In 2004, when the first Fi Edge came out, I was still very young. That’s why my acquaintance with the series began with the third part. Passed the fourth, played the fifth. I recently finished the second one, and now I’m getting to the first one. And I want to tell you how the first Far Cry is played in 2022.
I don’t really like playing older games because they’re often hard to get into. Not because the graphics are kind of old, not because the controls are clumsy, not because the gameplay has become very old. But because these games are often the most confusing and incomprehensible. Because of this, instead of playing, you will be constantly distracted, looking down, not understanding what is needed from you, where to go. Or you’ll just have to constantly go to Google to find a solution. What takes you out of immersion and the state of flow?.
And I thought that Far Cry would work exactly the same way. And what’s more, there’s even an open world here. Well, how can it not choke??
That’s why I was very surprised that the first Far Cry is not like that.
What is important to understand is that the first game in the series was made by Krytek, not Ubisoft. And therefore it is somewhat different in its concept. If the second part is an open world shooter with an attempt at a sandbox. If the three and the following are already a completely full-fledged sandbox. Then the first part is such a classic linear shooter.
Of course it has an open world. But somehow he’s not really needed. Because it’s completely empty. Its only purpose is to hold together the story-based arenas for shootings, one after another.
And I’m amazed that the game doesn’t stifle me and doesn’t make me not understand where I need to go before the next task. Crytek simply added a radar on which a dot indicates in which direction the desired target is located. Because you have absolutely no problems understanding where to go.
But the radar sometimes fails. Particularly in multi-level locations. For example, I entered one arena. They tell me on the radio to find a door to some kind of bunker. I’m going to the blip on the radar, in the most obvious and straightforward way, in a straight line. And the door is exactly on the mark.
But to open this door you need a key card, which I don’t have. And as it turned out, I didn’t need to go in a straight line, but go a little further to the corner of the level, where I can climb to the top of this building with a door. And there you go inside. And as it turned out, the mark was not on the door, but on the key card that unlocks this door. And it’s strange. Because it was almost impossible to get to this key card without hitting the closed door. You just get there sooner.
But such moments are very rare and basically in the game it is always clear what to do and where to go.
I played the game on challenging difficulty. And the shootings here evoke very strange emotions. On the one hand it seems cool, but on the other hand the game has a lot of problems on various levels.
The main type of opponents you fight with for most of the game are regular bots with assault rifles. And they’re stupid. Not in the sense that they are stupid, they miss you, they don’t see you point-blank. And in the sense that they have only 2 states. First, they don’t care about you. And secondly, they saw you and started shooting. And with the second state, everything is not very cool for them. In the sense that the enemies here are given such a full-fledged aimbot. If one of the bots saw your carcass several tens of meters away, then all the bots in the area begin to simultaneously shoot through the walls at you, even if they do not directly see you.
I’ll explain with an absurd but illustrative example. There is one arena at the beginning of the game. How’s the arena?. It’s just a flat field with tents set up and a couple of sniper towers.
You’re getting to this level. One bot saw you, everyone starts shooting at you. What are you doing? Well, of course, you run to the tents to take cover behind them, or you run inside to control where the enemies are coming at you, and gradually take them on.
But no, it’s not that simple. Tents are shot through.
And as I already said, the guys don’t care, they have an aimbot. Therefore, even while you are hiding behind the tents and while you are not visible, they still shoot at you and hit you perfectly. By the way, they do a ton of damage, so you fly away very quickly.
That is, it turns out that you go out into just a flat field in which there are no shelters. Or rather, there are shelters, but these shelters are for bots, since you can’t see them behind the tents. And they do you.
And so, dying over and over again, over and over again, you gradually learn: approximately how many bots are in your field of vision, how many where and when bots will appear a little later. And you come to the conclusion that the only way to pass the level is: take a sniper rifle, take out snipers on the towers, and then, at maximum speed, having memorized all the positions, instantly shoot all the bots before they kill you. And according to the same scheme, having learned it by heart, shoot new ones that appear before they have time to get angry at you.
This example is very absurd, but it shows the power of artificial intelligence in the game.
