Far Cry
Well I'm sorta bored, so I figured I'd write up my little review on this game <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo-->
*** MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS - I'll try to avoid big spoilers, I'll probably just stick to the obvious like basic game introduction like they do in magazine reviews. ***
First, let me post my machine specs. I've got one hell of a beefy machine (yes, all spent with money I've earned while paying through college too <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo-->), just to give you an idea on this.
AMD XP 2800+
1,526 (1.5 gigs) DDR 2700 RAM
Radeon 9800 Pro 128 Mb
Soundblaster Audigy 2
Well the first thing you'll notice when playing the game is level loading. Seriously, we were done with long load times years ago. The level load time is a good time to go out, hit the toilet... maybe make a sandwich. Then head into the office, catch up on some work, maybe go to the store and plan out your shopping list for the next two years, then head home and maybe build your own rocket ship. It took almost 2 minutes on my machine to load the initial island. I pity whoever plays (Plays? How about loads) this with less RAM. The good thing is that once you do the initial precache load, all the other loads will go relatively speedy (Until you close the game, that is).
GRAPHICS
Graphically, this game knocked me over and raped my eyes, and I enjoyed it, it was that good. Set on a tropical archipelago, the scenery is beautiful. Lightmapping, bumpmapping, I don't know what it is, but it's amazing. Metal rivits will shine and reflect as you move closer. Grasses and tropical plants will sway gently in the breeze. Vibrant fish swim under the sea as a scarlet macaw soars overhead. The textures are excellent looking, and there is a huge variety of flora in this game. You'll never grow bored of seeing the same trees over and over, because it simply won't happen. There's even wild pigs roaming the island you can chase around.
Another very cool point was the shadows through the plants. This is the first game I've seen that applied dynamic lighting to your player weapon model. As you pass under trees, spots of light and shadows will move across your M4. It's pretty much as good as you can get graphically.
Sorta. There's several things that I think they missed that could've been done better. For one, by default, the scenery looks almost fake. The trees are just a little TOO green, the water is just a little TOO blue, and the sand is just a little TOO white. There is a way to adjust how the game looks (I prefer 'Improved', but you have a choice of 'Default', 'Cold', 'Improved', 'Paradise' and 'Cartoon', one of which might please you), but by default it looks like a touched up resort brochure. Secondly, when you dive under water, you see as though you have swim goggles on. Which you don't. Also, aside from the fish, the underwater world is void of life. I believe I saw only two pieces of coral. Most of it is comprised of sparsly placed seaweed. Imagine if you could dive down and explore an undersea reef. Finally, the sky was almost put in as an afterthough. The sky itself doesn't have moving clouds, it's just a plain old boring flat sky. The sun is just a white spot in the sky. It sorta shines through trees (You can faintly see it if you try) but there's no flare from staring right at the sun through a rifle scope. It's just one of the few minor flaws that keep this game down (I'll go into more).
The game runs very smooth (But I'm on a powerhouse of a system) at full settings. The only obvious slowdowns I have is wierd glitches where looking in certain directions causes my FPS to drop in the single digits. I believe they are map bugs where the engine is suddenly drawing the island parts that I can't even see, meaning I'm rendering everything. The spots are few and far between, and they're easy to avoid once you find them. Just hope you don't bounce into one during a gunfight.
Finally, there's no dynamic shadows. Shining your flashlight doesn't cause any shadows to show up from rocks, bushes, people. It's just a boring old light.
SOUNDS
Sounds are awfully quiet. I turned down the in-game music and had to crank my system sound all the way up to make it sound even halfway real. Furthermore, weapon sounds simply don't travel. I can empty an M4 clip on the outskirts of a mercenary outpost and they won't hear a thing. The rifle has a VERY sharp crack, but blowing a guy out of a tower and no one will hear it. But run past a tent and they all freak about hearing footsteps. I dont' get it. Overall the sounds are pretty high quality. One nice touch is if you watch two AIs, they'll move together and chat. Unfortunately they only say about a total of 5 phrases. Furthermore, there's little for 'environmental' sounds. They tried to make this game very real, but here's an example: Firing weapons and such in a rock valley SHOULD cause echoes, but there are no echoes. Again, just the little overlooks that could've made this game better.
