Should you actually choose to continue forth with Far Cry, PLEASE get/use FCAM from the beginning as you are unable to switch profiles down-the-line without restarting your save file
NOTE -- as I did not complete the game, this review should not be taken as a serious critique, but more-so as a set of observations.
Contrary to popular belief, I don’t like to give up on video games. No matter how much I may disagree or dislike some aspect of a title, I know significant effort was put into its overall conception, and that effort consequently deserves to be rewarded with a full-fledged critique. Yet, as I get older, I find myself pondering the idea of time- we all have a finite amount of it on this planet, and when we decide to invest some of that into playing a game, the question each and every one of us should be asking is, am I having fun? And, if not, is there a point where I anticipate the gameplay loop becoming fun?
If the answer to that follow-up is also no, then perhaps it’s in your best interest to drop whatever you’re playing. At least, that’s the conclusion I came to when attempting to beat the original Far Cry. As you can easily surmise, this is the entity that began Ubisoft's eponymous cash cow, though unlike later members of the series, it was developed by Crytek three years before they made their own mark on the industry with Crysis. Unfortunately, if Crysis was a glorified tech demo, Far Cry is a glorified beta: its fascinating aspects bogged down by technical issue after technical issue.
Let’s get one thing straight -- this is a broken game: not too cracked to be unplayable, but fissured enough to make it overly-frustrating, and no matter how much the “get gud” crowd may gaslight you, take solace in knowing you’re not hallucinating. Enemies have extraordinary sightlines coupled with pinpoint accuracy, and while such design schemes have been successfully used in other ventures (most notably All Ghillied Up), here it’s so aggravating I’m convinced it was not intended. The sultry of apologists out there will claim Far Cry to be this strategy shooter wherein you’re meant to observe a post from a distance, mark the goons on your map, and employ some gambit to cull them with minimal self-injury. First off, that’s not true (more on that later), but secondly, even if it was, I would have no problem with it -- not every game needs to be a run-and-gunner, and it certainly fits in with the premise of a lone wolf taking on an army of mercs. The problem is stealth is completely defective due to those aforementioned sightlines imbuing every approach of yours with a 90% chance of failure, and when one guy is alerted, the rest of his cohorts gain awareness, no matter their distance from patient zero. Yes, it’s easy enough to shake them off, however their displaced movements combined with a refusal to return to previous walking patterns ruins any pre-planned stratagem you may have had.
Highlighting with your binoculars is also faulty, not only because it’s impossible to catch every single thug, but because even those you successfully snag end-up rendered as confusing triangles on the minimap (a minimap that, for the record, does not indicate elevation and goes outright bonkers whenever you enter an interior). And to any gamers out there thinking they can deal with miscellaneous mercs via playing it by ear in the field, understand Far Cry’s directional sound simply isn’t good enough to warrant discerning NPC locations via dialogue. Taking all of this into account, I genuinely found there was no point in trying to be stealthy because you were eventually going to get caught, meaning it was better to find some decent cover and simply trade fire from the get-go. Sadly, this is where the “pinpoint accuracy” dilemma comes into play as your HP gets knocked down very quickly. Against a few enemies I could see these duels being fine, but 9 times out of 10 you’re up against squads of 12+ men coming at you from multiple angles. Sure you can pick-&-pop, however even this tactic is impacted by numerous confounding variables: enemies are capable of seeing and shooting through walls; the many acres of foliage block your view but not theirs; grenades lack an indicator; RPGs, snipers, and helo gunners are potential one-hit KOs, and, worst of all, you have a bloody checkpoint system that forces you to literally reset a block should you not reach that invisible star barrel.
Now I’m sure the cost-sunk fanboys will come out of the gutter to tell me I was playing the game wrong, that I needed to be smarter and slower in my approaches, so let me give you normies a mind twist I alluded to above - Far Cry has TONS of mandatory combat! I obviously can’t speak for the game as a whole, but in the 4+ hours I played my character was put into many close-quarters situations wherein he was charged with taking out an entire attack force without ANY prior opportunities for stealth. One section has you defending a fort as it's assaulted by Black Hawks and rocketeering boats; another sees you paragliding from a cliff only to conveniently meet a chopper midair; and still an additional instance involves you battling your way across a ship deck to a spare lifeboat. You got vehicular shootings, air-deployed goons, alarm triggers, and more I’m sure I'm missing, all while contending with the aforestated issues of impeccable vision cones and deadeye accuracy.