By the way, it seems very funny to me that Krytek hasn’t changed this thing since Far Cry. What’s in the first Crysis, what’s in the second, what’s in the third, what, God forbid, in Warface. Exactly the same bots everywhere. They either don’t see you, or they all see you together and also shoot at you through the walls.
But with cards, everything is not https://fgfox.co.uk/withdrawal/ as bad as in this example. They’re only like this in the first half of the game. Then the developers probably learned from their mistakes along the way, and the arenas are already much better. These are either narrow corridors of bunkers where you can hide behind corners, doorways, small boxes. Or a jungle, in which there are always trees, stones, lying logs. In general, there is always somewhere to hide.
Therefore, from what I described, further on in the game, shootouts turn into methodical shooting of bots from behind cover. Which is quite nice to do. It’s still pretty clunky though. Because if you want to kill someone without killing yourself, then you just stick out of cover for a couple of microseconds, firing a couple of rounds. Because the bots immediately start shooting back. But again, in a 2004 game I don’t have any particular problems with this, so it’s fine.
By the way, about the tents being shot through. For some reason, the developers thought it was a very cool idea to push enemies somewhere into bushes, behind tents, behind glowing lanterns, so that you would have absolutely no idea where the fire was coming from.
Because again, you can’t see the enemy behind the bush, but his aimbot can see you perfectly. Because of which you have to shoot at random in approximately the area from which you see flying bullet tracers. But fortunately such situations do not happen very often.
But very often enemies blend in with their surroundings. In the sense that they are literally painted dark, or in camouflage so that they are difficult to notice. And it’s really damn hard to notice them until they start shooting at you.
For this purpose, the game has a thermal imager, which, when you turn it on, clearly shows all enemies. By the way, this to some extent solves the problem of the guys in the bushes. But still, you don’t get a thermal imager at the beginning of the game.
And I don’t even know how to feel about this. On the one hand, the fact that you can’t see enemies without a thermal imager is a problem. Because it makes it difficult to play. You can’t run around in a thermal imager the whole game. It’s already some kind of SUPERHOT in terms of visuals.
But on the other hand, this is an interesting solution. If in the third Far Cry they resorted to gaming conventions and made the enemies bright red and bright yellow so that they stood out against the background of the environment. Then in the first part they resorted to a less conventional and more realistic, let’s say, option. Like, yes, the bots are in camouflage, you won’t notice them, but here’s a thermal imager for you, look for it.
There’s already beauty in the eye of the player. I’m not a fan of this solution. A little later you will understand why.
The game has obvious problems with sound. Or more precisely with its positioning. I constantly had situations when I couldn’t understand from the sound where they were shooting at me. And it would be okay if I couldn’t make it out from afar. But no, even when a bot appears somewhere in my back and starts shooting at me, I notice it by accident. How did he get there, when, how was I supposed to know about him, if not by the sound?? Mystery.
But the shooting in this game, by the way, is very pleasant. So old, collective farm, lamp, exclusively from the hip, without sights. I really got a kick out of her. Very cool and very unusual for these years.
But here comes the problem. Snipers and grenade launchers. Just as Kraytek love to stick enemies into bushes from which they cannot be seen, in the same way they love to take a sniper or a grenade launcher, or better yet both, and spawn them somewhere a kilometer away from you. From where they will shoot carefree. Do I need to explain that killing them without normal aiming is very difficult?. It takes a very long time to hit and kill.
There is, of course, one sniper rifle in the game. But you almost never find cartridges for it, a maximum of 1-2 magazines, which very often are no longer available.
There are also 2 assault rifles with scopes. You find one somewhere in the middle of the game, but it is so oblique that it was more convenient for me to shoot bots in the distance from the hip with an M4. And the second one is given only at the end of the game . It’s a little better and a little more comfortable to shoot at a distance. But in reality it’s not really an option either.
And if there are snipers, then fine, to hell with them. The grenade launchers are completely broken.
They, like other bots, are simple people. They saw you a kilometer away and started shooting without missing. And they shoot very quickly, one missile is immediately followed by another, they are not even interested in reloading.
