To be fair, I should state from the outset that I was one of the beta testers for Far Cry (FC). As such, my experience with the game dates back a couple of releases prior to it going gold. I was relatively unimpressed with FC during the beta cycle for two reasons: (1) it ran like crap, and (2) several of the multi-player maps were horribly unbalanced in favor of snipers. Of course the multi-player aspect is but one piece of FC, and I was seeing a pre-release build.
This review is possibly the longest I've written to date. As such, I apologize in advance for its length. It is simply the case that FC is such an interesting mixture of the good and the bad that there is an awful lot to discuss. Bear with me while I try to make clear whether FC is ultimately a worthwhile game.
The visuals are varied in a surprising way. On the one hand the beauty and spaciousness of the environments is a stunning improvement over most other first-person shooter (FPS) games. The outdoor areas in other FPS games are typically as small as they are heavily-occluded. FC leaves other games in its dust in this respect, insofar as the player can wander just about anywhere on the various islands.
True, Operation Flashpoint (OPF) also gave the player an entire island on which to run around, but only FC makes the jungle come so alive with an insane amount of detail. OPF was a clear step forward, but no other game approaches FC's ability to provide an open-jungle experience. The outdoor levels are as beautiful as they are expansive, much like the real world, and that's arguably the highest compliment I can pay the visuals. The developers have clearly set a new standard and deserve a lot of credit for doing so.
It should also be stated that FC has the most amazing special effects of any game made to date. I'm sure when DOOM 3 and Half-Life 2 ship they'll show us some pretty stunning stuff as well, but FC is here now and is positively stupendous. For example, hot steam gushing from a pipe distorts one's vision through the surrounding air, just as in the real world. The cloaking effect (ala Arnold's nemesis from the Predator film) for the stealthier "trigen" enemies, who also happen to carry silenced MP5 submachine guns, is wonderful. I could gush about other effects as well, but I don't want to spoil too many surprises.
Continuing with the positive, the lighting in FC is absolutely bleeding-edge technology. I couldn't believe what I was seeing the first time I accidentally shot an overhead light fixture in a darkened building. Shadows played crazily about the room in real time as the light swung back and forth. I'm accustomed to lightmaps and other such trickery, which provide the static illusion of proper lighting; it's fair to say that the future is here today with FC, insofar as it does some amazing things with real-time, genuinely dynamic lighting.
Yet on the other hand there are several negative comments to be made, most notable of which is that FC is rough around the edges here and there in some pretty fundamental areas. First, the modeling of various characters is surprisingly angular in spots. There are some unnaturally flat looking surfaces on Jack's arms, for example, and that's pretty unusual for the games I've played of late. Overall, some of the characters look like they've got too few polygons to play with, which is strange given the abundance of polygons lavished on the environments. Perhaps that's the reason; I don't know.
Second, the bump-mapping and shader effects seem quite overdone in spots. Yes, I realize that technology now exists to show me pitted, corroded, and shiny metal surfaces like never before, but the mere fact that the technology exists provides no justification for going so far overboard with it. Maybe I'm being too picky, but it seemed to me like the focus of several indoor levels was on demonstrating technology and not providing fun gameplay. Honestly, how many pitted, corroded, dripping-wet pipes can one really justify leaving outside the walls in any given building? Sheesh.
Third, the level-of-detail algorithm needs some further tuning. Few games get this right, so it's not such a huge complaint against FC. After all, FC aims really high and accomplishes much of what it sets out to do. It's just that other games (e.g., Knights of the Old Republic) do a better job of blending foliage into the view gradually as the player approaches. There's too much "popping" in FC. Even hitting the right mouse button to use the zoomed weapon view kept making new shrubbery pop into existence, for example, and I found that highly irritating at times.
