Far Cry

Far Cry Overview

Far Cry is a first person shooter role playing game that takes place on an isolated island that is run by mercenary groups. The main character starts off escorting a girl but loses her when his ship is attacked by mercenaries. From that point onward the player must work to find her and bring her to safety. Other themes that are present in the game are genetic manipulation, and the genocide of natives on the island. Overall the game has a good story and is a great play through.

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Full Review

Far Cry Review

By, Nicholas Bale

Backdrop

.hack Part 1 Infection (Dot Hack) begins with a bang. Something disastrous happens to your character‘s real world friend, while innocently playing a 20 million-subscriber base, wildly popular online RPG game (MMORPG), The World. To unravel the mystery of your friend’s misfortune, you become an online, ingame rogue hacker, exploring every corner of The World, even some virus-infected ones.

The hero is armed with the special skills of Data Drain and Gate Hack, and some colorful, talented fellow adventurers to fill the two other available party slots. Different adventurers must accompany you depending on the plot‘s development. You have some control over the others in your party, including upgrading them through trades or gifts. You can play only a single class, Twin Blade. Other characters are from different classes, with varied strengths and weaknesses, from a mage type (Wavemaster) to a bully (Heavy Axeman).

Gameplay

Gameplay takes place in three principal areas – towns, fields, and dungeons. Towns house The World’s servers. There, the player can save the game, buy magic scrolls and useful and unique items, store items, buy equipment, and talk and trade with lots of other players in character online. One town has an unusual ranch to check out, a patent homage to an enduring feature of just about every Final Fantasy.

The town’s Chaos Gate provides instant teleportation to a particular wide-open Field, containing monster encounter hotspots, a mystical spring, treasure, and lots of mysterious food. You enter three distinct keywords, some known at the game‘s onset, and others learned through play. Whatever keywords are entered, the difficulty level of the destination is helpfully revealed. This prevents a low-level party from being massacred. Once the keywords are entered, you travel through the Chaos Gate. (You can enter specific keywords learned to continue the plot, do side quests, or do unlimited exploring. Or, you can instruct the Gate to enter random keywords, and take your chances. There‘s also an option to enter any keywords you wish from a word list.) Every Field houses a single Dungeon. The dungeons, where you spend much of the game fighting for your life, are not overly large in size, and always range between three and five average levels.

Many have compared Dot Hack to Phantasy Star Online Episode I and II (PSO) on the Gamecube. Let us gently discredit this. We feel Dot Hack has far better graphics than PSO. The Fields and Dungeons contain many colorful, over stylized backdrops and settings, including weather effects. Dot Hack’s monsters resemble the beautifully-drawn monsters of the later Final Fantasy’s. Dot Hack’s world is gigantic with a seeming infinite number of locations to explore. PSO’s world is relatively small, and plot is threadbare, with meaningless, though fun, side quests, which instill no enthusiasm in the player. Dot Hack’s plot is deep and complex, with each subplot advancing the story just a little bit further. (Remember though, the end of this game in no way comes close to wrapping up the story, to be completed in the three games to be released later this year.) One visual treat, however, was lifted directly from PSO – the cascading rings that accompany the teleportation of characters to and from different areas.

Combat

Dot Hack’s combat engine can best be described as modified real-time. Much like the action-RPG, Kingdom Hearts, button mashing can be effective to beat monsters. Monster combat icons appear as large yellow twirling landmarks. As you approach, the landmark dissolves, monsters come at you big-time, and, undoubtedly, players will feel a healthy adrenaline rush. Some of Dot Hack’s many monsters do not stand around waiting to be pummeled, rather some you need to catch. Dot Hack lets you turn combat almost into a turn-based affair. The player needs only to hit Triangle in the middle of battle to pause the game instantly. From there the player can give orders to the others in the party, anything from healing someone, reviving another, casting a spell, designating a target monster. Without jeopardizing your party from the hailstorm of monster blows, combat becomes a calmer, more strategic, experience. This will help the many action-challenged. Camera angles play a big role in successful combat. You must be facing a monster to do any damage. As in many games, manipulating opposing environmental elements, like fire vs. water, is a key to successful monster combat.

