Far Cry

As I understand it, the thing that set Far Cry apart the from other titles of its time was mainly the bigger scale of its maps accompanied with good draw distance. As such, the missions that best showcase the game’s identity are the ones set in outdoors environments. These are indeed pretty big and most of them are designed in a way that offers the player a variety of ways to get around the enemies and reach their objective.

In the beginning, I found this aspect of the game very interesting. I tried some parts of the early missions several times to try and see the different ways in which I could approach an enemy camp. The game has some stealth mechanics and the maps provide some environmental weapons you can use to kill your foes. So I went and tried to sneak my way around the enemies, getting rid of the guys in the watchtowers with my machete first and then blowing up tanks of fuel from afar or pushing barrels down a slope to deal with the rest of the guards.

Not much time passed before my interest in these mechanics vanished, mainly because stealth's just not a viable way to play the game. You can hide yourself in the jungle and kill everyone from afar, but forget about getting inside the camp and taking them out one by one. With the exception of a couple of segments, the game is just not designed for this kind of play style, which I find this very disappointing.

Doesn’t matter that you can sneak around by crouching, because enemies will hear you even if you approach them in this way. Doesn’t matter that the enemies can call for reinforcements or sound the alarm if they notice you, because as soon as one of them sees you, the whole camp will be in full alert. It’s frustrating, because the ingredients to make a good stealth-action game are there, they are just poorly implemented.

In the end, going in guns blazing is the best approach you can take in almost any situation, despite the supposed freedom the big map offers you. Thankfully, the shooting is fun for the most part, but solving every mission in the same way makes for a very one-note experience.

If you add to that the amount of bugs, the extremely derivative and personality devoid characters and storyline ripped straight out of a bad 90s macho action movie, the pointless backtracking to close a valve or press a button in order to progress, the visually repetitive environments, and the fact that there are much better games of this type and time period (Half-Life: Opposing Forces comes to mind), I'd say this first entry didn't win me over.

Also, I didn't finish the last mission, I find it an awful display of game design. They put you in a big enclosure with a bunch of annoying enemies that jump around all the time shooting at you from afar, accompanied by a bunch of bullet-sponge enemies that shoot you with rocket launchers... no, thank you.

I never want to play this again. Its so frustrating too playing i cant even begin to explain all the problems i had whilst playing. I did complete the game of course but it was one of the most tedious experiences ive had in a video game ever

list of problems:

-Story is terrible, makes no sense and i could see the plot twist from a mile away. Val was just added so the game could get some fan service.

-Game mechanics are a joke. The A.I is absolute garbage at times and other times they unironically just shoot you through the walls even tho you cant shoot through and even see them. Grenades are fairly useless and the stamina mechanic is one of the worst in gaming history. You go so slow in this game it feels like youre playing as a grandma in a wheelchair most of the time.

The A.I is so frustrating too play against because the maps are so big you can barely hit them, they take up max 5 pixels on your screen a lot of the time. And a bot with a sniper can shoot you from literally the entire map. The problem is the enemy sees you before you see them pretty much 90% of the time so you have no idea sometimes who is shooting you and they drain your hp in a matter of seconds.

-Guns are super weak in this game. Pretty much all weapons have very little damage apart from the sniper, even the rocket launchers are not even close to effective in any scenario. All scoped weapons are a pain because Jack here (main character you play as) keeps shaking like hes got parkinsons making you waste ammo.

-Maps are a joke, i get that it was a design choice too have large open maps so you can play however you want but most of the time the maps are designed too far in the A.Is advantage and they see you way before you do and thus you get the problem above.

-The stealth aspect does not work in this game. Its a joke to stealth this game period. A.I is not programmed too responding well when it comes to sneaking and sound, and whilst it might have been groundbreaking in 2004, it is now severly outdated and it is impossible to stealth most of the game unless youve sunk more than 100 hours into the game and know all the spots & locations of the enemies.

