f13.net forums - Far Cry (my early review/first impressions)

I surprised myself with this game. It is much better than the demo for me so far. I am only on level 4 (the demo was level 3), but I am enjoying it a lot. Just single player, I have not tried multi yet.

Don’t worry. I won’t go all fanboi here.

Graphics
It is stunningly pretty, and runs better than the demo.
My system:
AMD 2500+ barton
1 gig kingston hyperX ram
lowly GeForce4 TI4200 (128 ram)

I first tried 'high' for all settings and 1024x768. It ran well indoors but would stutter abit on transitions from indoor to outdoor and at other seemingly random times. Mouse seemed a tad unresponsive.

I backed off to medium with high lighting, water, and effects. This runs great and without viewing them side-by-side I don't really notice any visual degradation. Still using 1024x768 and 'medium' anti-aliasing

GREAT water effects, very impressive viewing range especially with the binoculars/sniper rifle. There is some 'popup' using these zooms though. Considering the binoculars can do 20x magnification on the fly that is understandable.

Basically nearly perfect environment with pretty darn good character models and enemies. Think max payne 2 in that regard.

Inside to outside transitions are seamless. Reasonably fast loadtimes except the first time you load during a play session. That takes a long time.

Physics
It seems to deserve its own category these days in FPS world. I am very impressed with this. FAR better than DX2 and better than Max Payne 2 as well. By a good margin on both counts actually. My main complaint in MP2 was that (like most physics engines) things were too light. Nothing had much mass in MP2. Either you could shove it across the room or it was immobile. Very little in between.

In Far Cry I really like the range of weights and frictions assigned to objects. The explosive containers take a sizable shove to get moving, but once you get them going their momentum can really get them hurling down hills (this is too fun by the way).

Objects also have density and hardness. If you know there is an enemy in that bamboo hut, but he won't come out... just do the logical thing. Fill it with machine gun fire and it will blow right through the walls. The first machine gun (M1? I don't know guns) will fire right through flimsy barricades like wooden boxes, but they will block shots from the pistol. A concrete barricade or a tree is adequate coverage though, assuming you are fully behind it of course.

Rag dolls are done better than Max Payne 2 as well in my opinion. I am using MP2 a lot because going into this game it was my favorite physics in a game. MP2 had very good ragdolls to my eye, but Far Cry incrementally improves on them. The knees for instance are better articulated. They may or may not be abit heavy on the friction end, but I have not killed enough people to really tell. I prefer them by far to the alternative of bodies sliding all over the place. I have seen guys who when shot with their backs to the wall will fall back into the wall and slump down in a sitting pose, with their butts totally off the ground supported by their bent legs. Just like if they were sitting on a short stool. Not sure if a dead body would do that, but I like it better than most physics engines that would have had the feet slip out from under the body so that the but would tough the ground while the legs contort in some crazy way.

Gameplay
Darn good so far. As I said earlier, I was getting a weird spongy mouse feeling when I had too many settings turned on, but after tuning them down abit and upping my mouse sensitivity it is accurate and responsive.

The game has a cone of fire system like oh so many games lately. Not much you have not seen here other than the right mouse button by default is a zoom key. With nonsniper guns it basically pulls up the sights abit (not as far up as medal of honor though), zooms in abit, and tightens the cone of fire abit. Not the hyper exact accuracy of medal of honor in this mode, but pretty accurate when stationary and zoomed in. It’s a nice touch, but nothing revolutionary.

The game play is pretty solid and about how you would expect a FPS with a good physics engine to play. The things that feel new to me are the binoculars, the ability to shoot through a lot of objects (not new, but pretty new to me in games I didn't hate), the graphics, and the feeling of scale you have on the island.

The binoculars are pretty funky. They have several functions.
1)The first is the scalable zoom up to 20x. Pretty self explanatory. Looks great.
2)The second is that they have a directional microphone built in. The more you zoom in the closer things sound as you focus in the mic more. You can hear conversations from across the island this way. Sometimes you actually hear useful snippets, like where the keycard to the armory is and other times it is banter about who is playing football tonight followed by an argument over the words football and soccer.
3)The third and weirdest function is the enemy identifier. I am making up that title, but anyone you see or even hear with the binoculars shows up on your little radar map. The story explained it away that the scientist who worked on the island had everyone electronically tagged and the binocs can read that signal. Kind of weak techno babble explanation, but in terms of gameplay it provides a strong advantage to scouting out areas prior to attacking. It is weird, but I like it. Anyone seen or heard gets displayed on your radar until you kill them. Their color also displays their alert/aggro level. Nice for detecting patrolling guards inside buildings, but it won't find a silent stationary guard who is not visible.

The game also has vehicles.
Vehicles have reasonable physics and handling as well... Hard to say if they are hard to control or if I just suck at them so far. I could go either way on that. They are fun at least IMO. (buggy, jeep, patrol boat, rubber raft, hang glider so far). So far they either have a machine gun, a rocket launcher, both, or none. You can play them in first person or third. For me that means I can either aim well or drive worth shit. Never both. I probably just need practice.

Weapons
So far pretty standard mix of machine guns, pistols, rocket launchers, knives, sniper rifle. The game is set in 2020 so it will probably end up having some future weapons as well. You can carry 4 weapons at a time. To get another after that you have to drop something else. Basically think Halo but with 4 slots and not 2.

