Far Cry [FPS] Full Game Review for PC

Far cry is a first-person shooter developed by Crytek in 2004 for Microsoft Windows. This is a game that helped evolve the graphic standard in the early nineties and has attained something of a cult following over the years since its release.

GAME PLAY

You play as a man named Jack Carver, a former Special Forces soldier hired by a woman named Val Cortez to take her to a mysterious island in Micronesia. Before he completes the job he is attacked and stranded on the island, why they attacked him? Who knows maybe that something to do with that stupid shirt. As Jack explores the island he discovers a sinister plot and ends up being chased by mutants and mercenaries. Along the way he is assisted by Val and also the obligatory scientist character wears the honor of explaining every single thing that happens in game through a magical radio connection.

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Jack is a total douchebag to be honest and the voice acting is pretty horrible but it was never trying to win any sort of awards in that regard and just serves more to get you from point A to point B. One of the game's biggest triumphs is the CryEngine which allows for some truly humongous outdoor and indoor environments and it still does look quite good when you max all of the settings out. The way the trees cast dynamic shadows across your weapon as you move through the environment still looks impressive and the first time you stepped out of that bunker and see the scale of the jungle is quite a sight to behold.

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The concept is that you're given free rein in these areas and aside from a key set of objectives how, you accomplish them is entirely up to you. Though this isn't really that true and the game is deceptively linear. The island may seem large and all but moving too far off the beaten path often ends in unscalable Hills or fatal drops to the crashing waves below but what you can do is take a more subtle approach to progressing through the levels. Early on you get a silent submachine gun which can be useful in taking down enemies without causing too much of a ruckus.

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You can throw rocks to distract enemies and sneak right past them or just go right in the front door assault rifles lazing. Weapons will need to be fired with some restraint unless you want your bullets whizzing all over the place and short controlled bursts will prove to be the most effective. Using your binoculars you can tag enemies in the area solo show up on your radar and you'll even be able to see how much sound you're sending out through a resonating circle that shows up on your mini-map. And for a while, everything is really good fun you drive speedboats and ATVs across the island scoping out bases and camps for mercenaries before planning your method of attack.

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There's a good sense of progression as night and day cycle from level to level and you'll no doubt cause all kinds of mayhem. And then you get to the second half of the game and encounter the Tri gen. The Tri gen are group of super pissed off lab experiments that conveniently manage to escape from confinement attacking Jack and the mercenaries alike. From this point on, the game is practically gone to shit and the difficulty becomes ridiculous. Abandon ship, man, the lifeboats, women, and children first. Tri gen is the most annoying enemy in any game ever made.

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For starters, on the default difficulty mode their melee attacks can kill you in one or two hits. One hit to take off all your armor then another hit to finish you off. These attacks have an unfairly long range when they leap at you regardless of how far away you move, you will almost always still take damage. Secondly they're able to take a serious beating up to several close-range shotgun blasts or close to an entire clip from assault rifle. The larger Trojan enemies have no sense of self-preservation as they bombard you with a fast firing rocket launcher even at point-blank range that can destroy a vehicle in a single blast.

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On top of all of this, you will rarely fight one at the time, quite often up to half a dozen if not more in a single encounter. And to make it even more annoying yes it gets more annoying, the Tri general prioritize killing you over the mercenaries. They will literally stop what they're doing and just beeline straight towards you. They're cheap, they're a pain in the ass, they're assholes, they're bastards and I don't like them. Like the Ceph in crisis they are everything that is wrong with the game and they totally ruin the second half of the game with their very existence.

Getting past these guys is mostly just luck hoping they can get stuck on a wall or somehow glitch out, giving you a free hit because skill gets practically thrown out the window as soon as these fucking assholes show up. Even the basic mercenaries seem to be juiced up on the Super Soldier Serum at this point, they tap dance all over the place making accurate shots unfairly tricky and anything other than a direct headshot will just bounce off their body armor. Their damage output is ridiculously high even on the easiest settings, Jack can only take a few bullets before buying the farm and it is incredibly cheap.

