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Exclusive: Far Cry (PC DVD-ROM)

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Description
Product Info
Reviews

Description

Far Cry is set in the future that features exciting new elements and 3D worlds set in both vast detailed outdoor and indoor areas. Far Cry will showcase the latest AI and physics technologies to recreate the most believable character movements, as well as realtime 3D atmospheric sound rendering, weapon bullets and footsteps as if you were there, in the game.

Features:

Augment your abilities with various weapons and equipment to aid you throughout the game, as the enemies become more cunning and better equipped themselves.
Set around 2020 on a set of beautiful tropical islands in the pacific.
A strong tropical-paradise feel, scenic in its beauty, but, harbors a terrible threat. It is a mix of jungle / primal / and next-gen technology.
Find yourself hunted by mercenaries without knowing why, and ultimately drawn into a secretive plot...

Product Info

Categories: Action / Shooter, UbiSoft Exclusive, Action / Adventure

Barcode

3307210205353

Country

South Africa

Format

DVD

Platform

Screenshots

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Studio

Ubisoft

Product Reviews (4)

Jonathan, Durbanville. 31 August 2004

Far Cry has always been a highly anticipated title, right from its first appearances at E3, but I don't think anyone, not even those who played both demos, thought the game would be this big.

You play muscle-bound freelance mariner Jack Carver, who ends up stranded on an idyllic-looking island after going to the Tropics to investigate a suspicious installation there. By the end of the intro sequence, the �well-constructed� female reporter Valerie, who paid for the investigation, has gone missing, your boat has been blown to smithereens, and there are members of a mysterious militia group everywhere.

Soon enough the situation gets much, much worse though, and the plot shapes up to be a sort of cross between Valve Software's Half-Life and Ritual Entertainment's Sin (with an old geezer in place of Elexis Sinclaire, bleh). In fact, Carver possesses a very similar gung-ho attitude to that of the hero in the latter, John Blade. Seeing as if you're anything of a first person shooter fan you've almost certainly played both of these, you'll now have a decent idea of what to expect. Sounds sort of like a B-Grade action flick, doesn't it? Well, don't worry, at the end of the day it all just adds to the games considerable charm and, think about it, would you rather your character was a deaf mute as in so many other titles?

That said, though, there are times when you wish Ubisoft and Crytek had toned down on the cheese factor just a tad, and I nearly fell off my chair the first time I heard one of the mercenaries say, �I'm gonna get that mofo�. Shame, will mommy spank you if you use the real word, little man?

Seeing as it's set on a Caribbean island, Crytek had to render a believable jungle environment and, boy, have they done themselves proud. Before now Vietcong featured the best tropical areas I'd seen in a game, but they look pathetic when compared to the German developer's work here. Foliage is incredibly lush, the shadows and water are amazing, birds, warthogs and insects abound, and being able to stand on a hill and look down upon a kilometre (quite literally) of treetops, observing the movement of both the enemy and wildlife, before plotting a route to your objective, is something you have to experience for yourself.

Take out your sniper rifle and peg an enemy from this �safe� vantage point, and you'll set in motion a flurry of activity. The commander will run for cover before calling for backup (shoot either him or the radio nearby, and you'll have a much better chance of survival), some of his friends will pile into any ground or air transport (helicopters) that may happen to be on location and come hunt down your ass, whilst others will begin tracking you on foot and, before you know it, you'll be fighting for your life. Bear in mind that these are just the grunts, and you'll start to get very worried about what you're going to come up against later on.

You'll spend quite a bit of time indoors too, and these areas are often reminiscent of those in the Alien vs Predator games, with numerous scripted sequences designed to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Thankfully, the developers have taken real care to make these environments look stunning as well, with bumpmapping used on just about everything imaginable and plenty of shader effects thrown in too, making lights reflect properly off the various surfaces. Apparently the game uses height-maps on almost everything, including characters, which considerably reduces the strain on your processor.

I'm sure you'll be glad to hear that the much-hyped Havok physics engine is put to great use here too (not quite up there with what we are expecting from Half-Life 2, but still), and the environments offer a great level of interactivity, with almost everything reacting the way you would expect it to do in real life, including the way enemies tumble down the stairs after receiving a well-placed cap in the ass.

