(far)Cry for your old pc and get ready to fire up the future!

INTRO:

Theres an old saying in the gaming world, thats its game play that counts not graphics, and for the most part its been true.

Whats been more fun over the years then Tetris, or pong or Arkanoids? The question was 'could a game have both?'

Yes it can!

Coming from a little known developer 'Cry tek' this FPS game bestowed mixed emotion as it grew towards its release date, would it be any good? How would it run? What was it all about? Well I'll tell you what its all about.


STORYLINE:

You play Jack Carver a gravelly voice Macho man dressed in a holiday shirt who has to save 'the girl'(Valarie) from the enemy, whilst keeping his person intact. Ok a hardly original storyline there, but at least it has one. At least you thinks thats the storyline untill mutant animals start appearing and you get a feeling that this is a rip off of 'The island of Dr Moreau'. The storyline is decent , whilst corny and provides us with the backdrop for the excellent Singleplayer experience.

You get helped along your way by your assistant 'Doyle' who offers you hints, tips and mission objectives as you play. He can sometimes grow tedious with he cliche comments however, but it doesnt really affect the core gameplay!

GRAPHICS AND SOUND:

Do you like tropical paradises? Islands in the sun? Waves lapping up against the beach, Golden Sa- Ok you get the idea, you see Far Cry is basicly one big long dangerous action packed postcard.

The Cry-Tek engine is the most powerful Graphics engine in the world to date, no other game can match the levels of textures in this game, it is simply the first of the new generation games that are coming out this year and its stunning!

Trees and Foilage are modelled perfectly, no jagged edges or pixely leaves for the trees, everythings picture perfect in this one.

As are player models, they bestow a wide range of emotions and lose most of the lagged edges that you get in other games, although the mutant ape models arent QUITE as detailed as would have been nice, but maybe thats just 'Doom-3's' Creature models spoiling things.

Water is pixel shaded and translucent making for the most beautiful aquatic locations ever, not to mention all the reefs, corals , and aquatic life underneath it.

However this beauty comes at the cost for Graphics card performance, but even at lower settings it still looks great, just not AS great!

The game also uses an advanced physics system. Things will bounce realisticly, barrels will roll down a hill and deflect of trees in true-to-life fashion, enemioes will fall and bounce around in the correct fashion too, this can also be very pleasing to the eye.

Sounds in this game are a mixed bag, alot of the sounds are really realistic and atomospheric with lots of suspence themes, however one little niggle is the sound changing to suit the action, so when enemies appear and you're on the run it will change to fast action drum beats and basicly spoil the stealth aspect of the game by in a sense 'telling' you that you've been spotted by the sound. Bullets and guns sound just as they should with realistic shatters and fires.

ENEMIES(ai), BASICS AND WEAPONS:

The opponents you will meet in Far cry are some of the toughest enemies I have ever seen in a game, the mercenarys will come out of the shadows, trees and bushes and ambush you, raining an almost constantly layer of fire at you, meaning you will be ducking for cover all the time. They are also some times to kill and a little too good, this can be frustrating especially coupled with the games Save system.

The game doesnt have a 'save when you want' feature, it opts for the checkpoint method, where it saves at given checkpoints on the map.

This can be annoyingly tedious if there is one sniper who keeps killing you after you have got so far killing everyone in your path only to have to re-do the whole lot again.

Thankfully the Checkpoints arent too far apart and they are usually placed sensibly. Also there is none of quake 2's frustrating occurances where you pass the save point right on the wisp of health and die every time you reload, when you reload you will have been giving a boost of all the essentials.

The ai in the game makes things worse in a sense by being very good. Enemies will hunt you down from afar, root you out, lay down cover fire, hide, swim, and basicly do most things a human player would do, If you kill one of a bands teammates the others will hunt you down. This can go a bit silly however when you kill one lone guy with a silenced pistol and the entire island around you is suddenly hunting you down! It only adds to the intense difficulty of the game.

So with all this said you can be sure of some heavy artillery to kill these clever cpu's with.

Weapons are really standard FPS fare however, but for the job you need they get the job done very well.

There are Pistols, Shotguns, Rifles, Sub machine guns, Silenced guns, Sniper rifles, and of course Grenades and Rocket launchers. Its all standard FPS fare, although you will find them doing more damage in this game than in a lot of others.

There are also a few vehicles in this game such as Jeeps Patrol boats and the enemy controlled Apache gunships, although you ont find them that useful in game since a lot of the travelling is in dense forests and you are a sitting duck in a jeep. They also feature in the multiplayer portion of Far Cry.

SINGLEPLAYER AND MUTLIPLAYER:

The single player in Far Cry is excellent. Its long, taxing, intelligent, and fun but never strays too far off the plot or gets you bored, you will always be on your toes.

There are many missions spanning a variety of different locations (80% of them tropical islands-10% caves-10% facilities and volcanos), and They all have their various objectives and checkpoints.

All in all the SP experience takes us back to Half lifes stunning effort giving us around 20-30 hours worth of gameplay, its well worth it.

Multiplayer however is a little less excellent, whilst not bad it fails to match up to the Sp element in the game.

There are 3 modes, One isthe same as the lastest incarnation of Unreal tournament's 'Assault' mode, whereby you have an attacking team and a defending team, and the attackers have to complete various objectives, whilst the defenders have to thwart their attempts to do so.

The other modes are 'DEATHMATCH' and 'TEAM DEATHMATCH', they speak for themselves I believe.

However the mian problem with Far Crys Multiplayer is that both the Rocket launcher and the sniper rifle are hugely overpowered.

a lone sniper hiding somewhere across the Island will be able to kill players miles away without being seen, As a rocket launcher wielding player will do tremendous splash damage, killing everyone within a huge range.

So the mutiplayer is a flaws aspect of the game but its not that bad, and besides the Singleplayer more then makes up for it.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:

You're going to need one hell of a pc to play this beauty on.

Anything below an amd 2600(or p4 equivilent) with 768 Ram and a geforce fx 5900 or ti 4600 and your not going to run this on full detail. Although it will run on lesser machines, but if you want to run this game with everything turned up high you will need something like the following

AMD 2800+ or p4 2.8ghz, 1024 ddr Ram, Geforce ti 4600 or 5900xt. This game also takes up a hefty bit of your hard drive, so make sure you have around 4-5 gig to spare for it.

CONCLUSION:

All in all Far Cry is an excellent FPS game, the best of the year so far, but in a year that promises 2 of the biggest names in gaming ever to surface who knows what summer/winter will bring us. For now though Far cry is a beautiful, difficult, sometimes frustrating Shooter thats going to be on your pcs for many months to come, Buy it now and join the holiday in hell!