Far Cry

"Don't let the viral advertisers fool you, Far Cry is a terrible game."

Don't let the viral advertisers fool you, Far Cry is a terrible game.

Graphics 6/10
The graphics are pretty ambitious. Out of the FPS games that were released around Far Cry's time, the sheer number of trees, leaves, bush, and reflective water pushed the limits of what graphics cards were capable of. But regardless of how detailed the trees look, they don't actually look like threes. They have weird jagged edges and impossible angles, it's only impressive because the engine displays so many of them at once. In the end, it's not such a big improvement over Half Life 2, or even Halo, which was quite short on vegetation.

The enemies look unimpressive, like they were modeled after the first Unreal, which was quite outdated even in Far Cry's time. They stick out like sore thumbs from the bounteous vegetation. You would think that at least they'd put some guys in camo or something. But no, they look like they've been pieced together using maybe ten different colors of big legos.

What bothered me the most about the graphics was how uncoordinated everything looked together. It's as if they hired one artist to draw one object in game and then threw all of the objects together without any art direction, so the whole affair looks quite terrible, and to diguise it all, they jacked the saturation, brightness, and contrast way up so everything looks almost unrealistically bright, like what clowns hallucinate when they drop acid.


Physics 4/10
Whoever made the physics engine overlooked three valuable points about physics:
1. An object in motion stays in motion.
2. Force is proportional to mass and acceleration.
3. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Ok, that's a bit harsh. They only overlooked the first two. But they messed up the second one badly. You can run into a box slowly, and knock it down a good amount, or you can run into it quickly, and move it the same amount.

What can and can't be affected by gravity is selected on a random basis. Some objects will be pushed if you move into them, and some will not. This is raised to such a high degree of eccentricity that some boxes in a room will be immobile while others can be pushed.

In a rare upset for the game though, the ragdolls for dead enemies look fine.


Sound 8/10
One of the game's features is that you can overhear the conversations of a bunch of enemies, even with the binoculars if you're far away. Many features like this start out interesting, but then end up incredibly dull. This is not one of these; it was never interesting from the outset.

The music is uninspired, like a medley of typical action music fare. But it gets a higher rating than it should because it's probably the only feature of the game that didn't fail miserably.


Gameplay 1/10
For a game claiming advanced AI, it's rather one-dimensional. If you fire at them, they will hear you. Not only that, they will see you. Even if you're hiding. They will know your exact location and empty their guns at you, and have miraculous aim even with full-auto M16s. If they're not in range, they will chase you.

This game should have focused on either stealth, like Metal Gear Solid, or just full on assaults, like Halo. It tries to do both, and in so doing, ruins both coherency and fun. It is said to be nonlinear, and you can go pretty much anywhere you feel like, but there are too many areas in which there is nothing at all, making the nonlinearity rather pointless. When everything looks the same as everything else, that really tends to defeat the purpose of exploring another route.

The one point is for the recoil on the guns, which felt about right. (Although you do aim too well.)


Storyline 0/10
You are a mysterious guy on an island. You wake up, grab a weapon, and begin killing everything in your path. There might have been a storyline after that, but it lost me. I play quite a few RPGs in addition to FPSs, and I'm not someone who completely ignores a storyline. But I honestly could not care about what the story was.


Control 6/10
The mouse sensitivity felt a bit weird on default settings. I changed them, but they felt weird no matter what. This also makes driving in vehicles not that fun.


Conclusion 2/10
I enjoy first person shooters. I liked the Halo series. I liked the Half Life series. I even have a pretty good understanding with the Doom series. But this game is just a glorified nVidia tech demo from 2004. Don't buy it, don't rent it, don't even pirate it and play it for free. It's not worth it.

Also, 2/10 might seem a bit low for the average of all of the individual ratings, but all of the bad features sort of synergize with each other to turn what should have been a moderately bad game into a torrential suckfest.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 09/29/08

Game Release: Far Cry (US, 03/23/04)