Most of what you can see here is playable gamespace,
with a lot you can't see reachable too.This is all one level.

If it sounds the stuff of B movies, it is, and the plot is coupled in Far Cry with cheesy voice acting. Gameplanet suspects this is deliberate and done with tongue firmly in cheek. There is quite a few sly jokes and references scattered through the game that show the developers have quite a sense of humour. Magazines are scattered through the levels including 'Redneck', 'PlayMerc' (think Playboy with guns and probably fewer articles) and 'Evil Science'. Billboards have game rendering pseudo-code scattered on them along with some excellent thick-headed utterances from the mercenaries. This slightly camp edge keeps the violence nicely artificial and helps make the mercenaries the most fun enemy to fight. It also helps leaven the moments of tension as the game's story gets creepy in the middle segments.

Jack appears in cutscenes where you get to see
his 'novel' approach to camoflague clothing.

Gameplay is fairly straightforward FPS fare with what are rapidly becoming the refinements expected in modern FPS games: a physics system so bodies ragdoll and world objects get flung around; check. Limited number of weapons you can carry so you have to choose how you want to fight; check. Vehicles you can drive complete with mounted weapons to use; check. Sniper scopes that allow you to engage enemies from hundreds of metres away; check. Locational damage so headshots count for more than direct body shots; check. A lot of these are features we have seen, usually seperately, in other games like Halo and Chrome.

Does this mean we failed the driving test officer?

Stealth also features strongly, with enemies having a detection threshold. Using silenced weapons, rocks (of which you have an infinite supply and can lob like grenades) and a healthy dollop of patience, it is possible to sneak your way through a large chunk of most missions. However, once combat is entered into it quickly devolves into a straightout gunfight that is hard to disengage from without slaughtering all immediate combatants. It would therefore be a mistake to consider this game akin to the Thief series; here the focus is firmly on fun gunfights. Stealth primarily serves two functions in the game: permitting the player to choose tactically advantageous ground to begin the fight from and to allow you to survey the ground to see who you are fighting.

Mercenaries frequently get bored and
do a spot of fishing.

Surveying your surroundings is important because it brings in the major innovation this game brings to FPS play: that of an enemy location radar that only shows the location of enemies you have spotted with your binoculars. This is explained in terms of game fiction as being about finding the id tags of the subcutaneous radio transmitters everyone working on the islands has to have implanted. What it does in game terms is reward the careful player that scouts the region thoroughly to not be blindsided by the AI, which loves to flank your position given a chance. A side effect is also letting you hear the many semi-scripted conversations that people engage in around the levels - frequently hilarious ones at that.

Ah, moonlit strolls on the beach with an FNP90. Nothing quite like it.

One of the game's strengths is the AI, which is aggressive and will utilise its superior numbers against you with suppressing fire and flanking maneouvres. Frequently on our playing of the game, we have been engaged in a fun fire fight trying to finish off what we thought was the last couple of mercenaries when another will suddenly appear from behind or to one side. It's great to see AI genuinely surprise you. Better yet, this is usually co-ordinated by a local squad commander, although lone troopers will try to sneak up on you. You can hear him calling out the orders - take him out and you have an easier time of it. The AI will also drive vehicles and man guns to use against you. Ignore them at your peril.

With reading material like this,
is it any wonder things went wrong?

Sadly the AI is lacklustre indoors, often charging mindlessly through the same door, one trooper after another, making them easy to mow down. Also, when the mutants begin appearing their AI is less sneaky and much more direct. While this provides a change of pace, with the toughness of the mutants it shifts the gameplay from feeling like a challenge of tactics to being more about brute firepower - especially against the heavier mutant types. Fortunately the mutants drop back a bit in the later levels. That said, the mutants do create quite a few moments of nasty surprise and dread as the game cranks up the tension with a variety of well-scripted set pieces.

Nice foggy steam. Screenshots really don't do
it justice - you need to see it in motion.

Where the game is strongest is in the quality of its environmental rendering. At the highest settings the game is gorgeous, just see the screenshots. Wildlife roams about with wild pigs, birdlife, fish and sharks appearing. Trees sway in the wind, their leaves dropping mottled shadows across your gun and the water reflects everything. Using techniques similar to the up-and-coming Doom 3, stencil shadows are provided for objects, allowing you to see enemies approaching by their shadows. Pixel and vertex shaders are used liberally to provide a variety of effects ranging from shine on piping, heat shimmer around steam vents, imperfections in glass or refractive water.

This level of quality is maintained with a solid audio engine that matches the on-screen action well. The audio can be a little delicate in that repeat runs of the game frequently cause the centre channel to drop out when using a 5.1 setup. We also found instances where a mercenary's gunfire sound would loop for some time after his death. However, the game is extensively tweakable and these are both issues that likely can be cured with a little more configuration work on our part. While Gameplanet is a little concerned with these audio issues, the game engine otherwise proves itself to be extremely solid and stable.

Mercenaries will also spend time at the firing range.
Nicely these guys are pretty deaf to your gunfire too.

It's also eminently capable of soaking up a serious amount of hardware power. While you can run the game on the minimum recommended spec, we suggest you don't - the game isn't happy at these levels and you really need hardware starting with a 2 GHz CPU, 512 Mb of RAM and probably a Radeon 9500/NVidia 5700 or better. There the game differentiates itself from other titles strongly and you get fairly fluid framerates. To crank it up to maximum detail you will need a 3GHz or better processor, a gigabyte of RAM and at least a Radeon 9700 Pro.

We found with the AMD 2500+ that we used most that often the bottleneck at 'very high' settings was the CPU and that as a result we could enable low anti-aliasing plus anisotropic filtering with little framerate cost, something that is a fairly sure sign of CPU speed limitations.

This is because at the highest settings a lot of extra detail is simulated and rendered, local extraneous wildlife being a prime example. Lower the quality settings and these disappear. CryTek has performed a nice balancing act and in our experience their recommendations seem to be right on the money.

No user servicable parts inside, please do not break seal.
No really, we mean it - please don't.

The last significant feature is the ready and built-in support for modifications. A lot of the game seems controlled by easily tweakable textfiles, and already a variety of tweaks, tricks and other such things has appeared for the game; a healthy number appeared before the game was released using just the demo. When you consider the full game ships with its Sandbox editor - a remarkable editor that interactively allows you to simulate and build a level within the game engine, not dissimilar to Tribes' in-game editor - the future looks bright for the player community generating novel new content for the game.

Far Cry's biggest fault is its multiplayer mode. Two deathmatch modes and the novel Assault mode (one team defends an objective while another assaults all with class-based gameplay) are perfunctory, and while the Assault mode excites us the most multi-player is let down by dramaticly bad netcode. Player movement seems to have little to no clientside prediction and ends up a warping mess where combat often comes down to firing blindly at a player's anticipated location.

Ah mad scientists and their fatal fondness
for holographic displays. It is a dead giveaway!

The physics engine is used to enhance gameplay but fails to expand it. Yes, bodies fall realistically, vehicles are fun to drive and there are opportunities to cause objects to fall on enemies, but without the ability to manipulate game objects as in Deus Ex 2 there is little opportunity to be creative. We would like the opportunity to sneakily move explosive cylinders into positions of our own choosing, or pile objects to make impromptue barriers and the like. You can manipulate objects a little using gunfire or knife strokes but this is laborious. Overall this is an opportunity lost after so much work and thought has been put into physics and objects.

Still, these are largely lesser complaints to what is a gorgeous and quite fun single-player game. If you like shooters and have the hardware to handle it, Far Cry is well worthwhile.