Far worse than any of these complaints, however, is that the game requires a ridiculously powerful computer to enjoy the visuals in all their glory. I'm aware that my system is no longer top notch in some respects. At the time of this writing I've got an Athlon XP 3000 CPU, an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro video card (w/128 MB of RAM), 1 GB of fast DDR RAM, a Creative Labs Audigy 2 Platinum sound card, and some fast 7200 RPM hard drives. My rig clearly has some room for improvement here and there, but it remains a powerful system nevertheless.
Despite my computer's better-than-average horsepower, however, I could never achieve a happy medium between performance and quality. I either had to sacrifice a lot of quality, running at a high resolution like 1280 x 1024 to avoid the jaggies, or enjoy high quality imagery but suffer from terrible jaggies at 1024 x 768 (or even lower resolutions). I eventually found a combination of settings that was at least playable, but getting there required that I reduce several of the graphical options significantly, overclock my video card a fair amount, and use only the most minimal image-quality enhancements (e.g., 2x anisotropic filtering and 2x low-quality anti-aliasing) in order to get an acceptable framerate at a relatively low resolution.
And despite all of my time-consuming fiddling around, there still remained several spots where things bogged down unacceptably. In the final level at the volcano, for example, I was getting a whopping one to two frames per second; I had to drop to 800 x 600 x 32 bpp resolution and turn down the graphical options even further just to make it playable. That's positively nuts given my system components. I imagine the average gamer will be quite unable to appreciate much of the visual glory of FC simply because of its overly steep system requirements.
In short, FC is clearly written for a generation of hardware not yet available, which is a pity. I suppose it does provide some incentive to come back to the game after a hardware upgrade, but I may have moved on to other games by then. I may not have the time or motivation to come back to it. FC aims a bit too far beyond today's hardware, given its release date.
The audio is far easier to quantify succinctly: it's pretty good. The sound effects are relatively standard fare, nothing standing out as either really good or obviously bad. The voice acting is good but not great. Thankfully, the audio implementation is as solid and reliable as one could hope. I didn't experience any aural bugs with the game whatsoever and that's not always the case.
I do want to lodge one complaint against the voice acting, namely, that I think they stole the voices and some of the concepts from Red Faction (RF). I would swear that the guy doing Harlan's voice is the same guy who did the work for the Hendrix character in RF. Similarly, the woman doing Valerie's annoying voice reminds me greatly of the similarly annoying Eos from RF. There are even some strong parallels between the characters, Hendrix and Harlan both being the largely unseen helpful voices over the comm channels and Eos and Valerie being the sometimes sidekicks for whom the protagonist is ultimately working.
Anyway, the best part of the game's audio is probably the music. It seems to me like the composer borrows a bit from Bill Brown, but imitation is supposedly the sincerest form of flattery. Seriously, though, some of the french horn work sounds a wee bit too similar to that in Command & Conquer: Generals for it to be purely coincidental.
At any rate, the basic themes are all well done, the ambient music is appropriate, and all of the tracks generally manage to heighten the dramatic tension. I got more than a bit tired with the jungle-beat music played during combat by the end of the game, but it wasn't a deal breaker. FC breaks a lot of new ground with its visuals, but it's not nearly so much of a standout where its audio is concerned. It does a good job, but I don't think it's going to win any awards.
Moving on, the interface is pretty funky in several respects. First, it requires way too many keys, giving the user different binds for selecting which object to throw, using the binoculars, toggling night-vision, using the flashlight, etc. Whatever happened to a nice, simple inventory system coupled with a use-item option? Ok, toward the end of the game I did find myself using more than one of those at a time, but I'm sure there's an easier way to present it to the player. I was constantly screwing up while reaching for the flashlight, binoculars, night-vision, etc., which wasn't helpful in the middle of a firefight.
Second, the vehicle interface is downright schizophrenic, at least when it comes to jeeps. Using the first-person view when driving a jeep lets the player control the weapons somewhat independently of the vehicle's current facing, yet this view makes it quite difficult to keep track of "trivial" things like the road, nearby trees, etc. In contrast, the third-person view is the exact opposite, giving the player a good view of his surroundings while making it nearly impossible to control his weapons properly. I found myself switching back and forth between the two views, which really diminished the enjoyment and utility of the vehicles.
