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‘FarCry’: experience the new frontiers of combat
If you have been playing computer games for a while now using a built-in 3D graphics cards on your system. Think over because finally a PC game is launched to blow your system and your senses out of this world. While the highly anticipated games such as “Doom III” and “Half Life 2” seem to be delayed forever, the men at Crytek and UbiSoft (makers of the “Prince of Persia”) has recently released the highlight game of the year, named as “FarCry.”
FarCry employs a new graphics engine delivering the cinematic like never seen before. The game offers exactly what game enthusiasts have been looking for in an exciting game for a long time.
With the introduction of the nVidia 6800 Ultra and ATI X800 Pro, there were really no games to exploit the capabilities the these $500 monsters until now, of course. This game has certainly seem to have set the stage for the age of modern gaming with its adrenaline pumping adventure and superb graphics to please even the odds.
A mad scientist-like guy has always been working on a top secret project, in order to make humans into biogenetical freaks, or in other words deadly monsters. Now it’s up to you to face the challenge and put an end to this havoc on the harmless and peace loving tropical island.
Graphics
What can one say? Seeing is believing. The settings of the game is a picturesque beautiful tropical island. An island, of course, having myriad of trees and plenty of water all around coupled with some intelligent shooting drama, its hard to imagine, such realistic pictures has been painted by the programmers of the game.
For the first time ever, you will experience some realistic water effects and minute details found on every visible object in the game. If it’s the trees you’re focusing on, you can clearly see the effects on each and every leaf of a tree; if its water which you are looking at, you will find the salt-water effect near the shore, submerge in the water and beautiful fishes and lots of aquatic plants, the emboss and engrave effects (bump mapping) give the game an even more brilliant look.
Full support of anisotropic filtering and FSAA add to the great visualization as well as slow down the game immensely. In almost every other PC game, most of the objects would give an expression of static images which would blur as you move close to them. FarCry is an exceptional case, its grasphical effects are too cleverly designed with focus on details, even when standing near an object and focusing through powerful in-game binoculars, there is literary no object blurriness whatsoever.
UbiSoft and Crytek have done something others haven’t. All this and so much more, I wasn’t even able to unleash the full throttle due to hardware limitations yet my system had just enough reserves to bring out something special. The game also provides a dynamic programmable graphics engine for professionals who would like to create their own scenario.
This entire graphical venue doesn’t come cheap though; already a recommendation of a P4 3.0GHz and a high-end AGP card with at least 128MB of memory and 512 MB of system memory. How many of you actually own a minimum of GeForce4 Ti or Radeon9600 Pro? If you don’t, you’re going to need it really bad.
The game consumes somewhere around 4GB of hard disk space and plenty more for temporary cache, I guess all of you may be running on a low hardware compared to the requirement of the game. Nonetheless, the glaring graphics will keep you tucked to the game forever if you manage to turn all the goodies on. No doubt, a score of 10/10 will do.
To add more, there are plenty of graphics options to toy with. It’s a matter of salvaging performance out of the game rather than the graphics itself. Setting the game on low-end graphics will improve game speed but making it looks very ordinary. Turning on high-end options will result in the coolest graphics at the cost of gaming performance or speed.
Game play
Right from the start you get a taste of the superb scenarios as well as the excellent game play. With the mouse to aid in shooting and aiming while the keyboard for movement and gizmos, once you get the basic key arrangements correct, you would get the greatest game play of all time (Not exactly).
The characters in the game are quite adorable but can only be viewed when using and vehicle. Pretty ordinary, those Tomb Raiders days are over when the whole character would show up on the screen. The AI is very good, only occasionally do I see any mad enemy runs but on every other instance they act just like the character itself or even better.
Any sprinting movements or other disturbances will create awareness in the camp and if you get caught, they will combine their efforts to hunt you down. As the game progresses, you lay your hands on new stealth weapons and snipers, even RPG’s but it wont be long until you start facing the bio-monsters who leave you just stunned by their rapid actions.
Stealth is the key to success here. With dedicated keys for walking, prone and crouching, it requires time to complete each stage. Though you won’t get through the enemies without being spotted but you’ll get aid in the form of stealthy weapons and 4x4 vehicles and boats. Oh yes, I almost forgot! You also get special binoculars which can pinpoint bad buys with in a desired area by some sound mechanism. Most importantly, the game offers a radar system to help you crack down on your desired target.
All in all, I love the game play, it’s better than the critically acclaimed Delta Force but lacks behind quiet dramatically from “Unreal Tournament 2004” but that’s a different story. No first, a game play score 8/10 is quite respectable isn’t it.
Sound
Yup, the Hollywood movie type background theme tracks all there, the theme songs actually creates a suspense packed scenario which will catch your ears under enemy encounters. Every weapon has its own distinctive sound and the peaceful seashore sounds are very good indeed.
The characters can speak with almost acceptable lip movements as you’ll see in the game and the character voices are pretty well dubbed. As they say, sounds best on Creative Sound Blaster no doubt.
The experience of “FarCry” was not even in my wildest of dreams but the era of realistic graphics begins with “FarCry.” This winter expect seeing such games may be “Half Life 2” and “Doom III.” But for now, “FarCry” takes the cake for the best adventure/action game. UT2004 is flooding the markets as well so I’ll see how UT stacks up with this game. Crytek and UbiSoft deserves the state-of-the-art award for their awesome work.
Post-installation problems
There is a problem after the game installation I encountered where running the “.exe” file gives out annoying error saying that some “*.dll” file is missing.” It took me a day to find a fix as those “dll” were really missing from the CD, that goes for you too. But Yeah! My smart intelligence lite up with an ingenious idea. I already own the game, “Prince of Persia: Sands of Time,” which is also produced by UbiSoft. So here is what you should do: get a copy of “Sands of time” and if FarCry gives any “dll” Errors simply copy the missing files from “ The Sands of Time “ installation and put them into the Bin32 folder in the FarCry directory. That’s it, if the game doesn’t run even after that then considers some hefty upgrading, that’s the way it goes.
The game takes an awfully long time load up. Longest loading time I have seen so far may be it’s because I am low on hardware but still it easily takes more than three-minutes to load most of the levels. It takes a lot of restarts and configuration set-ups to get the game running at suitable frame rates. While the game will speed up when inside buildings or looking straight down onto the ground, while rest of the time when your surfing the jungles and sea shores the game will suck up a lot up system resources and will most certainly slow down.
Hardware requirements
Minimum hardware: Intel P4 1.5Ghz or AMD Athlon XP @ 1.3Ghz; graphics card: 64MB Dx 9.0 compatible AGP card; Ram: 258MB (512 recommended); HD: 4 GB (Plus more temporary storage)
Recommended hardware: Intel P4 3.0GHz or AMD Athlon 64 3000; FX 5900 or Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card. However, recommended is Geforce 6800 GT or ATI X800; 512MB DRR 400+ Ram.
Reviewer’s machine: Over-clocked P4 1.5GHz (2.1)GHz, extreme modified Leadtek Winfast A250LE TD VIVO, 25 MB DDR.
The writer
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