AI
AI is excellent in Far Cry. The enemies will flank your position, they'll use some semblance of tactics, and they, for the most part, manage to avoid the 'kill zones' (Where you stand by a corner and mow down AIs as they turn). In some cases they'll march around corners for you to shoot them, but most of the time I turn around and see a guy rounding the building to shoot me from behind.
Furthermore, the jungle blocks vision. That's a good thing, but it's also a bad thing. Gone are the days of hiding in grass and having an AI you can't see snipe you out of it from across a ridge. However, grass makes you almost totally invisible to the AI. It's not much of a challenge to just peek out of a bush and headshot everyone while they run around shouting 'WHERE IS HE?!'. Secondly, the AI doesn't actually use the jungle either, which would've made it much better. They'll mill around in the open waiting for you to attack them. But be warned: They AI will spread out and search for you. One of my biggest peeves in every game is the 'AI Bloodhounds' that would follow you around even though you've ditched them far behind. Far Cry's AI will search for you in your last known position, and follow you if you give yourself away (Gunfire, triggering alarms, them seeing you). In the second encounter I had with a mercenary village, I attracted a lot of attention out in the jungle, and they all came searching for me. I dove into the ocean and swam around from behind, mopping up a few guards with my knife, and looted the armory, while they were all in the jungle.
Also, the AI tends to react a little slow sometimes, and they are completely oblivious to thrown grenades. Even Half-Life had better reaction to hand grenades. The AI in Far Cry will just keep shooting while it blows their legs off.
Finally, they react VERY poorly to situations that'd have other people running. Two guys were chatting on a platform, and I popped a 30.06 through one of the guy's skulls. He hit the dirt like a pile of bricks, and his buddy just looked at the body, and sorta stood around. They don't go prone, and they don't hide (unless they see you, then they'll take cover).
The AI is the best I've seen, but once again, lots of little tiny flaws.
PHYSICS
The physics engine isn't used as nearly as much as it should. Don't get me wrong, it's great how it is, but I've only seen one situation in which physics actually came in useful.
First, the ragdoll bodies are excellent. Better then any other game. I shot a guy inside a bunkhouse and he collapsed against the wall, and slumped onto a crate. I think I shot him twice more when I walked in because it looked like he was sitting there, waiting for me. The bodies will roll and slide and float better then any game I've seen use ragdolls before.
Now for the examples of the physics engine: You can't blow down trees, roll them over, collapse them on top of people, nothing like that. The only time the physics engine came in handy was when I used my machete to chop the ropes on a rope bridge and cause it to tumble down. However, the engine is flawed in a way. The rope bridge should've swung down, and bounced off of everything on the way down. Instead, it sorta got stuck at first, and I had to poke it a bit to make it fall. When it fell, it fell like it was made of balsa wood. It sorta floated down a bit. It didn't crack against the metal hull of the carrier, it just kinda floated straight down, drifted a bit to the side. Pretty unimpressive.
GAMEPLAY
Gameplay is where FC falls short. First, and most importantly, plot. The main character looks like a quarterbacker, and has the social graces of one. Someone is helping him out, and all he can do is make crappy one-liners at him. He's a complete and total **** hole. You're also looking for some woman. The opening cinematic shows your boat getting blown up. But I never found out what the hell I was doing out here, and how my guy knows how to use such a vast array of weapons. I don't even know who this girl IS.
You can only carry four weapons, so you have to pick and chose, giving a bit of tactical thought to is. The M4 is your bread-and-butter rifle, but it's almost too good: in single shot mode, it's overpowered as sin, as you can just one-shot everyone in the head from long ranges.
The game has you follow objectives, that are goofy and stupid. Several involve you blowing something up. In one situation, you have to destroy a fuel tank. So on my way, I conveniently find a demolition charge, and fifty feet down the hall is a tank with a big red Medal-Of-Honor-Esque silhouette of a demolition charge. Booring.