-Game checkpoints is the worst decision ever a ubisoft employee thought was a good idea. The amount of times i lost progressiong in this game is atleast 2-3 hours (took me 9 too finish the game) il never get back from my life. Personally im a bit of a save scummer and i like to save as much as possible so playing a game where im forced too trial and error my way through is very annoying and not my prefrence at all.

-Cutscenes and bosses were pretty bad. Now again its 2004 so the cutscenes im fine with, they look pretty good for the time but the boss fights are very similar too something like red faction where they die way too quickly. The "final boss" dies in 1 shot, it doesnt even count as a boss fight.

-The level Archive in general was one of the most tedious levels ive ever played through. The second too last checkpoint was so difficult it took me well over 50 mins to beat just that one section of the game. It demonstrates all the problems above except for cutscenes and bosses.

But yeah, i guess i should just "git gud", that would have solved all of these problems and made my entire argument invalid

i was really surprised by how much i enjoyed it this game aside from a few big design flaws. those first - the game's difficulty is definitely the biggest imo. i think the developers intent was to give the AI a slightly unfair advantage so that the combat situations would feel more life-or-death, making stealth and strategy a way bigger deal in this game than in its competitors (doom, quake, half life, etc). what actually happens though is that the AI takes an increasingly absurd amount of damage as the game goes on and constantly prefires into bushes and doorways, which really fucking sucks. my first playthrough of this was on challenging difficulty but i had to restart at medium about three quarters of the way through because it was just too ridiculous. this is especially bad during the indoor levels, where fighting in such small physical spaces necessitates really fast reflexes and l33t aiming skills that I don't have. everybody complains about those levels though. everybody also complains about the big twist a quarter of the way through where they introduce... mutant monkeys?? but then they become mutant human soldiers?? i don't know dog, i played through all of this stoned. but anyways, i don't want to go as far as to assume that the developers just added that to cash in on popular FPS trends at the time (see the aforementioned competitors), but i will agree that it's a likely explanation and that it also kind of sucks.

really though, put all of that aside cuz there's some absolute gold to be found here. the outdoor segments,especially the ones set at night, are absolutely lovely. i love games that let you creep around in the dark and i love sneaking up and blowing guys heads off cuz i'm still 12 years old and it's wonderful. the enemies are engaging, too! this is one of the first FPS games i can think of with really responsive and tricky AI. they'll respond to the sounds of gunfire and footsteps, they'll communicate with each other and try to out-strategize you, and they even have little conversations between themselves that you can overhear with the binoculars. you really do get the sense in parts that you're in the character shoes, slinking through the overgrowth, trying not to get caught. something i didn't mention earlier in my complaints section was the lack of quick saving which a lot of people cite as another big issue with the game. there's even a mod just to correct this. i actually really like this design choice, though. i feel like it divides each fight scene into a little vignette, one that you have to look at from every angle and fully understand before you can complete it. it's a little annoying during the indoor levels when you just want to get through the slog, but it works wonderfully outdoors. i can tolerate the added difficulty much better when i'm not just trying to memorize enemy patterns and dying over and over again to get past an annoying level.

i also want to add that, if you're a fan of the later games in the series (probably 3 onwards), this one might be really annoying for you. i've only played a little bit of a far cry 3 and 4 but those seemed way more like high-flying gun-slinging adventures than this one does. don't get me wrong, this game is just as ridiculous, but it requires a lot more patience and a lot more caution than your average open world shooter nowadays. think of it as being like Indiana Jones compared to Rambo. i intend to play through all of these games soon though so i may go back and remove this portion if this proves untrue. either way, i highly recommend this one.

its kinda an absolute classic but be warned, much of the bad opinion maybe comes from the fact that the newest patch 1.4, completely breaks the AI. make sure you play with patch 1.32/1.33. I played with amd64 graphics update patch (1.32) it was absolutely great

the lighting effects and graphics in general are still great, especially the physics engine and impacts from gunfire. the guns all have a special use and scenarios, the gunplay just feels great and has its own unique recoil system. you can put weapons into semi auto to make them more accurate. the level design is mostly really awesome (except for some small indoors levels but its not awful) it is a very hard game, but on Medium with the 1.33 patch it feels fair. story is cheesy but its charming and memorable. people have a lot of issues with late game enemies but i like the change of pace, the enemy variation is cool and welcome for me. overall a really cool blast from the past!!