Dot Hack’s cyberspace setting provides a wealth of Wow-inducing outbursts. The Data Drain option in combat is a great example. When a monster’s approaches zero, the player can Data Drain to reduce a horrendous, gigantic steel robot, for example, into a sniveling, puny monster, easily defeated with a single blow. Data Drain always results in a nifty, rare item or essential Virus Cores so you can Gate Hack areas of The World now closed, but needing investigation. One bad side effect – if you defeat, a Data Drained monster, but a single experience point is earned. One REALLY bad side effect – if you Data Drain too often without giving the skill a rest, you may overload and explode. Game Over. In the case of Boss monsters, Data Drain works the same, but what remains is no sniveling puny monster, but a full-blooded slightly less tough monster. All of this makes for interesting and captivating combat, a large part of the game.

Fresh Features

Dot Hack is replete with new and interesting features that kept us riveted.

To start, the entire background and story of a real world gamer becoming a rascal hacker, penetrating deep into a virus-infected online game, is quite novel. Combine this with Dot Hack’s emulating the look and feel of an online game universe. (Message traffic on the web shows many gamers mistakenly believe Dot Hack is a real online MMORPG, along with monthly fees! No real Internet connection is required.)

Just like in the real word, Dot Hack replicates your excitement level when “New” appears before a popular forum or on your email screen. Some of the game involves receiving emails as the plot develops, as well as new, crucial information surfacing on The World’s Board. (Look out for emails challenging you to a strange game of Tag.) The online game world looks very familiar with a bunch of characters wandering around the game’s towns, with the ubiquitous balloon icons talking typical “trash” to each other, even criticizing “newbies“.

Combat grippingly called for surprisingly strategic decision-making to succeed, not related to the usual attack or defend choices. Do you go for experience and upgrade your character or try for some special equipment or a Virus Core, vital to Gate Hacking? The innovative control of other party members became second nature to us after some practice. The game rewards a player taking chances, like entering a Field or Dungeon rated 5 levels above the player’s current level. On the other hand, the game scoffed at players entering areas much lower rated the their current level, by awarding negligible experience points for victory.

Dot Hack takes progress reports to a new level, by slowly unlocking books that contain much in the way of statistics and information. There’s even a monster compendium with tips for defeating them.

Some might complain about the minimal “Save Game” ability, but we thrived on it. You explore a very hostile cyberspace environment without the facility to save. Only in a server-hosting town is saving possible at the local Recorder. We may be a solitary voice in the Wilderness, but we like this throwback to the good old RPG days. Those of you old enough to remember the Wizardry series, may recall those fingernail-biting multi-combat treks back to the Castle just to save the game. In case you’re really stuck deep in a dungeon, a common item will teleport you to the outdoor field, from where you can simply gate back to town from the command menu.

Many pieces of equipment come with distinctive powerful attack, healing, and status skills, essential to combat dominance. The player must tradeoff whether to equip something that will raise defense or offense or something less vigorous that lets you use a powerful skill. Trading is the most successful way to upgrade equipment.

In a first, Dot Hack comes with a 45 minute anime video. This gives some great background on what’s going on in The World, as well as provide clues for completing the game. In a nice twist, voiceovers for game speech can be set for Japanese or English presentation. Listening to the authentic Japanese voices really keeps you glued to the game.

Though some may scoff at what follows as meaningless, we liked the game’s unlocking of some nifty new “toys” to like, some only available when the game is cleared. You can unlock many different background music play lists. Tired of creepy tunes, just switch to something more upbeat, or futuristic. Just like real world gamers, who constantly change their desktop wallpaper, new and different wallpapers are unlocked along the way. Some are concept art of characters, while others are full blown anime renditions of the characters. This makes for great fun, and seems to pump additional energy into the game. As you progress over a dozen special cut scenes or movies will become viewable after defeating the game.

Though Dot Hack’s extras and new wrinkles enhance the RPG game experience, much of the gameplay will ring true to those who enjoy RPG‘s. Expect plenty of exploration in a huge 3D world, frequent monster combat, tons of treasure to earn and discover, upgrading your character’s weapons and armor, and needing to level before tackling pivotal story dungeons. The status screens for the characters and all equipment are well laid out and easy to grasp.