And look, maybe the game was intended to be hard. Granted, I was playing on the normal difficulty (and consequently expected an appropriately-tuned experience…), but that could’ve very well been the intended challenge, and certainly plenty of franchises ala Ghosts 'n Goblins exist for the sole purpose of vexing buyers. Fair enough. But anyone who goes around telling you the game is a black box masterpiece or deliberately-geared towards “strategic” playthroughs is lying to you. I said it before and I’ll say it again- Far Cry 1 is broken, and what’s funny is I didn’t even make it to the part of the game that most reviewers agree is unfairly brutal: the Trigen (see my guy GManLives’s video to get an in-depth breakdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmkCCih1T00&).
Now, from what I understand, Far Cry wasn’t always like this. It was only after the release of a patch called 1.5 that a number of these defects arose, and such an update must’ve severely affected the source code as no mod exists to absolve it to this day. I prefaced this critique by mentioning FCAM as it does address some of the qualms: enemy viewing is no longer extraneous, mercs can’t shoot through walls, and you have a quick save button in the menu (negating checkpoints). These are definitely great implementations, but the elephant in the room is that the other issues aren’t tackled, and in my honest opinion those are still big enough to justify labeling the game too knackered to be worth a run.
I don’t want to sound like it’s all bad as there is a lot to enjoy about the gameplay. The shooting is still great with weapons handling fantastically (in fact, one of my reservations with FCAM is that it adds iron sights when the vanilla aiming was better), and enemy AI is pretty decent: some will amble in the open stupidly, but the majority are either flanking, fragging, or going prone to draw you out/avoid fire. When it comes to duking it out with patrols you really do have to be smart, and at its best Far Cry genuinely makes you feel like Rambo, sneaking through the wilderness against unsuspecting nobodies. It’s a shame those moments are few-and-far-between.
The technical facets aren’t particularly noteworthy. Far Cry was no doubt impressive when it came out, helping popularize what I’ve called the deserted island trope via its coastal beachfront, submersible waterways, yellow-green vegetation, and bright open sky, and that art design remains pretty dang gorgeous to this day. That said, the graphics are regrettably held back by outdated texture streaming that glazes everything with an atypical fuzz. Leaves, grass, and streams are generally fine, however, everything else, from trunks to the skyline, are way too hazy, as though the cameraman forgot to leave the autofocus on. Hampering things further is improper polygon modeling for the slopes, forcing you to indulge in the tried-and-true tactic of bunnyhopping to ascend a hill.
With regards to the music, I obviously didn’t beat enough of the game to rate its OST minus the main theme, which I felt was a bit too bombastic sounding despite being well-composed. SFX, on the other hand, is pretty good; firing and reloading mechanisms are sharp, whilst footsteps boast that soft yet distinct thud you’d expect from forestral traversal. I did feel the game overused stock animal sounds for fauna that were pretty blatantly not in the world (nothing but birds), though I understand Crytek was trying to conceive an untamed atmosphere.
Voice acting, at the point I was in the story, was pretty negative. NPCs are as hit-or-miss as you’d expect in a Ubisoft product, while main character Jack Carver literally comes across like an 80 action hero parody. Perhaps that was deliberate, but something tells me it wasn’t given how good his handler, Doyle, is. Played by a guy named Cornell Womack, Doyle has one of those genuinely pleasant voices like the Transistor, making you want to follow whatever plan he's laid out.
Sadly, he doesn’t have much of a presence in the early parts of the narrative, the whole of which I cannot give an oversight on due to the lack of subtitles and dedicating audio settings for vocals. Wikipedia provides the following synopsis (“Jack Carver has left his mysterious and bitter past behind him and dropped out of society to run a boat-charter business in the South Pacific. He is hired by a female journalist named Valerie Constantine to take her secretly to an uncharted island in Micronesia. After Val takes off on her own with a jet ski, Jack's boat is blown apart by a rocket, but he survives by diving into the water”), which sounds pretty cool, but having played the beginning I can tell you it’s nonsense. Outside of an amazing intro showcasing said boat attack, there’s NOTHING about Jack’s background or why he was even sailing the rig in the first place (Far Cry must be one of those games that summarized things in its CD case menu).
But look, it’s not like a great plot would’ve been able to overcome the gameplay dilemmas. While Far Cry deserves its place in history, it’s best left aside as a relic of over-ambition.
NOTES
-You can’t cook grenades.