Third, too many of the game options require the game to be restarted. I'll bet I spent a good half an hour (or likely more) fiddling around with all the various graphical options before I managed to reach a functional, but still undesirable, balance between visual quality and performance. The process was rendered all the more irritating by the constant restarting. I would make a few tweaks, exit the game, restart the game, load the campaign, test, exit to the main menu, make a few tweaks, exit the game, restart the game, etc. It was positively nauseating. It's bad enough that FC has such steep system requirements; it adds insult to injury by forcing the player to restart the game and sit through the very lengthy load times over and over in trying to find a good balance.
Fourth, whoever designed the ladder interface needs an enema. I've been immobilized and killed far too often because I made the mistake of walking by a ladder. Why, you ask? Because they "snag" you whenever you get close to them, whether you're facing them or not! Jack, a special forces expert, will promptly lower his weapon in a heartbeat in the middle of a pitched battle to grab ahold of any nearby ladder. Does that make any sense at all? I've never served in the military, so maybe some Green Beret out there can explain to me why it's reasonable to grab a ladder when somebody is shooting at you.
To put the complaint more generally, ladders are more troublesome than they need to be in FC. They're hard to avoid when walking by them, it's difficult to get off them at the top, and so forth. After a while I came to dread situations that required their use. It's a sure sign there's a problem with the interface when the player fears using it.
Finally, the interaction between the crouched and prone positions is wacky. I could never view my character from the third-person view—which incidentally would have been very handy for the stealthy portions of the game—so I was never quite sure what was happening. What I know for certain is that if I first crouched and then went prone, I'd have to fuss around to un-prone and un-crouch myself before I was standing up again. I never got the hang of it. Eventually I just decided never to mix the two stances and that made it bearable, but how hard would it be to let the player shift his stance more easily or perhaps provide some kind of stance indicator on his heads-up display (HUD)?
Aside from these complaints everything else works pretty much as expected. Binding keys works nicely. The HUD is pretty informative yet relatively unobtrusive. It would be nice to have some kind of stance indicator, insofar as that would go a long way toward clearing up the whole crouched/prone mess, but one can live without it. It would also be really nice, given how visually amazing FC is, to have the ability to toggle all of the interface elements for taking neat screenshots. I think that's a complaint I'm going to be making more frequently as games get better and better looking. The player will need to learn a lot of keys to get the most out of FC, but at least the interface doesn't make it too hard to configure them.
The game mechanics are also a mixed bag. The standard FPS stuff (i.e., shoot everything that moves, pick up everything that doesn't, find all the keys, etc.) is all there, and it's combined with some pretty cool innovations (e.g., the stamina bar, the audio-enhanced binoculars, the stealth meter, etc.). The basic running, jumping, weapon use, etc., are all pretty well done. I wasn't wild about the four-weapon limit, any more than I was wild about having no simple way to shuffle weapons from one slot to another, but these aren't fatal flaws.
I particularly like the stealth meter, insofar as it's not such a binary proposition as it is with other games. That is, there is a gradual ramp-up in enemy awareness which is displayed nicely by the stealth meter. I didn't have to wonder, as I did with the visibility meter in Splinter Cell (SC) or the gem in the Thief series, for example, whether the enemy would be able to detect me or not. As long as the stealth meter was rising I knew detection was inevitable, and, better still, it gave me a good feel for how long I had until all hell was going to break loose. This particular mechanic dovetails very nicely with the game's artificial intelligence (AI) for reasons I'll provide later. It suffices for the moment to say that the mechanics of stealth are handled beautifully.
