Far Cry

Sam journeys to a tropical island that's a Far Cry from paradise...

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Over the two years that I've been writing reviews for this site I've played a wide range of games, and for the most part they've been competent enough affairs and a challenge to critically dissect. Of course every once in a while a game comes along that is so poor that no amount of words can account for its lameness. I've still got to give the thing a good bash - if only to be fair to the PR people who send us the games - and it's the time spent playing crud that I really wish that this was a high paying position. Then there are other games, where every moment of the testing procedure is a moment enjoyed and I could sum the review up in two words: 'buy it'. Far Cry, falls into one of these two categories.

Taking control of the hero Jack Carver, it is your mission to locate and then rescue Valerie, the photo-journalist who hired you and your charter boat. The charter boat which you had retired from the special forces to, hoping to make some nice money taking holidaymakers on trips around the tropical ocean waters you now call home. The charter boat that gets blown to smithereens, separating the two of you, as she is captured by the mercenaries who inhabit the islands Valerie wanted to check out and you are sucked into an abandoned WWII underground bunker. All of this is shown during the excellent intro movie which sets the tone for the intense and often surreal game that is to follow.

The story is pure B movie hokum, what with a save the girl premise and a mad scientist creating all sorts of terrifying mutations out in some underground lab on a tropical island. And while the voice acting for the most part is so cheesy surrender monkeys would wolf it down, the plot is kept ticking along nicely by various cutscenes - both game engine and pre-rendered - and by the voiced thoughts of the mercenaries that you can eavesdrop on. While it won't be touching shoulders with shortlisters on the Booker prize, the plot does take some twists and turns and by half way through the game you will find yourself smack in the middle of an all out jungle war between the humans and the mutant Trigens. The believability is kept higher by the proper progress of time. As you grind through the levels the sun will set, the moon will come out and then the sun will rise again, albeit onto a very different world to the one it bade goodnight scant hours before. You will meet a few other characters during your stay on the islands, most notably Doyle, a scientist somewhere on an island, who gives you your mission waypoints via a satellite phone. Yet for the most part the story stays focused on Jack and his attempts to pluck freedom from the jaws of death.

And death is something that haunts these lush islands with a vengeance. Even on the fourth of six difficulty settings you will die a lot. At first I was considering changing up to a higher difficulty level as things seemed too easy for my seasoned shooter skills. But the curve is balanced so well that the depth of challenge my chosen rank was to offer soon became bloodily apparent. There are certainly parts of the game where frustration sets in, but this is always cancelled out by the burning desire to get to the next stage, an urge that Far Cry seems so adept at incubating in all who play it. The lack of a quick save feature compounds the difficulty of the really big firefights, however the checkpoint system works as well as you could hope for and does a very good job of saving at reasonably spaced intervals. By removing the safety net of the quicksave Crytek have helped to make their game that much more invigorating, not to mention delivering the extra amount of time it will take you to get through it. And at around 15 to 20 hours of gameplay you can be sure that ditching the quicksave wasn't done in some lame attempt to stretch things out a bit.