Far Cry also gives you an opportunity to drive a variety of vehicles and man their weapons. You’ll have the chance to mow down mercenaries on a beach with your speedboat’s machine gun and to take out an enemy high in a guard tower with your jeep’s rocket launcher. Vehicular control is easy to manage and you’ll be able to fire at enemies while driving at full speed without too much trouble. Manning a vehicle makes you a large and noisy target, so you’ll need to be careful not to attract too much attention all at once. Your vehicle will take damage when hit but it won’t necessarily protect you from being hit as well. Also, your enemy will be able to man all the vehicles that you can as well as bring in some heavy weapons at times. Running for your life takes on new meaning when you are dodging missile fire from a patrol boat or are trying to shake an attack chopper.

The game abounds with graphical goodness, like the spray kicked up by chopper rotors.

The realistic AI, weapons, and vehicles all make for some exciting gameplay, but the full immersive effect is completed by the game’s incredible graphics engine. Far Cry features some of the most amazing environments ever to appear in a shooter. Islands covered in lush vegetation and World War II artifacts such as downed aircraft, waterfalls, sandy beaches that slow your running, clear water with gentle surf and surface refraction … and that’s just the opening level. Just the variety of plant life alone is amazing, not to mention the lighting effects that cause trees and bushes to cast realistic shadows making the denser areas suitably darker. You’ll even encounter some of the island’s indigenous animals and birds as you make your way through the jungle.

The game’s amazing graphics engine is backed by a pretty good physics engine as well. You can push crates around, knock them off of a pier and watch them float, and send stuff flying off of shelves. Large weapons also have a physical impact – a near miss by a rocket can still send your jeep rolling from the blast. The addition of the physics engine is just another factor that makes the game such an immersive experience.

While Far Cry is an excellent game it does have a few minor issues. The first is that you can occasionally get stuck for a few seconds even on open ground or when swimming through water. This is a minor annoyance as you can always seem to unstick yourself, unless you are under fire in which case it is a lot larger annoyance. The second issue is that you can not save your game. Far Cry uses a checkpoint save system and for the most part the checkpoints are spaced close enough to each other that it is not an issue. However, there are times when you’ll need to play the same stretch of the game over just to return to the part that gave you enough trouble that it cost you your life. Finally, the multiplayer component is a little disappointing. It covers the basics by providing several maps for deathmatch, team deathmatch, and assault games, but that’s about it. In addition, the maps are all pretty large so you’ll spend a lot of time running around on your own unless there are a lot of other players in the game.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 95%.  It’s a far cry from anything that you’ve played before that will simply blow you away.

System Requirements:  Pentium III 1 GHz;  256 MB RAM;  32 MB Video RAM; 24x CD-ROM;  3 GB Hard Drive Space;  Mouse.

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