Yet the game mechanics also feature a number of irritating warts. For example, controlling many of the vehicles is downright ridiculous. Jeeps in particular bounce around as if they have roughly zero mass. Controlling vehicles in Battlefield Vietnam or Unreal Tournament 2004 is an absolute joy; controlling vehicles in FC is a hassle at best and a nightmare at worst. The only time I truly enjoyed the vehicles in the game was on the "Boat" level, where there was so much sea-room to maneuver that their shortcomings weren't a problem.
Save for that lone exception, I generally avoided the vehicles as much as possible because they kept getting me killed again and again. If the vehicle control issues didn't get me killed, the terrain surely would. Many of the paths seem to have been designed deliberately to make firing on the bad guys impossible (due to their lower elevations), which rendered Jack a sitting duck in a truck. Vehicles should be a fun addition to a game; they generally aren't in FC and that's a pity.
Further, certain basic bits of the game mechanics are flaky. For example, after I figured out how to beat the first really tough battle (i.e., the standoff with the helicopter and the mercenaries on the Japanese carrier's topmost deck) I couldn't use the boat I was supposed to lower. After knocking myself out to get past that really tough fight, I died simply trying to use the boat! Eventually, after playing through the whole sequence far too many times, I simply shot the chains holding the boat and endured the damage for falling into the water. I never figured out why the boat didn't want to work. I kept hitting the action button, as prompted by the game, but it refused to let me use it until I'd dropped it into the water manually and sacrificed a lot of health in the process.
The most inexcusable of all such warts, however, is that the game uses a checkpoint system for saving. Listen to me carefully, developers, for this is not to be missed: every game must allow the player to save whenever and wherever he wants! I absolutely despise console-ish interfaces, and this complaint applies most forcefully against save points. To its credit FC does feature quite a few save points, but I inevitably need to quit playing just after the big, tough battle and before I've found the next one.
Players have lives and all the intrusions that go with them, developers. Stop the irritating nonsense, ditch the hollow rationalizations, and give the player a quick-save option! I have yet to play a single game without a quick-save option that didn't irritate the hell out of me, and FC is not an exception to that rule.
While I'm on the subject of irritation, I'm all for location-dependent damage but FC gets it terribly wrong. The enemies of FC have glass heads bolted onto adamantium bodies; i.e., the same bad guys who die instantly from a spitball to the head can take four or five rounds from an assault rifle in the neck. Heck, I've pumped entire clips into their chest without them going down, and I suspect the player would simply run out of ammo shooting at any other part of their anatomy. That's ridiculous.
Also ridiculous was the relative lack of consistency where steam was concerned. I said before that I feared ladders; I feared steam all the more. Yup, you heard that right. Water in a gaseous state was one of my worst foes throughout FC, largely because its in-game presentation simply isn't consistent. Sometimes when you see steam issuing from a pipe you can walk right through it without any problem. Other times, you'll melt and die instantly when you step near it. I agree with Emerson that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but this hardly seems foolish.
One more negative comment and then I'll stop: I really didn't care much for the sniping mechanics at all. More to the point, some games keep the view perfectly steady when one is zoomed in with a sniper rifle, whereas other games seek to model the degree to which the player's heartbeart and/or nerves tend to make the reticule drift. The degree to which the reticule drifts in FC seems downright excessive, to the point where it made sniping rocket-firing enemies nearly impossible. I say that because it took so long to get a bead on them that I'd be blown up by the time I got off a shot. Yes, I know Jack can hold his breath for a few seconds, as in SC, but it really didn't help much.
I'm surprised to say it, but FC actually has a story. Granted, it starts with a typically empty-headed Jerry-Bruckheimer-ish explosion (cue Homer Simpson voice: "Mmmmm... Explosion...") but it does actually go somewhere. The whole mad scientist thing is a bit hackneyed, but the developers managed to make it fun nevertheless. I found the issue of "Evil Science" magazine in one of the labs particularly amusing.
