Far Cry first impressions

Well, it's been a while since I posted something, so I thought I'd better put something up so my two regular readers won't get mildly irritated.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been playing the single player portion of Far Cry for the PC. Here are my initial thoughts.

First of all, it is hands down the prettiest game I've ever seen. The water is beautiful and looking at it makes me want to dive in and go swimming. The trees and grass are likewise gorgeous. One of the CryEngine's major claims is that it supports absolutely huge contiguous environments. They obviously do some aggressive optimization, most of which is probably detail reduction at distance, to get the game to perform as well as it does even on high end hardware. My system is no slouch and I'm running it pretty well cranked up. I don't know how well it does on lower-end hardware but there are a lot of visual quality options available so I would imagine it can scale down with little problem. It just won't look as purty.

As for gameplay, the AI is among the better I've seen. Your opponents have pretty keen vision and hearing and they will utilize cover pretty effectively. They will also sometimes move toward you over some pretty long distances if they catch sight of you. On the other hand, if you just hide in the bushes and wait for them to come to you, you can pick them off pretty easy as they come into view.

And hiding in the bushes is something you'll need to learn to do pretty quickly. You have an armored vest but if you charge into a group of bad guys, they'll take you down pretty quickly. With one or two guys, charging them can be an effective technique but use it sparingly, and watch out for the guy over there behind the tree or in the watch tower.

Side note: My brother recommends that you always keep the sniper rifle regardless of what other weapons you have. You only have four slots so, unlike many games of the past, you can't carry all the available weapons simultaneously.

So far I'd have to say the game is excellent. It's not easy, either. I'm playing on the standard difficulty and it was kicking my ass for a while before I figured out some techniques. The only downside I can think of right now is that the land vehicles are a bit hard to control. I haven't checked to see if it supports the use of a joystick but, if it does, that may work better.

I've promised to wait until I finish Far Cry before picking up Doom 3. It's going to take a lot of willpower given what I've read so far about id's latest offering. Once I finally pick it up and play it for a while, I'll post my thoughts.