Time for Completion

Game length in hours always concerns many purchasers. A short RPG normally takes a lot of flack, and many online are asking about Dot Hack‘s time for completion. (Some have questioned whether Bandai should have released a single 80 hour game for $50, rather than four 20-hour games for $200 for a single story. This matter is beyond the scope of this review, but our high opinion of this game as a standalone is obvious.) Our experience, playing the plot without doing side quests or extra exploration, is in the 12 to 15-hour range. Players side-questing and extensively exploring, aside from the main plot, can expect to spend 25 hours to complete the game. You can even continue to advance your character, after game completion, to get a jump start on Part 2 due in May. In the next game, your character can be imported from Part 1.

Furthermore, imagine trying to explore every nook and cranny of the fields and dungeons accessible by a large number of 3-word combinations. Doing that would put the game in the 50-hour range, if not more. However, at a certain point, new items dry up, and a single experience point is earned for any defeated monster, no matter how tough.

Shortcomings

While, as is evident above, there is much to recommend in Dot Hack, certain concerns to varying degrees deserve mention.

From the “Why oh why did they leave this out?“ File. Pregame game board traffic and information about the Japanese version released months ago had many salivating for replaying the game in “parody” mode. This mode apparently converted all Dot Hack’s game world characters into satirical comedians. Sorry to say, this highly-anticipated feature is missing from the version released here.

The game requires massive amounts of button pressing. Every item or treasure uncovered from combat victories or exploration (opening chests, searching expired adventure remains, collecting food for Grunty’s, as examples) must be confirmed with a button press. When there could be 50-100 such occurrences in a single dungeon or field, over the course of the game, finger cramps seem inevitable. Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance also required lots of bashing for buried treasure and chests, but the items literally flew into your inventory, a much better way to handle this.

The manual is woefully terse and lacking in some crucial information and guidance. While the ingame tutorials fill in many of the gaps, one extremely important gameplay feature is missing from both the manual and tutorials – instructions on control your characters directly during combat.

Final Word

We got a kick out of Dot Hack. The feeling of “just one more dungeon” dominated our lives for the 3 days to completion. The engaging environment held our attention without much effort. The strategic nature of combat, plus the convoluted plot kept us going for hours on end. The constant unlocking of both frivolous and important gameplay features created a “what’s next” anticipation. Now, if I could only read Japanese better, Dot Hack Part 2 is already out in Japan!

Final Grade: B

Most FPS’s have the common space station, spy flick, or military shooter theme. FarCry deviates completely from the known formula and instead puts you into a beautiful island environment, which is definitely a far cry from paradise.

From the moment I started the game, I knew this would be a different experience. In the background of the menu screen, a camera pans through an island in the game, over white beaches, through lush jungles, and across pristine lagoons. This game looked beautiful, and I enjoy beautiful games.

In fact, FarCry seems to have the most advanced graphics on PC to date. The jungles of the islands are densely-packed with well-rendered greenery, trees, tall grass, and other cover for you. The water (which is the best I’ve ever seen) will lap along the shores in tiny waves, and the character models just look amazing.

Lighting has also been taken to a new level. While you’re crawling through the jungle, you will actually see the shadows of the trees overhead on your gun as you run below them. The shadows of patrolling guards inside buildings will be portrayed against the wall, giving you a sign of when they’re coming. Lava’s intense heat will distort the air above it, and should you be shot by a rocket, or be near an explosion, the screen will grey out, as if you had lost your wind.

The opening cinematic, an odd smorgasbord of gunfire and explosions, confused me. But that was okay, I read the box, I read the manual. You’re an ex-SEAL named Jack Carver who has been commissioned to escort a female journalist to a sunny archipelago. However, all goes wrong when she disappears, and your boat is hit with a rocket, leaving you stranded on these islands.

The story seems to start out dull and predictable, but as the game progresses, it takes some interesting Dr. Moreau-like twists and turns as you discover who resides on the islands, and what exactly he is doing on them. The end of the game gives you a final twist to the entire story as you try to finally escape the hell that the islands have become.