I don't want to ruin the story, but it features a couple of pretty neat plot twists near the end. I normally see that kind of thing coming, but I sure missed it with FC. I didn't think I gave a rip about either Valerie or Jack, but I was sucking wind for a few seconds when the big plot twist hit me near the end of the game. I like those kind of surprises.
I also like game's humor. Jack resembles the typical action hero, but his dialogue makes him seem a lot more interesting than the heroes in many other FPS games. Several of the exchanges between him and Harlan cracked me up, and that doesn't happen all that often. FC clearly isn't going to win a pulitzer prize, but the story isn't ridiculous and does help the game along.
The first comment to be made is that FC provides quite a lot of value for one's gaming dollar. This isn't a game that's going to be finished within a single digit's worth of hours. Not at all. I'll bet the average gamer will get at least thirty hours of play just from the single-player campaign. I went through it a bit more quickly than that, but I was moving at a pretty good pace for much of it. Some portions I played slowly and stealthily while I approached others with guns a blazin'. Better still, I may play through FC again; it's one of those games with enough of a learning curve that it's probably better the second time through.
Most of of the content itself is also pretty darned impressive. How many games give you an entire island on which to run around? Not many. How many give you an island as detailed as those in FC? Aside from FC, none. The environment is amazing in that respect. The arsenal of weapons is perhaps a bit tame (i.e., they're nothing we haven't already seen before and done better at that), but they're functional and pretty entertaining. The cast of characters isn't huge, but it remains pretty compelling due to the fabulous AI—about which more in a moment. The variety of vehicles is pretty limited, but it doesn't matter much because of the aforementioned control issues.
Perhaps this wouldn't have been such a problem if the vehicles didn't suck. I'm not sure. Still, that fight seemed about an order of magnitude more difficult than anything I'd faced up to that point. Another big standout was surely the fight on the top deck of the carrier. I stepped off the ladder from below decks and got mowed down almost instantly by the helicopter. The next time I ran for cover and got mowed down by some guy with a minigun instead. I alternated between getting mowed down by the helicopter, the guy with the minigun, and the other infantry for a while until I finally found one combination of moves that let me traverse the deck to get to one of the miniguns.
I have no idea how it's possible to beat that sequence otherwise, and I really had to struggle to get there in one piece. Eventually I got to the minigun with but the barest slice of my health bar visible and shot down the helicopter. Naturally, I got killed from behind by one of the other infantry a second or two later. I'll bet I played that sequence for a good fifteen to twenty minutes until everything came together just right and I was able to kill all the bad guys. And then, as I mentioned before, I couldn't get the boat to work properly and died while trying to use it. Lovely. Needless to say I wasn't thrilled with having to play that sequence so many times.
I wish I could say it was the only such sequence, but I can't. The developers clearly have some kind of screw loose when it comes to setting up encounters. Picture if you will some badass human mercenaries, guys who can somehow take more than a full clip from an assault rifle to the body before dying. Next, picture some even scarier creatures, nasty pinkish nightmares that will kill you with a single swipe of their claws. Now, imagine yourself going down a couple of floors in an elevator and having the doors open onto... two of each!
Unlike elsewhere in the game these particular creatures refused to attack the human enemies, so I was on my own. Worse, as I found out to my very great surprise, the nasty pink creatures could magically swing their claws through solid objects, killing me instantly despite the closed, metal cage door in front of me. If that sounds like a stupidly difficult sequence, you've got the picture. Somebody needs to find the guy who came up with that bit and knock some sense into him.
On the whole, the first half of the game is pretty playable save for a couple of really bad spots. But if the difficulty ramps up through the first half of the game, it goes insanely through the roof in the latter half. I have no idea how someone could possibly survive some of those levels. I eventually gave up in frustration and used some cheats I found on the web to get past several spots.