-Lip syncing is surprisingly on point, even if the mouth movements are grandiose.
NOTE -- as I did not complete the game, this review should not be taken as a serious critique, but more-so as a set of observations.
Contrary to popular belief, I don’t like to give up on video games. No matter how much I may disagree or dislike some aspect of a title, I know significant effort was put into its overall conception, and that effort consequently deserves to be rewarded with a full-fledged critique. Yet, as I get older, I find myself pondering the idea of time- we all have a finite amount of it on this planet, and when we decide to invest some of that into playing a game, the question each and every one of us should be asking is, am I having fun? And, if not, is there a point where I anticipate the gameplay loop becoming fun?
If the answer to that follow-up is also no, then perhaps it’s in your best interest to drop whatever you’re playing. At least, that’s the conclusion I came to when attempting to beat the original Far Cry. As you can easily surmise, this is the entity that began Ubisoft's eponymous cash cow, though unlike later members of the series, it was developed by Crytek three years before they made their own mark on the industry with Crysis. Unfortunately, if Crysis was a glorified tech demo, Far Cry is a glorified beta: its fascinating aspects bogged down by technical issue after technical issue.
Let’s get one thing straight -- this is a broken game: not too cracked to be unplayable, but fissured enough to make it overly-frustrating, and no matter how much the “get gud” crowd may gaslight you, take solace in knowing you’re not hallucinating. Enemies have extraordinary sightlines coupled with pinpoint accuracy, and while such design schemes have been successfully used in other ventures (most notably All Ghillied Up), here it’s so aggravating I’m convinced it was not intended. The sultry of apologists out there will claim Far Cry to be this strategy shooter wherein you’re meant to observe a post from a distance, mark the goons on your map, and employ some gambit to cull them with minimal self-injury. First off, that’s not true (more on that later), but secondly, even if it was, I would have no problem with it -- not every game needs to be a run-and-gunner, and it certainly fits in with the premise of a lone wolf taking on an army of mercs. The problem is stealth is completely defective due to those aforementioned sightlines imbuing every approach of yours with a 90% chance of failure, and when one guy is alerted, the rest of his cohorts gain awareness, no matter their distance from patient zero. Yes, it’s easy enough to shake them off, however their displaced movements combined with a refusal to return to previous walking patterns ruins any pre-planned stratagem you may have had.
Highlighting with your binoculars is also faulty, not only because it’s impossible to catch every single thug, but because even those you successfully snag end-up rendered as confusing triangles on the minimap (a minimap that, for the record, does not indicate elevation and goes outright bonkers whenever you enter an interior). And to any gamers out there thinking they can deal with miscellaneous mercs via playing it by ear in the field, understand Far Cry’s directional sound simply isn’t good enough to warrant discerning NPC locations via dialogue. Taking all of this into account, I genuinely found there was no point in trying to be stealthy because you were eventually going to get caught, meaning it was better to find some decent cover and simply trade fire from the get-go. Sadly, this is where the “pinpoint accuracy” dilemma comes into play as your HP gets knocked down very quickly. Against a few enemies I could see these duels being fine, but 9 times out of 10 you’re up against squads of 12+ men coming at you from multiple angles. Sure you can pick-&-pop, however even this tactic is impacted by numerous confounding variables: enemies are capable of seeing and shooting through walls; the many acres of foliage block your view but not theirs; grenades lack an indicator; RPGs, snipers, and helo gunners are potential one-hit KOs, and, worst of all, you have a bloody checkpoint system that forces you to literally reset a block should you not reach that invisible star barrel.
Now I’m sure the cost-sunk fanboys will come out of the gutter to tell me I was playing the game wrong, that I needed to be smarter and slower in my approaches, so let me give you normies a mind twist I alluded to above - Far Cry has TONS of mandatory combat! I obviously can’t speak for the game as a whole, but in the 4+ hours I played my character was put into many close-quarters situations wherein he was charged with taking out an entire attack force without ANY prior opportunities for stealth. One section has you defending a fort as it's assaulted by Black Hawks and rocketeering boats; another sees you paragliding from a cliff only to conveniently meet a chopper midair; and still an additional instance involves you battling your way across a ship deck to a spare lifeboat. You got vehicular shootings, air-deployed goons, alarm triggers, and more I’m sure I'm missing, all while contending with the aforestated issues of impeccable vision cones and deadeye accuracy.