While the game starts with you taking out the mercenaries who work on the island, you will soon come into contact with a new enemy who will definitely change how you fight. There’s nothing as creepy as shuffling quietly through the night-lit underbrush while inhuman growls echo all around you. Sometimes creatures will explode out of the darkness of buildings, scaring the wits out of you, and that makes the game all the more enjoyable.

The game started with me being plunked into a abandoned maintenance shaft-type area. At this point, the game looked pretty normal. In the bottom left corner of the screen is a radar which will indicate enemies when you use your binoculars, display the sound you’re giving off, as well as any loud noises around you.

It was all pretty standard to begin with, sneak by a guard, get a pistol, but then I stepped out into the jungle, and I realized that the newly developed CryEngine is definitely something to be marvelled at. The entire place looked amazing, from the trees, bushes and plants next to me, to the guards faces while they shot at me (I was a little distracted), to the mountaintops on the other side of the island.

The draw distance for FarCry is approximately 1.2 kilometers, allowing you to fully appreciate a sniper rifle as you take out an enemy who isn’t even on the same landmass as you, or to use your binoculars to locate the enemies far, far ahead. This was just amazing, and didn’t create the strain on my computer that I thought it would. It allowed me to utilize a new level of stealth, so I didn’t have to approach the enemies to bring them down.

Through most of the game, you will be running around, whether in a facility or through the underbrush. However, there will be times when you can grab any number of vehicles, ranging from a humvee, to a patrol boat, to a hang glider, to get yourself around the islands in a different fashion. Most of the vehicles are equipped with onboard weapons, which allows you to attack enemies in the form of bullets or sometimes even rockets.

While driving these vehicles was fun, I found they were not implemented as well as they should have been. While driving around and shooting enemies in these vehicles was a blast, you’re pretty much restricted to places where there aren’t trees, namely, the roads. The boats are more enjoyable, but should you venture far from the island, you will be spotted by the enemy and shot at by a Black Hawk helicopter.

One of the greatest things that this game has going for it is the aspect of choice. I’m not talking about the standard run-and-gun or stealth choice, I’m talking about how to get from point A to point B. Example: I need to get to a facility on the other side of the island. The entrance is protected by a gate and a sniper. How should I proceed?

Well, I can storm through the front, gunning down guards as I went, shooting the lock off the gate, and taking down the sniper. I could also grab a humvee, drive over/around the guards, avoid the sniper, and crash through the gate. Or I can just avoid them entirely by shooting guards on a patrol boat, stealing it, and attacking the guarded dock around the other side. The variety of tactics you can use adds a new twist to the usual frontal assault.

The stealth engine isn’t as advanced as it could’ve been, and I felt myself losing more and more of the stealth aspect as the game went on. By the end, I was just shooting my way around the islands, retreating to the underbrush just so that I wouldn’t get hit by snipers. However, at first, when you’re only equipped with a machete and a pistol, sometimes stealth is the best solution, for it also allows you to see the AI in action.

The AI in this game is some of the best I’ve ever seen. If the mercenaries hear you creep in the underbrush, they will come to investigate, and look around, not just in the place they heard it. If the person next to them falls to the floor with a bullet wound in his head, they will first try to see what it was, then run. That’s the smart thing for them to do, and yet so few games have the enemies do this. The only problem I found with this is that the hearing is ultra-sensitive, and sometimes they will go onto high-alert just by hearing a twig snap.

If they still can’t find you, they will employ advanced tactics, trying to flank you out. As I hid, I could often hear the cries of “Left flank, move forward! Right flank, go forward!”. And often they would find me, and bullets flew. Should you begin a fire-fight, the mercenaries will hide behind any cover they can find, and should you begin shooting wildly, they will stay there until they believe a clear shot can be made. They will duck and weave, kneeling to get a better shot, trying to surround you and take you down.

FarCry has definitely got something going for it. It’s not just lifted the bar on FPS’s, it’s broken it in two and thrown it into a beautifully rendered jungle. FarCry is a remarkable game, and one of the best shooters out on the market!

Final Verdict: 93%

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