Far Cry

System: PC
Release Date: 2004
Published By: Ubisoft
Reviewed by: Stephen
Rating:

If Far Cry had come out in 1998, it would have been revolutionary. In 2004, however, it seemed like a poor rip-off of many better games (though for reasons I still cannot fathom it was reasonably popular and got decent reviews).

In the wake of succesful stealth games like Goldeneye 007 on the N64 or Metal Gear Solid on the Playstation, stealth was the hot thing right around the turn of the century. Unfortunately, many of the games that followed those two simply pretended to favor stealth. In a pseudo-stealth game, your best bet is to simply run-and-gun. The end result is that all the bad guys are dead and you did not have to waste a bunch of time crawling around in shadows. Far Cry is a pseudo-stealth game.

In a nutshell: you shoot guns at guys and they shoot back. You can sneak around in the foliage if you want, but just shooting them in the face is a lot quicker. Any time I had trouble with a section, I would get bored and just charge in with both barrels blazing. I found this to be both more fun and more effective. When you get sick of that, you can use a vehicle with crappy controls to drive around an island. Sometimes you can take boats between islands. Hey, the levels are really big! Too bad they're all more or less identical.

Aside from the size of the levels (you can wander all over but for the most part there's no reason to) there's not much original here. There are a lot of vehicles, including a hang glider and a forklift, but they're not really fun to use. I'm not generally a fan of vehicles in FPS games to start with, so the constant use of them in Far Cry didn't help my impressions of the game.

As the game progresses, you move from fighting mercenaries to monsters because, hey, Half-Life had both monsters and soldiers! Of course Half-Life also had interesting guns and a compelling environment. Far Cry has a lot of islands and weapons such as "Assault Rifle" and "Advanced Assault Rifle." Wow. Every single thing in Far Cry feels like it was ripped off some other, better, game.

At least the graphics are pretty. All that foliage and water is rendered well.

Buy this game from Amazon.com!