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 It's good to know that if you shoot some gas tanks, they will blow up, and the explosion will not only look good, but it will sweep everything in its range, just as you would expect it. If you shoot some monster and it falls in the river, the water will carry him away to the waterfall, where the ride will get even more intense. When some mercenaries sit under a crane from which some container hangs, shooting the container down will mess with the mercenaries' heads accordingly. So you see, everything works towards the player being able to squeeze everything he can think of out of the game.
Hey, but look how it makes you feel!
Surely the monsters and other enemies from the game wouldn't do much if they couldn't think for themselves. Yes, it's one of those boring talks about AI, where I try to tell you shit has changed for the better and you say, yeah, sure, give me a human opponent instead. Well, I'm sure that would be nice, but the single player component is this game's most important part, so therefore AI is as well.
Surely you could notice from the demo how things work. Mercenaries will fool around, talking about stuff, fishing, working on something, reading, whatever, until they notice you and the fun begins.
They alert each other, take cover using the surroundings, work as a team, and when a leader is present, things get even more complicated for you. Monsters aren't as smart, but they make up for it either by speed or strength, or both, so they won't be easy pickings either.
There's also the birds and fishes, they avoid you, get scared, you can shoot them, whatever, this is not really AI but I like the pretty fishes... fishy-fishy! Also, fishes can't call the cops, but mercenaries will often call in for backup, most of the times a helicopter full of other soldiers for hire, so yeah, there'll be more of them I guess.
Just Drive, Far Away
Hooray for in-game vehicles and pr0n, although you kinda have to be eighteen and pay some money for the second one. As far as vehicles are concerned though, they're free to use and fun to drive. You have boats, buggies, jeeps, trucks, with or without guns, and best of all, there's a glider that you can use to skip some of the land action, but not all of it, as the glider lowers itself when near locations meant to be crossed on foot. 
Vehicles are good to quickly get about the large maps of the game, but even if graphically it would be possible for the game to let you go wherever you wanted on the island, for example, the story forces you to go through certain locations before others become available, which is very normal.
Other than the vehicles I just presented earlier, you can also see ships, crashed planes, helicopters and stuff like that, but you can't drive those, so whatever. One more important thing about vehicles is that, once you're 'at the wheel', you can change the view from 1st person to 3rd person, which makes driving a lot of fun, and driving over enemies even easier.
And then?
And then some things happen. The graphics and physics are nice, the AI makes shooting enemies pretty interesting, there's even some interiors, but you know, after a while it kinda got boring, until I got to level 14. Level 14 had me on a sinking boat, fighting some sort of boss in a helicopter. Everything seemed right: it was very difficult, it would have had meaning, there was an 'end' setting, so I said to myself 'This is it, the game ends right here'.  But it didn't, it kept getting better and better as the game progressed, and I personally had the impression that I was just about to finish the game for or five times after level 14 and before the game actually ended. Had the entire game been done this way, we would have had us an almost flawless shooter, but even like this it is definitely one of the better ones.
Like I said, the landscapes are huge, thus offering multiple possibilities for reaching an objective. Moving around is kinda slow though. The heavier the weapon you're packing at the time, the slower you walk. Why not endorse the knife at all times then? Sure, you'd move considerably faster, but most of the times you just HAVE to have a powerful weapon handy, you can't know what's going to happen next. Eventually you'll probably get used to the slow movement, although personally I never quite did. But then again you'll be shooting a lot of stuff most of the time, plenty of fire fights that leave you ammo-less very fast, so you have to be careful and aim for the goddamn head. Most of the weapons have a normal firing mode, and an enhanced mode - you aim better, you move slower (if at all).
I need a team, 'cause I'm a playa
Yeah, it's got a multiplayer component as well, but it kinda sucks. Deathmatch, Team-Deathmatch and Assault, standard faeces. Your slow moving character gets blown right away by the very powerful weapons, and then you get tired. With huge maps and mostly jungle setting, camping would be the option for all players, if not for Crytek's 'fuck you' approach towards campers, which means all weapons 'shine' in the hand of the wielder, so you can't really hide for a very long time because enemies can easily pick you up and then you get bored together. Definitely not a successful multiplayer game, although it runs faster than the singleplayer, and by that I mean higher framerates. Don't ask, I don't know, could be the AI, the scripts, I don't know, multiplayer runs smoother somehow though.
Things that suck ass
Stupid is as stupid does, Tom Hanks' mother once told me, but I'm sure you don't want to hear that. One other thing I'm probably almost sure you don't want to hear is Farcry's music. It's not awful or something like that but I'm really kinda having some sorts of writers' block, although it's not actually me writing this, I'm just saying stuff and there's a small tin robot here that takes notes. I must confess I had a little too much to drink last night, and as a result, I forgot how to write. Man, this is going to suck, I'll have my robot type in the passwords for the adult sites, but he can't sign a receipt or write down a shopping list. I know what I'll do, tonight I'll drink some more, maybe it'll come back, and if not, I'll have to buy smarter tin robots, or keep on drinking. |
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