Finally, the game just doesn't feel very real. There's something about single handedly blowing away 600 mercenaries that just sorta ruins the 'reality' of the rest of the game. I mean, what good is a complex AI system when you're a walking woodchipper who's just annihilated the virtual population of a small town (I played through it at 'normal', maybe it gets better at higher difficulty?)?
The best thing about this game is that it looks ripe. It doesn't stink like it's been rushed out the door early. It doesn't have any gamestopping bugs (that I've seen so far). It just seems like the development team didn't give it their full 100% attention it deserved.
And on the last note. What the hell sort of name is "Far Cry"? It makes me think of some space interplanetary fantasy thing, not a tropical boatride gone wrong.
I think if I were to sum up the game in one sentence: "It's like a good action movie; it's entertaining as long as you don't think too hard about it."
Overall, 8 out of 10. It would've gotten a 9 out of 10, or even 9.5, but I'm hugely into storytelling, and the story in this one just didn't work for me.
*** MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS - I'll try to avoid big spoilers, I'll probably just stick to the obvious like basic game introduction like they do in magazine reviews. ***
First, let me post my machine specs. I've got one hell of a beefy machine (yes, all spent with money I've earned while paying through college too <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo-->), just to give you an idea on this.
AMD XP 2800+
1,526 (1.5 gigs) DDR 2700 RAM
Radeon 9800 Pro 128 Mb
Soundblaster Audigy 2
Well the first thing you'll notice when playing the game is level loading. Seriously, we were done with long load times years ago. The level load time is a good time to go out, hit the toilet... maybe make a sandwich. Then head into the office, catch up on some work, maybe go to the store and plan out your shopping list for the next two years, then head home and maybe build your own rocket ship. It took almost 2 minutes on my machine to load the initial island. I pity whoever plays (Plays? How about loads) this with less RAM. The good thing is that once you do the initial precache load, all the other loads will go relatively speedy (Until you close the game, that is).
GRAPHICS
Graphically, this game knocked me over and raped my eyes, and I enjoyed it, it was that good. Set on a tropical archipelago, the scenery is beautiful. Lightmapping, bumpmapping, I don't know what it is, but it's amazing. Metal rivits will shine and reflect as you move closer. Grasses and tropical plants will sway gently in the breeze. Vibrant fish swim under the sea as a scarlet macaw soars overhead. The textures are excellent looking, and there is a huge variety of flora in this game. You'll never grow bored of seeing the same trees over and over, because it simply won't happen. There's even wild pigs roaming the island you can chase around.
Another very cool point was the shadows through the plants. This is the first game I've seen that applied dynamic lighting to your player weapon model. As you pass under trees, spots of light and shadows will move across your M4. It's pretty much as good as you can get graphically.
Sorta. There's several things that I think they missed that could've been done better. For one, by default, the scenery looks almost fake. The trees are just a little TOO green, the water is just a little TOO blue, and the sand is just a little TOO white. There is a way to adjust how the game looks (I prefer 'Improved', but you have a choice of 'Default', 'Cold', 'Improved', 'Paradise' and 'Cartoon', one of which might please you), but by default it looks like a touched up resort brochure. Secondly, when you dive under water, you see as though you have swim goggles on. Which you don't. Also, aside from the fish, the underwater world is void of life. I believe I saw only two pieces of coral. Most of it is comprised of sparsly placed seaweed. Imagine if you could dive down and explore an undersea reef. Finally, the sky was almost put in as an afterthough. The sky itself doesn't have moving clouds, it's just a plain old boring flat sky. The sun is just a white spot in the sky. It sorta shines through trees (You can faintly see it if you try) but there's no flare from staring right at the sun through a rifle scope. It's just one of the few minor flaws that keep this game down (I'll go into more).
The game runs very smooth (But I'm on a powerhouse of a system) at full settings. The only obvious slowdowns I have is wierd glitches where looking in certain directions causes my FPS to drop in the single digits. I believe they are map bugs where the engine is suddenly drawing the island parts that I can't even see, meaning I'm rendering everything. The spots are few and far between, and they're easy to avoid once you find them. Just hope you don't bounce into one during a gunfight.
