Far Cry Review

March 19, 2004 - Even games with the best of intentions come and go, if they fall short in a couple key areas, to be eventually shuffled off to the graveyard of industry footnotes. A new graphical innovation here, a good sense of humor there, but something just doesn't gel. With Far Cry, however, you can see so many places where thingscould have gone wrong, but didn't. The AI could easily have been blindly aggressive or stone deaf. The load times could have been constant and distracting. In almost all major areas, Far Cry manages to walk the tightrope of game design over a chasm of Things Gone Wrong. I've always wondered why no one apparently tried to license the AI of the Marines in Half-Life, because after that, I was always a little bit disappointed with the FPSs that came after. And finally someone has answered the call and the creatures here are actually smart.

It's not all wine and roses, though. It's important to keep in mind that this game is meant to push your rig to its limit. My home system is a 2.4GHz P4 with 512MB of RAM and a 9700 Pro, and while this has been more than enough for 99% of the games I've played on, with all the details cranked up, it's not the case here. I need the full power of the Alienware rig at work, a 3.0GHz P4 with a gigabyte of RAM and a 9800 Pro. The deciding factor seems to be the extra RAM and CPU horsepower, as I can run everything on Very High on this machine, but the home rig has to do Medium and High on most options. However, the many graphical options provide plenty of flexibility. You can't ratchet down view distance, but you can tone down things like dynamic lighting, water effects, and shadows. The game will only load once for each of the enormous areas, and it takes about a minute, but reloading from a save game after dying only takes a few seconds. The system with a gigabyte of RAM did both operations noticeably quicker.

With that said, Far Cry can be an incredibly beautiful game. From the 1-kilometer view distance, to the almost-overflowing foliage, lighting and more, this game is a bullet point list of things you'd want a game to be able to do. I'm very pleased to say, though, that it's more than just a glorified tech demo. It creates a continuous strategic and tactical challenge while wowing my eyeballs with next-generation bells and whistles. There is some clipping--it seems to be unavoidable in a 3D engine--and textures at a distance scale down noticeably even with everything maxed out. Also, you'll sometimes see long-range targets fade in as you get close to them. Lastly, lowering some of the graphical settings for the environment can produce foliage popping, where a bush will start out as a flat, basic texture, then sort of spring into a full-fledged, high-detail image as you get close to it. However, the smallest (and most numerous) foliage objects would fade into view as you may have seen in PlanetSide, which is much more transparent for the player.

Sound isn't too shabby either--especially when playing with headphones, where the ambient music really comes to the fore to develop mood. You can turn music off, but you'd be missing out. It adapts to the action, and each area has a subtly different theme. Some of it is standard action movie fare, but there's also plenty of effective ambient spookiness to go around. However, the later cutscenes in the game had dialogue that seemed a second or two off from the on-screen action.