Game: Far Cry
Year (s): 2004
Company: dev. Crytek
pub. Ubisoft
Engine: CryEngine
Type: First-Person Shooter
Price (as of 11-28-2011 )
Regular price on Steam: 9.99
Lowest Buy-It-Now on eBay (new, with shipping): 6.99
Game Time: 31 hours, first time, default difficulty
Obligatory Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pnKAljANsU
Plot
Former special forces soldier Jack Carver is hired by Valerie Constantine to sail her to a remote island. While approaching, a missile destroys the boat. Val is captured by a mercenary force. Jack washes ashore and sets to rescue her. While in the process of murdering mercenaries and making merry mayhem, Jack disrupts the island's operations enough so that the hyper-aggressive experimental creatures break loose. The tropical paradise becomes a warzone.
The plot, in general, works. There were a couple QUITE anti-climactic spots that annoyed me though. A nuclear bomb blows up... exactly one building! The island's volcano, we are told, has been kept from erupting by the bad guys. After you defeat the bad guys... it continues to not erupt. The game ends on a fizzle that easily allowed for a sequel.
Hi, We are Crytek
This was the first game by Crytek, so I'm willing to cut it some slack. It had features not seen in other games, and was a success. Wikipedia tells me that 730,000 units were sold within the first four months of release.
Far Cry runs on their fancy CryEngine, which was quite competetive at the time of release. Far Cry grew out of technology demo made to showcase the capabilities of NVIDIA GeForce 3 video graphics accelerator. Graphically, it had higher system requirements than other offerings. I don't notice a big difference visually over the other top engines of the year (id Tech 4, Source, Unreal Engine 2/2.5) but for one thing: scope. Areas between load points are relatively enormous.
But the engine has major problems. This game crashed every time I exit it. I then have to have Steam verify file integrity and download some files. Launching the game after that, I have to re-spec graphics options and key bindings. Every time. Additionally, the game sometimes crashed on launch, restarting the computer. I had worse problems with Painkiller, but these issues are good motivation to not play the game.
Unique
This was one of the early open-world games. You have some (limited) options for approaching firefights, so players might proceed a little differently. Cover is a big deal, and there is a meter on the HUD to show how alert the enemies are to your presence. It's hard to find (and evade) targets with the underbrush, but you have some tricks. You can throw rocks to distract enemies, you have binoculars that give a rough location of enemies and put them on your radar, and you have limited use of infrared.
Combat
This was the biggest inconsistency of the game. Sometimes, I'd play for two hours and enjoy an intense, challenging experience. Other times, I'd play for an hour on the same damn firefight. I played on default (difficulty 2 of 5). On a singular basis, enemies were easy to take out. In groups, they will flank you, provide covering fire, throw grenades, and use cover. Solid AI, that increases with difficulty. The parts I got stuck on I eventually beat (after 10-30 attempts) after memorizing each enemy position and scoring headshots. That's far too methodical (and frustrating) for me. The last fighting segment was impossible and I watched the ending of the game on YouTube.
Expansions / DLC / Sequels
Far Cry 2, developed by Ubisoft alone, came out in 2008. Far Cry 3 (also just Ubisoft) was announced at E3 2011 with no set release date.
A film based the game was released in Germany in 2008.
Final Thoughts
We have here a game that was very, very interesting at the time of release. If there was a patch to address the bugs and allow quicksaves, I'd be a lot happier. As it is, this is a bipolar game. Fantastic for the first offering of a new company with a new engine, but a far cry from the phenomenally fun second offering, Crysis. Skip this one.
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