The one that I remember most vividly involved a "fatboy" (a huge, powerful genetic aberration with a rocket launcher where one of his hands should be) accompanied by half a dozen or more of the smaller "trigenes" (pink, demonic looking things). As with too much of the game, that fight took place in a dark, cramped hallway with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Any one of those enemies could regularly kill me with a single attack, while I had to dump a minimum of half a clip on target to kill even one of them. If the fatboy's rocket launcher didn't get me, one of the smaller trigenes did every time. After a few dozen reloads I said to hell with it and enabled the god-mode cheat.
Another such encounter involved facing a group of guards just prior to making it into the archives building. I crept up slowly, counting maybe six or seven bad guys, figuring that I could take them out without much trouble. When I was ready I popped out from cover and tossed a grenade at their feet—they had bunched up nicely, so I figured I should make use of it. The grenade went off right in their midst, to my credit, but not one of them died from it! No, you see, they were carrying plastic riot shields, which somehow render them nigh invulnerable to... well... anything. Naturally, all of them opened fire and killed me in a couple of seconds.
The next time I tried to face them I decided to snipe them from the best distance I could muster. So I got into position, drew a careful bead on one of them whose back was turned to me and thus shouldn't have involved the riot shield, and shot him in the head. And shot him in the head a second time. And shot him in the head a third time before he hit the ground. Of course I died again almost instantly. It's utterly damned ridiculous that just because someone is carrying a riot shield they can survive multiple grenades going off at their feet, several shots to the head with a high-powered rifle, multiple blasts to the face from a shotgun, etc.
And yet as tough as that encounter was, it still doesn't hold a candle to some of the still more impossibly difficult battles near the end of the game. Again, I have no idea how someone could possibly survive them without cheating. I know this much for certain: I wasn't about to spend hours of my time replaying the same sequence a few hundred times to find out.
Having said that, I don't know why you play games, dear reader, but I play them to be entertained, not frustrated. Part of being entertained, of course, is the challenge of facing progressively tougher foes, which also brings a welcome feeling of accomplishment. But given FC's inexcusably stupid omission of a quick-save function, and given the level of difficulty of much of the latter half of the game, it frequently fails to be entertaining. Maybe others really enjoy reloading hundreds of times until they can get past freakishly, stupidly difficult situations but I don't. Maybe I'm missing something, but I found a fair amount of the latter half of the game to be little fun—and for the record I was playing on "normal" difficulty.
For what it's worth, I think the biggest factor contributing to the game's difficulty is the ridiculous location-dependent damage problem with the game mechanics. Because the enemies in FC can take so much damage, I got killed reloading more times than I could count. Seriously, a big fraction of the firefights in FC saw me switching desperately from weapon to weapon as the one I was holding would run dry. When all four weapons were dry, I would then frequently get killed while trying to reload.
Granted, a lot of the enemies die relatively quickly with shots to the head, but the innate inaccuracy of the weapons themselves makes it pretty tough to score headshots at anything beyond close range. I'm a pretty good shot but I was getting really tired of the constant reloading, which was necessary because it was taking me half a clip or more to kill a single mercenary. Finding the OICW gun was long overdue because its flat-trajectory grenade launcher really helped even things up. It's needed a fair bit earlier in the game in my estimation but it did help somewhat. Heck, it's absolutely essential for the final levels.
My very great hope is that someone will release a mod for FC that fixes the ridiculous location-dependent damage problem. Such a mod would do much to make FC both more reasonably paced and a lot more entertaining. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect human targets to die with a half dozen rounds of assault-rifle fire to the torso. If anyone out there makes such a mod, please do let me know; I'd love to play it.
Also in the negative column, the game is pretty buggy. I've had it fail while switching resolutions, the result of which being that it sits as an empty, black window on the Windows desktop until it stops responding to the system. Further investigation on my part demonstrates that this problem is due to the copy protection used by the game. It can get hung up while trying to verify the CD, which freezes the game completely. Way to go, developers! Not only does the copy protection fail to protect—a quick check of a couple of warez sites show FC available for download as well as cracks to disable the copy protection—it also manages to screw your legitimate, paying customers. Good job!
