Far Cry preview and demo

As the PC games market seems to be shrinking further and further into itself, producing less and less games in less and less genres, the idea of yet another first person shooter begins to seem about as appealing as a new Police Academy sequel. That is, until you see Far Cry…

To be honest I haven’t really been paying attention to Far Cry – I’ve ignored most of the screenshots that Ubisoft keep pelting us with and I didn’t do much more than glance at it at ECTS. (See – I really am bored of FPS!) Yesterday though I got a good long go on almost final code of the single player mode and I have to admit it impressed my socks off.

Six Days Seven Nights

As the more observant of you will have noticed the larger part of Far Cry is set on a desert island. The reasons for this seeme to involve some sort of cock and bull story about you running an aeroplane charter service and having a female client kidnapped by mercenaries. Or something. To be honest I wasn’t really paying attention to such trivialities considering the quite awesome graphical spectacle the game offers. The training level actually starts out in a rusted WWII ship (the islands are littered with such things, including almost a whole aircraft carrier) but as you make it outside and take in the incredible view of the island paradise it really is a bit of a jaw dropper.

The draw distance is essentially infinite, the object models highly detailed and almost everything is interactive – with certain surfaces, such as wood, being just as much fodder for the heavier weapons as the bad guys. Despite all this what really leaves an initial impression is the vegetation. This is no barren island hideaway but a completely realistic looking terrain that’s absolutely chock full of bushes, trees, long grass and miscellaneous plant life. It’s incredibly pretty and immediately makes the game look like no other.

Haley Joel Osment

But graphical trickery really only scratches the surface of what makes Far Cry special – its real innovation is in the A.I. of the bad guys. We’ve heard claims of advanced A.I. before and they’ve usually turned out to be complete tosh, only drawing attention to obvious deficiencies. Far Cry though is the real deal.

First contact with the enemy shows just how intelligent they are. For starters they can see and hear in a highly realistic manner – another thing that most games usually get completely wrong. These guys can actually see more than three feet in front of them and in my first attempt to creep up on a bunch of them I’m spotted and they all open fire as one. Cutting down a few with an M-16 I start to think that maybe this is going to be easy, at which point one of the baddies runs off to a radio, calls up some friends on the other side of the bay and gets them to start shelling my position with mortar fire. At which point I die.

Finding Nemo

What’s also impressive about the A.I. is that it doesn’t suffer from the usual video game amnesia of most FPS bad guys. After yet another ambush goes pear shaped I decide that discretion is the better part of valour and turn around, jump in the water and start to swim towards a wreck in the distance. Even though the mercenaries I was attacking are now some distance behind me they still continue to fire and bullets ping through the water at me. Eventually emerging out of the briny depths and onto what I assumed was the safety of cover half a mile distance I’m shot in the head by a sniper. The mercenaries. clearly, where having none of my nonsense.

In fact the producer demoing us the game then begins to relate a story one of the programmers told him about how they were testing one of the later interior levels (the game isn’t just set on the islands but also inside the various wrecks and assorted laboratory complexes) and were moving between floors in a lift. When doing so the A.I. started following them, the only problem being they were never programmed to do it – which apparently rather freaked the team out!

Top Gear

Another impressive proof of the A.I. comes when playing a level with a motorboat (there are seven different vehicles in the game, with several varieties of jeep and boat and a hanglider). While messing about on a river an enemy boat sails past and gives chase. A quick bit of dodging around rocks appears to loose them though at which point I make a beeline for the shore and a bit of a ramble amongst the foliage. It’s at that point though that the boat suddenly reappears, clearly searching the shoreline, spots my boat and comes ashore – at which point one guy gets out to have a look around and the other stays by the machine gun in order to help out should his pal spot anything!

The final medal on Far Cry’s already gleaming chest is its non-linearity – not only of each level but of pretty much every encounter. There’s a particularly hard bit at the top of an aircraft carrier, involving a helicopter shooting down at you while you try to hide behind wooden boxes (which actually completely fail to stop the chopper’s heavy calibre weaponry). The ultimate goal is to get to lifeboat at the other end of the deck, but it's all very tricky. It turns out though that if I’d just taken a minute to observe the surroundings before clambering on deck I could have shoot the lifeboat's supports from a safe position and simply jumped in the water after it – negating all the nasty business with being killed by heavy machine gun fire.

There’s almost nothing in the game that has a prescribed solution, as you’ll see when you play the demo and you have a go at the first encounter with the bad guys in the shack – do you just run in there guns blazing, try and sneak round the back of their hunt and pinch the M-16 inside or be extra sneaky by climbing under the platform they’re standing on, throw some rocks to attract them, and shoot up from a whole in the floor when they come to see what the noise is. The choice is yours.

The small print

As you’d expect Far Cry wasn’t all perfect and even though the code I was looking at was only a month away from being final there were still some obvious bugs with enemies occasionally locking up or yabbering away with phrases like “Where is he?”, despite the fact they’ve been shooting at you for the last five minutes with unnerving accuracy. In most other respects the code was remarkably solid and didn’t crash once.

There was some noticeable pop-up of incidental detail though, particularly bushes and the like, but nothing too serious. In fact the only fault you could really make with the graphics is that when moving through dense foliage there doesn’t seem to be any kind of collision detection – the leaves aren’t pushed out of the way at all by your movement and you instead get an occasionally ugly warping as you plunge on through. It’s possible this could be fixed for the final release though, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Marlon Brando

The only other concern is about the later levels of the game, which apparently will feature a series of ‘mutants’ as the game's storyline takes on a very “Island of Dr. Moreau” vibe. We were shown only a glimpse of these guys and although they were interesting, hearing that they would be less intelligent and wouldn’t work as well in groups as the human mercs was a little disconcerting. One hopes the game doesn’t “do a Halo” and fill the last levels with brain-dead bad guys, when the best thing about the early bits had been how intelligent everyone was.

We’ll have to wait and see on that though and there’s certainly nothing else in the rest of the game to suggest that developers Crytek are going to deliver anything more than a cast iron classic with this one.

Of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so if you want to try out the brand new single player demo just click here to download it directly from Boomtown.