Genre	FPS
System	P4 2GHz, 256MB, 64MB card
Year	2004
Developer

Now this is what I'm talking about. Without doubt the best FPS since Deus Ex in terms of concept, design and gameplay and in terms of graphics, the best ever at the time of its release. Half-life 2 may have pipped it in the area of story and looks (maybe), but as an all-round gaming experience, I would still give the title to Far Cry, just.

THE STORY

You are Carter, an ex-Special Forces (natch!) grunt retired to the tropics where you run a small boat operation. Hired by a tasty journo' to take her to one of the islands, you are unexpectedly blown out of the water by some joker with an RPG. You come to in the sea off the coast and set about trying to find out what the hell happened. In this you are aided by a "voice off" to which you get access having successfully stayed alive through the first part of the level. This comes from a disaffected member of the staff of the nutter who owns the place and his guidance adds continuity and flow to the narrative as you try to find Val, your erstwhile passenger, and get yourself off the island.

THE PLAY

For the most part it is classic FPS, with some wrinkles. One of which is that you can only carry four weapons at a time. Each is pretty distinctive in behaviour and use, so you need to pick and choose carefully. Starting with a panga, you quickly find a pistol, and soon add such stuff as sub-machine guns, M16 and sniper rifle (always one of my favourites). Additionally there are a rocket launcher, shotgun (absolutely vital in several places) and a couple of assault weapons which have the advantage of zooming sights and/or grenade launcher. You can also carry up to six of each of the three types of grenade available; frag', gas and flash-bang and when you run out, you can always chuck rocks. Again, these are useful in various situations and a mix is always a good idea when going into the unknown.

Binoculars feature in lots of FPS games, but the utilisation here is the best yet. For starters there's a seriously long zoom option, default controlled with the scroll wheel, which allows you to get right up close to the baddies. Secondly, this is allied with a long range directional microphone, so you can eavesdrop of what your opponents are saying (or, occasionally, grunting). Thirdly, there is a tracking facility. Once you have spotted one of the opposition, the bino's lock on and maintain track. Not only that, but the contact is colour-coded so that you can see at a glance the alert state of the enemy. This is particularly vital as there is a very cleverly implemented stealth option, which allows, even encourages you to negotiate many situations by avoiding contact, just as in Deus Ex. Low on ammo', down to the last bar on health and with the wrong weapons, you can run into situations where a frontal assault will be the short path to the reload screen, and even a bit of clever hit-and-run won't get you much further. So, you crawl through the bushes to a vantage point, scan the enemy camp, get a lock on all the mercenaries and then tiptoe around them en route to the objective. Which may well be one of the vehicles available at various points.

GETTING ABOUT

Running and walking of course, plus the crouch-and-waddle or straight crawl. The last two are almost entirely silent, so you can sneak up pretty close to a potential victim, but your movement thereafter is more restricted and when prone, your weapon elevation is seriously reduced. The enemy AI is top-notch (the best yet?) and their hearing ability astounding. Obviously they will get jolly excited if you start shooting things off, but they will also become alert if they hear you stumbling around in the bush or pounding along the corridors of the various facilities you have to traverse. Once they are alerted, you can back off, slow down or hide and they may, or may not, decide they were hearing things and carry on with what they were doing. Once they are convinced there is something going on, such as when you have shot a bunch of them, they will come after you relentlessly and cleverly. On numerous occasions I have sat on a hill among some bushes, locked-on to all the enemy I can see and then set about taking them out at range, only for the one or two guys I didn't spot to sneak up on my flanks and send me to hell.

As I mentioned, there are also vehicles on offer. Usually it is a armed jeep or buggy, which allows you to get about more quickly as well as offering you some serious firepower to get through a sticky patch. These chaps have a large calibre machine gun with alternate rocket launcher fixed to the roof, which you can control independently of the direction in which the car is going. This often leads to such hilarious situations as victualling up a bunch of merc's on your beam while heading over the cliff on your bow. If you don't land in water at the bottom, you have to start again.

A word here on saves. There is no quick-save option, and the game only saves at waypoints. Normally these aren't too far apart, but sometimes they are just the other side of a particularly difficult passage. More than once it has taken me an entire day's worth of playing (2-3 hours monitor time) to get beyond one particular point. Frustrating, but not fatal.

Back to travel. There are also numerous opportunities to get about in boats, which often have the dual function gun added. The enemy are particularly keen on using theirs to patrol the offshore bits of their remit, but if you can pick the guys off, you can nick their boat for your own use. Lastly, there is the hang-glider. Your range is limited (particularly so given that you are on a tropical island and would expect rather more in the way of uplift), but you can zoom around rather niftily while you still have altitude, bypassing baddies or cutting a load off your travel time, not to mention getting an excellent view of the countryside. Should you miss your landing zone, you may have to swim. This you can do either underwater, while you still have breath mind you, or on the surface, where you may well be spotted. Whichever, you can't use weapons in the water, so if the bad guys do get a bead on you, you are fish bait!

THE ENEMY

So, what are the mercenaries there for? Why are they so pissed off at you? What was Val up to? Well, I won't spoil the story, aside from to say that naughty things have been going on on the island and some of the enemies you meet aren't exactly human. Nor are they necessarily overly chummy with the guards, which you can use to your advantage of occasion. As I said earlier, enemy AI is very good indeed. As well as coming after you on foot and in boats, you will often come up against helicopter gunships, which will kill you damn quick if you aren't careful. Sometimes the merc's will call for reinforcements and a VTOL aircraft will pitch up, either landing or fast-roping additional forces into the arena. You can, however, short-circuit this by shooting the thing down should you have the rocket launcher with you. There are two or three boss-type levels, one of which kept me occupied for an entire day, but these are a nice variation on the usual bigger-badder-uglier enemy that other games throw at you. There's a particularly neat wrinkle towards the end of the last level, involving doors and chairs which turns the nearly impossible into the merely bloody difficult.

THE LAND

The game looks beautiful. Large outdoor environments feature lush vegetation and abundant wildlife, ruins, water, hills and enemy camps, while inside the various buildings you will experience a nice variety of modern and ancient, as well as weird and deadly. Realtime shadows and superb lighting enhance the scenery and incidental music and other sound will alert you to approaching danger. The physics engine isn't half bad either, though it isn't implemented to the extent that HL2 manages. Bodies fly and fings burn, shot barrels float and enemies fall from watch towers, all very realistically and satisfyingly.

THE WHY

I like the story in Far Cry. Some claim it is simplistic or clichéd, but I don't buy it. So it's a mix of Dr Moreau and Rambo, but it's coherent and gives you a reason to be in the place you find yourself. When you eventually meet up with Val again, there are some neat team engagements, including an especially challenging passage where you have to hold off hordes of enemies while she rigs a bomb. And anyway, remember the old adage about swamps and alligators? With the hot lead flying and some seriously unpleasant individuals on your tail, it really doesn't matter a damn how deep or believable the background story is. Just as long as it doesn't piss you off or make you laugh (unintentionally), who cares?

SUMMARY

Top notch graphics; an engaging, but simple story; first rate enemy AI and use of sound; excellent weapons and accessories; solid physics engine; multiple paths to success (or failure); exciting vehicle sections; varied and beautifully designed levels. All this puts Far Cry right near the top of the tree for my money. Put that together with the fact that it is anything but a simplistic, corridor-ridden, on-rails shooter and I reckon you have the best game since Deus Ex.