I should also note that FC has crashed back to the desktop several times. Even worse, after a couple of hours of playing the framerate goes right into the toilet, seemingly as the result of a memory leak. I say that because if I close the game at that point and check the Windows XP task manager, it tells me FC is using all of the available memory; that's absurd given the 1 GB of RAM in my machine. Once I exit and restart the game everything is back to normal. Obviously, FC is in need of a few bug fixes.
Now, I've made a fair number of negative comments about the game, and I'm still not finished. Yet as I was playing it, taking a number of discouraging notes, I found myself coming back to it pretty quickly nevertheless. It took me a while to figure out what it was that was bringing me back, despite the framerate issues, the screwy interface, the crashing, the pacing and difficulty issues, etc. Eventually I put my finger on it: the AI in FC sets a whole new standard for the FPS genre and is worthy of serious acclaim.
FC isn't yet another game in which the enemies march stupidly along the very same, wholly linear path into gunfire. Not by a long shot. Enemies use grenades, albeit somewhat infrequently; they call for backup; they run for cover and make good use of it when advancing; they trip alarms to bring reinforcements and helicopters to spot from the air; they even seem to employ covering fire pretty intelligently when advancing! All of these things go far beyond the AI in any other FPS game I've played. The AI is so good that I just didn't think about it at all. I realized how good the AI was when I realized how I was treating my opponents, namely, like living breathing enemies.
Admittedly, the AI isn't perfect. The bad guys do sometimes bunch up, making them easy targets for grenades, but not-so-smart mercenaries in the real world might do that as well, seeking safety in numbers. Heck, I've seen entire teams of human players do that in Raven Shield. If humans are stupid enough to do it pretty consistently, I can forgive the occasional failing in bots as well. It also seems like the bad guys might have perfect night vision without any kind of goggles, but maybe that's just necessary for the nighttime firefights to be any fun. I don't know. What I do know is that the AI in FC has to be taken seriously. I've been flanked, blinded with flashbangs, hit with frag grenades when I lingered too long, enveloped from multiple directions, etc., all of which make for an invigorating gaming experience.
Ironically, for an FPS game that prides itself on carnage, the powerful AI of FC makes stealth gameplay more compelling than other games that deliberately focus on it! Let me provide an example to explain. Shortly after finding the silenced MP5 submachine gun, I came across a camp that I had to assault. I figured the MP5 provided me with just the right tool for a stealthy approach, so I decided to see how well it worked. Up to that point in the game I'd been using the stealth meter largely as a way to tell when all hell was about to break loose, not as something to be used for infiltration or clever approaches. In short, I was still treating FC like every other FPS game.
I snuck up to the periphery of the camp and heard someone coming my way. Sure enough, a large black guard was headed toward me, so I covered his head with the reticule and shoved a good four or five rounds into his face. He dropped without a sound. I snuck forward and heard someone comment about something moving; a quick check of the stealth meter showed that I was about to be discovered, so I raced forward and hid in a nearby tent. A few tense seconds went by while I heard footsteps searching for me. Then, all of a sudden, I heard a guard yell from behind me; I had been discovered. He ran off to the alarm while other soldiers headed our way. I put down a few of the bad guys before the alarm was triggered, but it wasn't enough. Within about thirty seconds a helicopter was hovering over the camp, directing the bad guys toward my position and firing down at me to boot.
This was the single most intelligent display I have ever seen from characters in a video game. I was so amazed that I played through that entire sequence several times, even after I had beaten it, just to see how things worked. What I found was amazing. If I took guys out from a long distance, others would crouch and start looking around for me, eventually heading off in different directions to flush me out. If I made too much noise in nailing somebody up close with the MP5 the guards would come to investigate. And if I couldn't put steel on target fast enough, or at least lose my pursuers in the foliage, I'd be in a world of hurt. In this single assault scenario FC provided brilliantly compelling stealth gameplay, largely because of the strength of its AI. It was wonderful!