And look, maybe the game was intended to be hard. Granted, I was playing on the normal difficulty (and consequently expected an appropriately-tuned experience…), but that could’ve very well been the intended challenge, and certainly plenty of franchises ala Ghosts 'n Goblins exist for the sole purpose of vexing buyers. Fair enough. But anyone who goes around telling you the game is a black box masterpiece or deliberately-geared towards “strategic” playthroughs is lying to you. I said it before and I’ll say it again- Far Cry 1 is broken, and what’s funny is I didn’t even make it to the part of the game that most reviewers agree is unfairly brutal: the Trigen (see my guy GManLives’s video to get an in-depth breakdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmkCCih1T00&).
Now, from what I understand, Far Cry wasn’t always like this. It was only after the release of a patch called 1.5 that a number of these defects arose, and such an update must’ve severely affected the source code as no mod exists to absolve it to this day. I prefaced this critique by mentioning FCAM as it does address some of the qualms: enemy viewing is no longer extraneous, mercs can’t shoot through walls, and you have a quick save button in the menu (negating checkpoints). These are definitely great implementations, but the elephant in the room is that the other issues aren’t tackled, and in my honest opinion those are still big enough to justify labeling the game too knackered to be worth a run.
I don’t want to sound like it’s all bad as there is a lot to enjoy about the gameplay. The shooting is still great with weapons handling fantastically (in fact, one of my reservations with FCAM is that it adds iron sights when the vanilla aiming was better), and enemy AI is pretty decent: some will amble in the open stupidly, but the majority are either flanking, fragging, or going prone to draw you out/avoid fire. When it comes to duking it out with patrols you really do have to be smart, and at its best Far Cry genuinely makes you feel like Rambo, sneaking through the wilderness against unsuspecting nobodies. It’s a shame those moments are few-and-far-between.
The technical facets aren’t particularly noteworthy. Far Cry was no doubt impressive when it came out, helping popularize what I’ve called the deserted island trope via its coastal beachfront, submersible waterways, yellow-green vegetation, and bright open sky, and that art design remains pretty dang gorgeous to this day. That said, the graphics are regrettably held back by outdated texture streaming that glazes everything with an atypical fuzz. Leaves, grass, and streams are generally fine, however, everything else, from trunks to the skyline, are way too hazy, as though the cameraman forgot to leave the autofocus on. Hampering things further is improper polygon modeling for the slopes, forcing you to indulge in the tried-and-true tactic of bunnyhopping to ascend a hill.
With regards to the music, I obviously didn’t beat enough of the game to rate its OST minus the main theme, which I felt was a bit too bombastic sounding despite being well-composed. SFX, on the other hand, is pretty good; firing and reloading mechanisms are sharp, whilst footsteps boast that soft yet distinct thud you’d expect from forestral traversal. I did feel the game overused stock animal sounds for fauna that were pretty blatantly not in the world (nothing but birds), though I understand Crytek was trying to conceive an untamed atmosphere.
Voice acting, at the point I was in the story, was pretty negative. NPCs are as hit-or-miss as you’d expect in a Ubisoft product, while main character Jack Carver literally comes across like an 80 action hero parody. Perhaps that was deliberate, but something tells me it wasn’t given how good his handler, Doyle, is. Played by a guy named Cornell Womack, Doyle has one of those genuinely pleasant voices like the Transistor, making you want to follow whatever plan he's laid out.
Sadly, he doesn’t have much of a presence in the early parts of the narrative, the whole of which I cannot give an oversight on due to the lack of subtitles and dedicating audio settings for vocals. Wikipedia provides the following synopsis (“Jack Carver has left his mysterious and bitter past behind him and dropped out of society to run a boat-charter business in the South Pacific. He is hired by a female journalist named Valerie Constantine to take her secretly to an uncharted island in Micronesia. After Val takes off on her own with a jet ski, Jack's boat is blown apart by a rocket, but he survives by diving into the water”), which sounds pretty cool, but having played the beginning I can tell you it’s nonsense. Outside of an amazing intro showcasing said boat attack, there’s NOTHING about Jack’s background or why he was even sailing the rig in the first place (Far Cry must be one of those games that summarized things in its CD case menu).
But look, it’s not like a great plot would’ve been able to overcome the gameplay dilemmas. While Far Cry deserves its place in history, it’s best left aside as a relic of over-ambition.
NOTES
-You can’t cook grenades.
-Lip syncing is surprisingly on point, even if the mouth movements are grandiose.