And the gameplay against them is the same as sitting behind cover. But there is a nuance. With one rocket they tear off half your HP bar. The missiles also do area damage. Even if you are hiding behind cover, you are still standing on the ground, which can be shot at not far from you and splash damage will land in your face. Maybe he won’t tear off half a strip, but a third or a quarter is sure.
And there is only one way to survive grenade launchers. This means dying a couple of times, finally understanding where he is sitting and trying to quickly throw as many bullets at him as possible, and praying to God that at least some of them reach him before your face is torn off.
It becomes even more interesting when we remember that in addition to the grenade launcher, there is also a whole gang of equally accurate bots next to you. Therefore, on the one hand, you are squeezed behind cover by a bunch of enemies, because if you get out of it, you will be shot instantly. On the other hand, you cannot sit behind this shelter, because missiles are flying at you, which are not interested in your shelter.
There is no way to get past this except endlessly dying and memorizing enemy positions.
And here we come to the main problem of combat. It lies in the fact that it is simply impossible not to take damage in the game. Well literally, no way at all. No options.
Because the enemies have aim. They instantly target you and shoot. And you still need time to notice who is where, it is possible to additionally turn on the thermal imager. And while you are trying to get your bearings, it flies in your face from all sides. There’s a ton of damage flying in, from which you can’t completely hide.
Especially from grenade launchers, who are very difficult to shoot. Because by the time you aim from the hip, until at least some bullets hit him, a couple of missiles will already fly at you and a bunch of bullets from the bots around. And you’ll just fly away. And you will fly away like this dozens of times until you memorize all the positions and until you are lucky enough to have enough bullets hit distant targets.
That’s why I’m not a fan of the thermal imaging in this game. You don’t have time to notice enemies under heavy fire, so you also have to turn on the thermal imager separately.
Here I described the worst cases in battles with people. But there is much worse. Because there are mutants in the game.
What kind of mutants are these?? Where are they from?? True, I still don’t understand. Probably explained in the plot.
By the way, the plot: well, it exists. Cutscenes play, characters speak dialogue. Honestly, I didn’t pay attention to him at all. I came here solely for the gameplay.
So, mutants. They take overall curvature to the next level. Most of them are not very annoying. There are fuckers who jump at you. The ones that just jump around the arena. And invisible fuckers. Here’s a thermal imager and off we go. It’s more or less normal.
But what there is a problem with are fat men with grenade launchers. This is the same cancerous abomination as ordinary grenade launchers, only these are also impenetrable.
I don’t know how many headshots from a sniper, how many rockets from a grenade launcher, how many magazines from a rifle you need to put into them so that they drive away. So many. And at this time they are unstoppably moving forward right at you, spamming missiles without missing, who the hell knows how to hide from them.
Let’s summarize all of the above.
The first third of the game is quite a relaxed cover shooter with pleasant shooting. It is overshadowed only by rare levels without shelters and equally rare grenade launchers. But overall it’s quite strong and pleasant.
Mid game is disgusting. Mobs come out of every crevice and they shoot at you. And they are more armored than at the beginning. That is, it is even more difficult to kill them before they kill you. A bunch of open locations with almost no cover and where a bunch of snipers and grenade launchers sit far from you.
The most disgusting levels in the game, where I died dozens of times, memorizing the positions of all the mobs. Mutants with grenade launchers also appear for the first time.
And the last third is normal again. There and in general everything is more dynamic. And episodes with trips on vehicles are added. Again you are not fighting against a bunch of armored people. The vast majority of arenas are well designed and do not cause problems. Everything is gorgeous.
Except for the last level, where you are released into some kind of pit. No shelter. In which there are about 5 mutant grenade launchers, constantly firing at you, whom you need to somehow try to kill. So to speak, the last torture before the end.
And what in general?
Overall I liked it. The game has a lot of problems, both due to age and simply. But as a museum exhibit of what our grandfathers played, it’s interesting. The graphics in the game are respectable. Even now it looks good. Character models are high quality. The jungle and vegetation are very cool.
Shooting lamp and cozy.
I was waiting for an old, crooked shooter that I could get stuck into for a bit and see where Far Cry began. And I got it.
