Far Cry Instincts Predator

"A Far Cry From Any Fun"

INTRO: While we are still waiting for the nest gen classic I decided to try out yet another PC FPS port come to the 360. Far Cry got a lot of press as one of the most violent games out. And since I have been having some luck with PC ports I decided Far Cry would be worth my money. So of course I turn out to be horribly wrong. Instincts is ugly, slow paced, uninspiring, and lacks any substance of good old FPS action.

GRAPHICS: The previews for this game has said it was shaping up to be great looking game. Which is only partly true. The environments are very large and open to your exploring. The plants do actually look very lush and bend in a realistic fashion when you crawl over them. The water is quite amazing too. Which is good because you can end up spending a lot of time in the water. But the character models are hideous. Sure the NPCs don't look bad. But the enemies all look the same and are largely indistinguishable. Add to that all that violence you thought you were going to see is unremarkable. Oh and sometimes your enemies are so stupid the will forget to bleed!
Score 7

SOUND: Far Cry does feature some pretty good sound effects. Namely walking through the forest and hearing the realistic sound of grass and leaves crunching. The guns themselves sound decent enough but nothing that memorable. Voice acting is surprisly enough very good, which is becoming more and more a staple in gaming.
Score 9

CONTROLS: Probably my biggest beef with the game is the sluggish controls. This is kinda of expected considering that this a PC port. But other games in recent times have managed to make a worth while translation. Far Cry does not unfortunately. You never seem to move that well and some actions such as doing dive to the ground or switching between crouching to standing are overly difficult and delayed in response. This means you could accidentally jump up while in the middle of stalking someone. As you can imagine this becomes a big problem considering Far Cry does feature some very unforgiving fire fights.
Score 4

STORY: In the beginning of the game a decent plot is attempted to be set up. And with great production values it gives a pretty good premise to fight the mercenaries that the island is swarming with. The basic premise is your ship is blown up and your now stranded on mentioned island. Along the way a man named Carver is guide along island via headset, if of course you do him a favor by killing a whole lot of mercenaries. And yes eventually you will receive completely useless “feral” abilities. The action gets monotonous though and in return so does the plot.
Score 5

REPLAY: If you actually do like the game there is a whole lot of it to play. The story mode will take 15 to 20 hours to beat. That's pretty long by today's standards. On top of that the complete XBOX version (Evolution) will unlocked by beating the single player game. There is the standard online death match and CTF bouts as well. Even a map editor. However the game is nowhere near enjoyable enough to warrant the 30 plus hours of gameplay provided. Although hopefully more developers will try to make this much of an effort in other games. One other thing is that the online maps mainly aren't that great and also have lots of lag.
Score 7

GAMEPLAY: Far Cry does play like a fairly typical first person shooter. The two big things here are supposed to be your environment and feral abilities. The environment is obviously that you are on a great big chain of tropical islands. This for some reason has never really been tried before for this genre. Other than a fresh setting Far Cry was supposed to deliver stealthy approach of keeping to the bushes. And early on it does. Featuring stealth kills and bobby traps while lying prone in the grass. However after their initial appearance these kills go vastly unused. Furthermore the game's beginning levels are a little to punishing with stealth approach. You will rarely survive any large scale fire fights for the first 1 to 2 hours. This is further made frustrating by AI though largely stupid, will unpredictably spot you in situations just five minutes ago it could not. This leads to trial and error frustration. But once you learn the feral abilities you are much faster and the game quickly becomes a run and gun. A very long run and gun game....
Score 5

BOTTOM LINE: The FPS genre is the best represented one on the 360's small library. So with that said there is very little reason to check out this subpar PC port.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 09/06/06