I'm not sure it's possible to convey how important this rich set of AI behaviors is to the game as a whole. It's probably something one has to experience to understand. Suffice it to say that I am overjoyed about the AI in FC and have even written a more detailed essay explaining why it's so groundbreaking.
As one might expect, FC offers some positively enormous maps on which to play, which is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because the maps have plenty of elbow room, but it's a curse insofar as it can make for pretty sparse action. I played a fair amount of free-for-all deathmatch and team deathmatch and the same was true of almost every game: they all included some rather pregnant pauses between encounters. That's not necessarily a bad thing, particularly because it gives players a chance to re-equip themselves, but it is definitely not the frantic, fast-paced action of Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament 2004, and many other FPS games.
Assault is definitely the most interesting of the paltry three multi-player game modes—it may seem cheap of me to complain about having a mere three modes, but I've been spoiled by other recent games—though it suffers from a different set of problems. More to the point, snipers continue to dominate the big, open assault maps just as they did during the beta test. Yes, the developers have added features to hint at where the snipers are (e.g., bullet trails, light reflections from the sniper's scope, etc.), but it really doesn't matter much.
Movement speeds are slow enough and sniper rifle ranges are long enough that the big, open maps degenerate quickly into sniping matches. That's great if you like sniping matches, mind you, but that's hardly the point of assault. I found it unsatisfying to say the least. Spawn, take two steps, die. Spawn, take five steps, die. Spawn, look around for a weapon, die. That's how the big, open assault maps play out and that isn't much fun in my view.
The remainder of the bad news comes in two flavors. First, the idiotic user interface decision of the day: FC stupidly requires the player to approve a log-in screen to connect to Ubi.com every single time you play. Even if you tell it to remember your password it's still going to prompt you. That's bad enough when using the in-game browser. It's much worse for those of us who like to use The All Seeing Eye (or other such third-party software) to find games instead. It's incredibly annoying. Maybe there's some way to specify one's user ID and password when launching from a command line, a nice concession made by Tribes 2, but I haven't found it.
Second, remember how I said the game was buggy? Something is seriously screwed up with the multi-player code. I say that because while the single-player aspect sometimes hangs or crashes, requiring me to close and restart the game, the multi-player aspect crashes the entire computer. It rebooted my system immediately the first time I tried to play on-line. That's not supposed to be possible under Windows XP, or at least that's what Microsoft keeps telling us. I've seen plenty of other strange bugs as well, so I'd have to say the developers have several things to fix to bring the multi-player aspect up to snuff.
The general summary for multi-player FC is that it's somewhat underwhelming. The game's primary focus is clearly its single-player campaign. Its multi-player aspect can be a fun diversion, but I can't imagine anyone spending a whole lot of time on it. Not when there are so many other, more compelling multi-player experiences to be had from games today.
FC is a good game. It's neither a great game nor is it a must-buy. It's a game that has a number of very positive things going for it, most notably its visuals and the great strength and flexibility of its AI compared to other FPS games. But be aware from the outset that it's not without flaws.
The interface can be pretty funky. The game mechanics have some substantive problems. The whole thing is downright freakishly, stupidly difficult in spots. The multi-player aspect just doesn't produce the kind of gripping play that other games provide. And you'd darned well better have tomorrow's technology on your desktop today if you want FC to be more than just a pretty slide show.
I'm glad I bought the game, and I enjoyed playing it. It wasn't the best game I've bought this year, but it happily wasn't a waste of either my time or money. So, if you're a gamer who likes really difficult, visually stunning, single-player FPS games, and you have at least as powerful a system as I do, I can recommend FC as a good game today. For others, I suggest waiting for the next generation of hardware or perhaps some future patches to see if the various issues get fixed.
04/10/2004