub $10 it costs now to give it a go and mess around with the compatibility settings on Windows to get it to run. It is definitely in the hall of fame along with the original Half Life. If you have trouble running it, the version offered by the Steam might be more compatible with newer machines.