The sound effects and dynamic music are superb and, when played with a decent speaker setup, you'll feel completely immersed in the action, but unfortunately there are problems with some soundcards that cause you to lose many of the effects (including that of your weapon firing) and much of the voice work. When this bug rears its ugly head, it can be put to bed temporarily by restarting the game and loading your last saved game, which is obviously a nuisance, and I'm sure everyone at Crytek is working really hard to rectify this in a patch.

Which brings us to performance � just how high-end a setup are you going to need to do this release justice? Well, those of you with lower end rigs will be very glad to hear that the game is incredibly scaleable, and with a bit of tinkering in the options menu you'll be able to get it to run decently enough on something near the minimum spec machine. Sure, you end up losing a lot of the foliage and graphical tricks with the settings toned down drastically, but it still looks as good as anything else out at the moment. If you want the full experience, an Intel processor in excess of 2Ghz / Athlon XP 2000+ or faster and a Radeon 9700/GeForce FX 5900 or higher is a must though, and you can take a look at some of the screen shots to get an idea of just how good this baby looked when played on our 3.4Ghz Pentium 4, Radeon 9800 XT, 1.5GB test rig. Is this the best-looking game ever? Yes, without a shadow of a doubt.

Crytek have settled on including several save points in each level and have opted not to allow the player to save in between these areas. Whilst I've heard quite a bit of bitching about this decision, I think the game is all the better for it. There are plenty of difficulty levels, including an auto-adjust setting that will raise or lower the enemy AI strength according to how well a player is doing, so you're bound to find one to suit your ability.

Of course, being a first person shooter, the tools you have on hand to dispatch the enemy are of great importance, and Far Cry doesn't disappoint here either. Along with an assortment of grenades (smoke, flashbang, and frag), you also get a host of SMG's and rifles, including an M4 Carbine, P90, OICW and sniper rifle, a jackhammer shotgun, rocket launcher (great for annihilating those pesky helicopters) and M249 machine gun. A la Halo, you can only carry four of these at a time, not including the grenades, so you're going to have to choose different weapons in different scenarios. Many of the weapons have alternate firing modes, which further adds to the tactical side of things. Now and again you'll be fortunate enough to come across mounted machine guns and mortars too, and if you can get to one of these undetected, the enemy is in for quite a surprise.

You also have a pair of binoculars in your inventory, which offer 24 times zoom, and these become indispensable in later levels. Other than merely allowing you to spy on enemies, they also detect them and immediately pinpoint their locations in your mini-map, and make it possible to listen in on their conversations from a great distance. Nifty.

There are several areas of the game where making good use of vehicles and hang gliders (weeeee) is paramount to your continued survival and, whilst most are fairly short-lived, these sections are great fun.

The inclusion of a stamina meter is a fairly interesting one and, other than coming into play when running and swimming underwater, it also affects your accuracy when using the sniper rifle. There are times when this feature will frustrate you but, all in all, I think it's really well implemented.

Some of you are obviously looking at buying this one for the multiplayer component and there's no doubt that the game is solid in this area, but the recent release of both Unreal Tournament 2004 and Electronic Arts' Battlefield: Vietnam, coupled with Far Cry's hefty system requirements, probably means you'd be better off looking at one of those two if you aren't interested in what is on offer here in the singleplayer department. I'm sure that with 11 well-designed maps, many with boats available to race around in (as well as the other singleplayer vehicles), and three modes of play (Assault, Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch), you'll see this one popping up at LANs from time to time though.

Conclusion

This is without doubt the year of the first person shooter, and I'm sure id and Valve weren't expecting a relatively unknown German developer to seriously challenge them for the crown, but this is exactly what Crytek have done. They've thrown down the gauntlet with a title that features the best visuals seen on any platform ever, artificial intelligence that has no equal, a highly entertaining and compelling storyline, and a competent multiplayer mode. How will the so-called big guns respond? Only time will tell . . .

Review source: http://www.nmlnetwork.net

Dawie, ROOIHUISKRAAL. 16 January 2006

Brilliant !!! Brilliant !!! Brilliant !!! Brilliant !!!

Alexander, Bergvliet. 29 March 2004

FarCry is soo hot right now!

Lachlan, Howick. 1 April 2007

Everyone should own or at least have played this game! REALLY BRILLIANT and at the low price it goes for, you DO NOT have an excuse for not having played it! First Person Shooter, Action Adventure at its best.