The attack tactics that you may abuse sneaking and moving slowly through the bushes become all but useless as everyone is able to spot you within a ten-mile radius and enemies launch rockets and use rifles with frustrating accuracy. This is legitimately one of the hardest shooting games ever made. Why they even have a higher difficulty mode is just beyond me because the so called medium setting will have most plays ripping out their hair. You will die over and over and over again and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. You don't mix all of this shit even worse, the fact that the game uses a checkpoint system.

How good was that FPS game that didn't have quick save, no one ever . If there's a better example than far cry of why checkpoints do not work in first-person shooters, I have yet to see it. There is a way to quick save through the console but it doesn't change the fact that the core game is a horribly irritating and cheaply coded mess. It is important to note though that all of these problems literally only rise in the second half of the game and I can't think of any other game aside from crisis that is that has such a large contrast between the first and second half of its campaign.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND

Far cry was good for its time in the way that it gave players some great open-ended environments to seemingly forge their own paths and it had a gorgeous graphics engine and good sound too. Even if character models do look like they're made out of plastic, the game does show off some truly impressive artificial intelligence as well when they're not wall hacking and there's lots of subtleties with the shooting and stealth that's easy to gloss over when you're getting attacked by a dozen mercs at once.

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But in terms of a shooting game, it is as brutal and difficult as they come and it sure as shit doesn't hold back. It's not all bad to be honest and there are a few later levels which almost redeem it. I also think the auto shotgun is one of the most badass guns of all time and when you do actually get given a move with a sniper rifle, taking out enemies from a mile away is great fun.
It also included a hugely enjoyable multiplayer mode but unfortunately the Ubisoft servers were shut down years ago so yeah, that sucks.

MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Supported OS: Windows® 2000/XP (only)
Processor: AMD Athlon™ 1 GHz or Pentium® III 1 GHz
Memory: 256 MB
Graphics: 64 MB DirectX® 9.0b-compliant graphics card (see supported list*)
Sound: DirectX 9.0b compliant PCI card (Sound Blaster Audigy series recommended)
DirectX: DirectX 9.0b or higher
Hard Disk Space: 4 GB
Multiplay: Broadband with 64 Kbps upstream (512 Kbps upstream to host 8 players)
Mouse/Keyboard: Windows compatible mouse and keyboard required

RECOMMENDED SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:

Supported OS: Windows 2000/XP (only)
Processor: AMD Athlon 2-3 GHz or Pentium 4 2-3 GHz
Memory: 512-1024 MB
Sound: Sound Blaster® Audigy® series (see supported list*)
Graphics: 128 MB GeForce™ 4 128 MB to GeForce FX 5950; ATI Radeon 9500-9800 XT
*Supported video cards at time of retail release: NVIDIA GeForce 2/3/4/FX families ( NVIDIA based cards must have ForceWare drivers 53.03 or later; GeForce 2 and GeForce 4 MX cards do not support all graphics features). ATI Radeon 8500/9000 families (ATI Radeon 9500-9800 XT recommended; ATI-based cards must have Catalyst drivers 3.9 or higher).

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REVIEW/RATING

Graphics 5/10
Sound 7/10
Gameplay 6/10
Controls 6/10
Effect 5/10

OVERALL REVIEW/RATING

6.2\10

DEVELOPER

Crytek Studios

PUBLISHER

Ubisoft

GENRE

First-person shooter, Adventure

MODE(S)

Single-player‎, ‎multiplayer (discontinued)

RELEASE DATE

23 Mar, 2004

CONCLUSION

Truth be told, I've never been the biggest fan of far cry, it was horribly optimized upon release like all Crytek games and most people seem to overlook the game's bigger problem simply because of how good it looked on the surface. Despite everything I said I'd probably still recommend it but I won't make any allusions to the fact that this game will kick your goddamn ass.