Far Cry

The first-person shoot-'em-up genre is among the most saturated in the games industry. Unless you're dealing with an established series of games, developing successful new titles is something of a lottery.

One game that has defied the odds in the face of stiff competition is the eagerly anticipated Far Cry from Ubi Soft.

The game follows the plight of charter boat captain Jack Carver, whose life takes a turn for the worse while escorting a journalist to the tropical island of Cabatu.

Without giving away too much of the game's plot, Jack soon finds himself being pursued by hordes of highly trained mercenaries across the island as he tries to escape.

This is the first title to use the lauded Cry Engine - a system that produces breathtaking visuals and an extraordinary level of interaction. Anyone who has played the Far Cry demo will attest to its beauty.

Tropical flora sways lazily in the wind; dynamic shadows are cast by literally every object that light touches, and the sea laps at the ultra-realistic shore in a manner rarely seen in games.

The physics element of Far Cry is also second-to-none. Inanimate objects respond exactly as you might expect them to, reacting to collisions with in-game characters and ricocheting wildly when hit by flying bullets.

The artificial intelligence of enemy soldiers is also particularly impressive. Charge blindly into battle and they'll alert each other, working as a cohesive team to bring about your downfall.

If they find themselves under substantial pressure, they'll retreat and take cover while better-positioned units try to outflank you. There are times when they will make mistakes, but for the most part, their behaviour is startlingly realistic.

Far Cry's early levels avoid the traditional claustrophobic corridor approach favoured by many games of this type, in favour of using wide-open spaces.

Levels can be over a kilometre in size, so you have to adopt a variety of different approaches, including the use of vehicles, for each section. This provides enjoyable single-player missions, although purists may find this approach is not as much fun in the multiplayer modes.

As the game progresses, however, there is a good amount of variation in the level design and you'll encounter new enemy types with altogether different, and more terrifying characteristics.

Ubi Soft touts Far Cry as being one of the first titles to take advantage of 64bit AMD processors. Although a complete 64bit version of Windows XP is not yet available, we tested the game on a standard 32bit Windows XP platform using an Athlon XP 3200 CPU, and compared its performance when run on an Athlon 64 3400+ processor. There was a slight improvement in performance, but this was not as impressive as we had hoped.

Despite this, Far Cry serves as much more than a stopgap for Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, both of which are released later this year. It features sublime gameplay, realistic artificial intelligence and some of the most impressive graphics we have seen in a game.

Contact: Ubi Soft
www.farcry.ubi.com

System requirements:

• Windows 98 or above
• 1GHz CPU, 256MB Ram
• Geforce4 MX
• Geforce3 or higher
• 582MB hard disk space
• DirectX 9
• Forceware 53.03 drivers or Catalyst 3.9 drivers