I just finished the game Far Cry. I picked it up a couple of weeks ago to blow off steam between projects for school. When it came out, I think two years ago, I had heard a lot about it. The reviews were glorious, and this seemed to be everyones must have game. Except mine, apparently. I was probably on another MMO kick at the time and that is why I didn't buy it. It looked good, and I liked the prospect of the insane sniping you were supposed to be able to do with the game.
So was it as good as I hoped? Sort of. The parts of it that were good, were plain awesome and made me want to play for hours. The parts that sucked (which was bulk of the end of the game, unfortunatly) made me throw on Godmode just to get to the next area hoping that it would be better. The sniping was cool, but it would have been a lot cooler if they would have tossed in a silenced sniper rifle in there somewhere. As it was, I rarely used the sniper rifle because it was so loud that I would alert three islands to my presence. And given the AI in the game, at least a few would know exactly were I was hiding.
The cool parts all revolved around me being alone in the jungle stalking the human enemy soldiers. Crouched in the bushes watching troop movements for inordinate amounts of time and crawling for 15-20 minutes at a time to get to just the right striking point to take out a soldier only to do it all over again on the next one made it worth the money. Most of the enemies reacted much like you would expect them to, and they did not know you were there just because you were near them. The bushes and leaves actually adding potential cover was nice. I am used to games just having them to be pretty and obscure your view. The enemy troops could act as a team, and they did reasonably well. I was fairly surpised the first time I was trying to take out the point man and got fragged as a couple of guys got me out of flanking positions.
Sadly every time an enemy vehicle was tossed in, such as a helicopter, they always seemed to know the 5-10 ft area you were hiding even if there was no reason for them to know. And the trigens, so lame. Apparently having humans as enemies are not enough, we need big burly grey and pink guys who are far tougher than humans to get involved as well. I might not have been so annoyed at these blatant Doom ripoffs if A) they were introduced much later in the game, like the end island, and B) the big ones could not take multiple clips of ammo to the face without dying. I understand that the point of the game was to shut down a research facility where the big bad was experimenting on humans. Oh, and the infinite shot rocket arms are getting old. The humans having infinite ammo is one thing, at least they were packs and jackets that they could put extra ammo in. I can forgive that. The big trigens with rocket arms, no packs, nothing. At times I seriously felt like I was playing Doom Goes Hawaiian, Same monsters. Less clothes.
The plot, while consistent and much what you would expect out of a first person shooter was mildly bland. Especially the twists at the end which could have been exciting if they played it off right, but since it was a shooter, they didn't. All in all, I would probably rate it about a 3 out of 5. It probably would have been closer to a 4.5 if the trigens were only near the far end of the game and none of them had rocket arms. Now I need a new game.
