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.