Finally, there's no dynamic shadows. Shining your flashlight doesn't cause any shadows to show up from rocks, bushes, people. It's just a boring old light.
SOUNDS
Sounds are awfully quiet. I turned down the in-game music and had to crank my system sound all the way up to make it sound even halfway real. Furthermore, weapon sounds simply don't travel. I can empty an M4 clip on the outskirts of a mercenary outpost and they won't hear a thing. The rifle has a VERY sharp crack, but blowing a guy out of a tower and no one will hear it. But run past a tent and they all freak about hearing footsteps. I dont' get it. Overall the sounds are pretty high quality. One nice touch is if you watch two AIs, they'll move together and chat. Unfortunately they only say about a total of 5 phrases. Furthermore, there's little for 'environmental' sounds. They tried to make this game very real, but here's an example: Firing weapons and such in a rock valley SHOULD cause echoes, but there are no echoes. Again, just the little overlooks that could've made this game better.
AI
AI is excellent in Far Cry. The enemies will flank your position, they'll use some semblance of tactics, and they, for the most part, manage to avoid the 'kill zones' (Where you stand by a corner and mow down AIs as they turn). In some cases they'll march around corners for you to shoot them, but most of the time I turn around and see a guy rounding the building to shoot me from behind.
Furthermore, the jungle blocks vision. That's a good thing, but it's also a bad thing. Gone are the days of hiding in grass and having an AI you can't see snipe you out of it from across a ridge. However, grass makes you almost totally invisible to the AI. It's not much of a challenge to just peek out of a bush and headshot everyone while they run around shouting 'WHERE IS HE?!'. Secondly, the AI doesn't actually use the jungle either, which would've made it much better. They'll mill around in the open waiting for you to attack them. But be warned: They AI will spread out and search for you. One of my biggest peeves in every game is the 'AI Bloodhounds' that would follow you around even though you've ditched them far behind. Far Cry's AI will search for you in your last known position, and follow you if you give yourself away (Gunfire, triggering alarms, them seeing you). In the second encounter I had with a mercenary village, I attracted a lot of attention out in the jungle, and they all came searching for me. I dove into the ocean and swam around from behind, mopping up a few guards with my knife, and looted the armory, while they were all in the jungle.
Also, the AI tends to react a little slow sometimes, and they are completely oblivious to thrown grenades. Even Half-Life had better reaction to hand grenades. The AI in Far Cry will just keep shooting while it blows their legs off.
Finally, they react VERY poorly to situations that'd have other people running. Two guys were chatting on a platform, and I popped a 30.06 through one of the guy's skulls. He hit the dirt like a pile of bricks, and his buddy just looked at the body, and sorta stood around. They don't go prone, and they don't hide (unless they see you, then they'll take cover).
The AI is the best I've seen, but once again, lots of little tiny flaws.
PHYSICS
The physics engine isn't used as nearly as much as it should. Don't get me wrong, it's great how it is, but I've only seen one situation in which physics actually came in useful.
First, the ragdoll bodies are excellent. Better then any other game. I shot a guy inside a bunkhouse and he collapsed against the wall, and slumped onto a crate. I think I shot him twice more when I walked in because it looked like he was sitting there, waiting for me. The bodies will roll and slide and float better then any game I've seen use ragdolls before.
Now for the examples of the physics engine: You can't blow down trees, roll them over, collapse them on top of people, nothing like that. The only time the physics engine came in handy was when I used my machete to chop the ropes on a rope bridge and cause it to tumble down. However, the engine is flawed in a way. The rope bridge should've swung down, and bounced off of everything on the way down. Instead, it sorta got stuck at first, and I had to poke it a bit to make it fall. When it fell, it fell like it was made of balsa wood. It sorta floated down a bit. It didn't crack against the metal hull of the carrier, it just kinda floated straight down, drifted a bit to the side. Pretty unimpressive.
GAMEPLAY
Gameplay is where FC falls short. First, and most importantly, plot. The main character looks like a quarterbacker, and has the social graces of one. Someone is helping him out, and all he can do is make crappy one-liners at him. He's a complete and total **** hole. You're also looking for some woman. The opening cinematic shows your boat getting blown up. But I never found out what the hell I was doing out here, and how my guy knows how to use such a vast array of weapons. I don't even know who this girl IS.
