Welcome Guest LOGIN | REGISTER
HANDS ON GUIDE

Number 04 - Far Cry

Welcome to the jungle sucka

Cyrtek, 2004.

Many have praised Far Cry for its stunning visuals, great physics, cool weapons and vehicles, but for the purposes of this list, these are background considerations. Far Cry’s claim to the number four spot is that it’s unapologetically the toughest first person shooter of the last five years. Game designers of the world take note: this is how to build a tough game.

The hero of the piece, Jack Carver, is a typical FPS protagonist, in that he carries multiple assault weapons with ease, is beefier than a sack of cattle and he pretends he wants nothing more than a quiet life while being outfitted with the actions to slaughter an army. Critically though, Jack Carver is very ordinary – you’re not a space marine and you don’t have the ability slow down time. Under direct fire from a bad guy you die just as fast as they do, your principle edge being that enemies being hit by bullets stagger and can’t return fire. This frailty means you need to avoid getting shot by being sneaky, aware, accurate and fast. You can’t run and gun in the outdoor scenes, as you’ll simply be gunned down like a fool. So you need to think. While Far Cry is an A to B game, sometimes you might go via the road in an armed jeep, or maybe creep through the underbrush. You have options and more importantly you need to use them.

That’s just for fighting the soldiers though. When the game starts piling on the monsters it gets much tougher. There’s fast, jumpy, clawy ones, big lumbering ones, invisible ones with machineguns and giant ones with rocket launchers for arms. These enemies show no respect to the techniques of the infantry soldier, so you need to adapt again. And then you have to adapt yet again to deal with the enemy vehicles.

Besides just the enemies you also have the island to deal with. Sumptuous visuals of a tropical paradise belie the fact that most of the jungle, blocks line of sight, yet won’t stop a bullet. This means your engagement range can be horribly small. Jungle combat has never been better brought to the PC screen and nor has the sense of being hunted that comes when the jungles are alive with bloodthirsty monsters.



Far Cry is a very rare breed,a first person shooter which cannot be simply chewed through one quicksave at a time. The checkpoint system means that while you don’t go back a long way when you die, you do have to complete a whole scene to progress.



Related Articles