![]() The island is clearly not just an experimental ground for gruesome mutant beasts, but also for telepathic humans with unfailing aims across any distances. Because absolutely not, Far Cry is a colossal mess when it comes to enemy AI. Now, let's not get too carried away by pretending everything was better in the olden days. I know this sounds horribly unfair, but Far Cry had this odd notion that being shot in the head by a volley of machine gun fire would have you be not-alive pretty much right away. And bullets do a very odd thing in this game: they kill you when you're hit by them. You stumbled on, scraps of health, desperately hoping for a medkit, and they're few and far between in the jungle. No recoverable health here, you soft younglings. FPS games used to do that! They used to be all kinds of difficult, demanding you replay and replay a sequence until you damned well got it right. I set it to standard difficulty, and boldly strode out to shoot at the targets, but the bastard targets kept shooting back first. ![]() ![]() It's really really hard! I'd completely forgotten. "Ha ha! This isn't a brown shooter like all the other brown shooters! It's blue and green! Surprise!" So Jack Knife begins his epic quest to kill absolutely everything that moves.Īnd oh good gracious it's hard. But then he emerges into the light, and the game deserves the forced gloat of the moment. He's in a bunker, it's dark and dingy, and people want to shoot at him. The start of the game is of course the arrival of Jack Growl, professional idiot and gun holder, who hur-dur-durs his way around the collection of islands upon which he finds himself stranded. But obviously you hang-glide, and then fight a helicopter as you do so, before landing near a boat to murder its inhabitants. Or scramble through the undergrowth and risk big drops. Of course you could run down the long path down the hill. It's the level set at the top of the mountain, with the hang-glider waiting to take you down to the river. I showed off one particular moment so many times back then that I was confused to discover today that it's not the start of the game. So everyone has to be interesting within that to stand out.īut in 2004, we were nowhere near, and Far Cry was jolly exciting to see running. And this is all a very good thing! Because now I find myself telling other people to check out graphics that are artful, that do something novel, or create beauty through design rather than technical prowess. Even Crysis, which was a game everyone bought a new graphics card to be able to play, felt like an iteration on Far Cry, rather than a monumental moment. We may be impressed by how realistically a cloth flutters, or notice that the reflections in the water ripple in extraordinary ways, but it feels small, specific, and most of all, incremental. It was the last time I can remember thinking, "I can't believe my computer can do this!" "You've got to come over and see this! You won't believe it!" And people would visit my flat above the Spar and oooh and coo at the luscious vistas, the green forests against the blue sea and sky, alive with parrots and feral hogs. It was one of those big turning point games, and boy did it help get itself a lot of attention by looking so damned pretty.įar Cry was the last game I remember inviting people to my home to see. It's big open islands covered in drivable cars and boats and hang-gliders, with its enemy encampments with alarms and reinforcements and guards in tall towers - without Far Cry you've no Just Cause, probably no Assassin's Creed, and on and on and on. But I don't think there's any argument to be made that FC1 wasn't seminal. ![]() While Ubi marketed Far Cry 2 as a direct sequel, it barely had a thing to do with the original, not least in comparison to the real sequel, Crysis. There is of course one big difference between FC1 and all those that followed: this was the only one made by Crytek. So let's talk about Far Cry Brackets 2004. And I feel like the first gets a bit missed. People who want to look cool and pretend the entire game wasn't one enormous clown car of broken AI like to say how Far Cry 2 was the best game in the series.Įveryone else likes to bemoan the terribad writing of all the variously problematic sequels that have poured forth from the Ubisoft's Incredibly Complicated And Detailed Sausage Factory ever since. But I mean this Far Cry, the very first one. Sure, yes, absolutely, they make one every other year. This may sound a bit silly, but I feel like Far Cry has gone a bit forgotten. Let me tell you about a time when we were made of sturdier stuff, way back in the distant fogs of 2004. Feeble little twigs, snapping at the mildest first-person breeze. Past Perfect is a retrospective column in which we look back into gaming history to see whether old favourites are still worth playing today.
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