The three machine guns (I am not a gun person so I can't remember the names of them) so far are well balanced with pros and cons. The standard machine gun you get near the beginning has a very accurate single shot mode and can be toggle to full auto for a sizable big accuracy loss. It is REALLY loud and will get a TON of attention if you use it. The second smg I got had a larger clip size, had accuracy between the two fire modes of the first gun, and was pretty quiet. If I had some distance people had trouble telling where I was. This gun did not have to modes, but instead was only full auto. Tapping the trigger would give a controlled three round burst. The third machine gun was the quietest of them all so far. Nearly noiseless, but also very little stopping power. Can't fire through most wood obstacles and takes a lot to punch through bodyarmor without a headshot. Nice sneaky gun, but once they see you, you better pull out the big gun.

The rocket launcher I had was pretty standard. The smoke trail looked GREAT. No homing on this one and very limited ammo. Same one at the end of the demo level. I got it there again and dropped it in favor of another smg once I ran out of ammo.

Sniper rifle is the same as in the demo. Up to 16x zoom. Super accurate, limited ammo, LOUD AS HELL. I don't really like that last bit. It is abit hard to use unless you are truly being davey crockett from across the island. Usually it just gets me in a heck of a lot of trouble. It stays in my inventory because you never know...

Knife is the ultimate silent kill. I so far have only used it on unaware targets and it has always been a oneshot kill. Alert targets may take less damage...

So far frags and flashbang grenades. The second is neat if you are not careful. It will blind your ass if you don't turn away. Separate key to throw them, you don't need to equip them other than picking which grenade you are using. There is a third grenade type that I can see in silhouette that I have not gotten yet.

Stealth / run and gun
Stealth is not too shabby in this game. You can crouch, go prone, walk, and sprint. All with different noise levels of course. There is a theif/splinter cell-esque visibility gauge that tells you when people will start shooting at you. So far it has been very logical and I have only been spotted when it made sense. Usually when I shoot or lean out around a corner into a guards face. The best part of the stealth is all the ground cover vegetation. It is a jungle, and logically it is FILLED with plants. Not so logically those plants don't move as you crawl through them. Plants block guards vision, unlike many games I have played where they offer no coverage and just get in the way of your sight. This is not thief or DX1 though. You cannot stealth your way around the entire game. You CAN bypass large enemy groups, or get in advantageous positions before dropping the bomb.

Once you screw up, or are forced into combat, the run and gun is well done and very fun. Fleeing and re-hiding is also a valid option with all the ground cover in the jungle. At this point you can single out and kill enemies in an almost predator fashion. Someone is actually doing a predator mod for this game and that could be NICE.

Artificial Intelligence
Pretty good. I have heard RAVES about it other places but I won't get that carried away. They alert logically to sound and comrades dying around them. They use cover and will duck back when being fired at, allowing the concept of suppression fire to actually work while moving to a new vantage point. At my difficulty (the second easiest, I am a wuss on my first play through of fps games) the AI does occasionally break down. More so at close range I find. They don't logically time their reloads for instance. When I fire my gun and run out of ammo I get my tail behind some cover or at least strafe around like a freak till my gun has finished reloading. They will pretty much just stop what they are doing and stand there at point blank range reloading so you can casually shoot them in the head (easy to do since they look down conveniently during reload). I have also seen two broken AIs so far out of probably 100+ soldiers. No biggie, but always annoying to see a guy just standing there waiting to be shot. I think they both got physically stuck on boxes. There is a patch out now that mentioned that sometimes enemies were not initializing AI when loading. This could be it, but I don't think they loaded there but instead moved there from their loadpoint.

Nice touches are thrown in like voice and emote commands from the soldier in charge that are actually usually followed by the other troops. Like 'flank him left' as three guys break off and move to my right behind a fallen tree.

Overall the AI is solid and is a benefit to the game. It is not "teh best AI evar!!!11!1!@" or anything like that though. Maybe it kicks more ass at higher difficulty though. Hard for me to say at this stage.

Not sure where it fits so I will throw it here. The game so far has never resorted to any cheap spawning tactics. Soldiers show up from logical locations. They are usually detectable from LONG in advance if you are scouting carefully. Other times they will sometimes come out of a building as you approach, but only if you have been real noisy or are currently detected. They will come in and drop from helicopters as reinforcements sometimes as well, but even here you have the option of blowing up the chopper before they get the drop. No buildings that act like clown cars dispensing impossible amounts of baddies or people spawning behind you. They are all either there at the beginning of the level or spawn in a way that I have not noticed it occur yet.

Sound
I really really like the sound. Very LOUD guns with that 'crack' that seems muffled in so many games I have played. This coupled with the physics makes for a quite real feel to much of the combat. The binoculars sometimes pickup weird sounds, like when you hear some machinery in a tunnel when pointing certain directions, but if you really had a directional mic like this maybe it WOULD pick that up. Sometimes seems out of place to me though.

The music so far that I have heard is also quite nice and has not gotten annoying at all yet. That is about all I ask in music. I tend to not pay much attention to it unless it really sucks. I left on the menu tune for a few trips to the restroom though and found it rather enjoyable.

Multiplayer
Have not played it, probably won't for awhile. I hear it is pretty lackluster but there is a mode that is similar to UT2kx assault mode that has three classes, heavy weapon, sniper, and engineer. Engineer basically being the Wolfenstein enemy territory engineer. Other than that you have vanilla deathmatch and team deathmatch.

My verdict
Dying for HL2 or Doom3? Check out Far Cry. It is a pretty damn good game with great graphics, solid control, solid ai, solid sound.

Only buy maybe 1 or 2 FPS games a year? Probably wait till HL2. I am a pre-release HL2 fanboi though, so I am stupidly positive HL2 will kick ass. Far Cry is here now and is good though. Besides, you want to be in practice for HL2/Doom3.