7.5/10

It is unusual to find a FPS that is open yet precise but that's what Far Cry balances well. You can scout the terrain, snipe enemies from a long distance away and silently sneak past a patrol or pick them off one by one. The ai is above average, particularly in navigating the open terrain, and concentrating fire on the player. If you try to go straight through the enemies you will not get very far.

As fun as the outdoor sections are, the cramped corridor sections are pretty much the worst, and remind me of everything I hate about Doom 3. There is a door every five seconds, and you move so slowly that the pacing takes a huge hit. This game is at its best when you are outside and have the freedom to move around. The tank-like enemies that take so much to kill are a bother as well.

Lastly, this game takes the cake for the worst cut scenes I have ever seen in a game. I might go so far as to say that a wall of text plot outline like Doom used would have been an improvement.

Far Cry is something that I've wanted to play for a while, and now that I've obtained it I thought that it was atleast going to be a decent FPS game that I can sink my teeth into. I was sorely wrong.

I don't seem to quite understand all the hype about this game. When Far Cry first came out it was receiving critical acclaim by critics for multiple things: gunplay, graphics and freedom of movement in FPS. Now because of my disdain for this game there are some positives that were lying around. First the gunplay is actually pretty fun, ranging from multiple weapons such as a machete, sniper, several sub-machine guns and a rocket launcher, the majority of these were fun to use. Second the graphics are quite amazing for the time. The bloom effects, attention to detail, ragdoll physics and the particle effect are great. Now all these things may have been enjoyable for 40 minutes or so, but then I started to realize there was something that was making me shaking my head every 10 minutes.

The flaws in this game are just too obvious to skim over, in fact they present nearly every second of the experience. The game may pride itself on the gunplay, but it all goes down the toilet when coming to facing AI enemies. First the AI has this nagging problem of knowing where you are no matter how hard you try to sneak or hide in the bushes, secondly some events they have x-ray vision or something and shooting through walls even though I was no where in site. Third the AI even on normal difficulty are able to just destroy you in 2-5 hits with their gun, it's absolutely mind numbing, and this is more about the fact they can land cheap shots at you which are incredibly frustrating, some enemies in the game are like bullet sponges but can kill you with 1-2 hits.
Another major issue that drove me insane was the absolute slowness of your character Jack Craver. When he walks, it's like he's got limp or something that is hindering him from walking, when you choose the option to sprint it's not good either, and with the addition of the game being a large island sandbox, it's almost like a punishment than anything else. Now you can use vehicles in the game but these only come up occasionally, and if you get stuck in an area where there's none, tough luck you're walking for the next 10 minutes till you can see an enemy.
Another problem is that Jack when getting to the top of stairs or a ladder with start to jitter and can't climb up, this was extremely infuriating because enemies were often near or I had to 'quickly' move away from them only to be unfairly hinder by something as a simple as a ladder or stairway.
A minor problem was the fact that the game has a mediocre story about a madman making super mutants and Jack Craver must stop it at all costs. After that nothing else, it's garbage that could have had some potential, top that with some cheesy voice acting and voice audio quality being abysmal, with the sound effect blasting of the voices. In addition to it, the variety of maps are nothing special, you have an island, catacombs, underground facility etc. etc. It's all generic and dull, especially the island levels since they're so wide and vast but lack anything really interesting.
Finally the last pet peeve that made me want to rip out my hair was the lack of saving and loading options. Instead, the game had a autosave/checkpoint save which would happen every time you get a certain location. This had to be the worst idea for the game since such a large open space and the high difficulty curve makes it all the more annoying, having to play the same part over and over again.

At the end of the day, the game was a technical beauty but everything else is a massive trainwreck that was painful to play.