You can only carry four weapons, so you have to pick and chose, giving a bit of tactical thought to is. The M4 is your bread-and-butter rifle, but it's almost too good: in single shot mode, it's overpowered as sin, as you can just one-shot everyone in the head from long ranges.
The game has you follow objectives, that are goofy and stupid. Several involve you blowing something up. In one situation, you have to destroy a fuel tank. So on my way, I conveniently find a demolition charge, and fifty feet down the hall is a tank with a big red Medal-Of-Honor-Esque silhouette of a demolition charge. Booring.
Finally, the game just doesn't feel very real. There's something about single handedly blowing away 600 mercenaries that just sorta ruins the 'reality' of the rest of the game. I mean, what good is a complex AI system when you're a walking woodchipper who's just annihilated the virtual population of a small town (I played through it at 'normal', maybe it gets better at higher difficulty?)?
The best thing about this game is that it looks ripe. It doesn't stink like it's been rushed out the door early. It doesn't have any gamestopping bugs (that I've seen so far). It just seems like the development team didn't give it their full 100% attention it deserved.
And on the last note. What the hell sort of name is "Far Cry"? It makes me think of some space interplanetary fantasy thing, not a tropical boatride gone wrong.
I think if I were to sum up the game in one sentence: "It's like a good action movie; it's entertaining as long as you don't think too hard about it."
Overall, 8 out of 10. It would've gotten a 9 out of 10, or even 9.5, but I'm hugely into storytelling, and the story in this one just didn't work for me.
Comments
Okay here's how the game looked by default. See what I mean that the trees and plants looked fake?
You have to look really close. In two screenshots it's hard to tell, but running around the game you see a massive difference. Most noticable difference is the shade of the palm tree on the left of the screen. In the top it's neon green. In the bottom it's a more washed out green.
You have to look really close. In two screenshots it's hard to tell, but running around the game you see a massive difference. Most noticable difference is the shade of the palm tree on the left of the screen. In the top it's neon green. In the bottom it's a more washed out green. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
so basically....they are the same
Also, the emplaced machinegunners got annoying. Sure, you can pop them from range. But if they spot you, even for a second, you're dead. No matter how far you run, they know when you come back into range, no matter how you hide.
Also disliked the fact that when I went trailblazing across the island (read: I got lost and refused to just go the other way like a sane person), after a certain point I started hearing a helicopter. Took cover under some brush and kept moving, never saw the 'copter. Came up on the end of the land-spit, and BOOM. Five or ten missiles into the precise bush I was hiding in.
This was AFTER killing two guys in a patrol boat who had just happened to come by earlier and saw where I was hiding behind a tree.
Definitely beautiful, but definitely a HOG on anything less than an R9800 Pro. And CPU power isn't gonna fix things for you.. it's all in the GPU. My 9500 Pro could *barely* cut the mustard on Medium.
Now on to the fun parts:
Throwing grenades under stacks of bodies, taking a different path and finding a jeep and proceeding to drive it over the enemy forces in my way.. including up three flights of stairs, gunning my way through thirty enemies only to slap my forehead as I go to loot 'em... and find an explosive barrel off to the side, standing on a catwalk and figuring I'll be cool shooting the guys down below because I didn't see a staircase... then getting shot in the head from behind as I MISSED the staircase (bu the guys taking fire down below didn't).
In short, yeah. It's pretty. But it has some pretty glaring flaws both from a programming standpoint, AND a visual standpoint. Nowhere near as bad as Daikatana, but it'd take a lot of *trying* to get THAT bad. <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo-->
1,526 (1.5 gigs) DDR 2700 RAM
Radeon 9800 Pro 128 Mb
Soundblaster Audigy 2
<!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
so it would run well on my :
AMD XP 3200+ barton?
1.5 gig of ddr 3200
Radeon 9800 pro 128
creative platinum audigy
<!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo-->
sorry lol just got the new rig.. had to brag somewhere.. oddly enough i dont really care much for farcry.. it didnt impress me..