The Highs and Lows of Far Cry

Looking back at the successes and failures of one of gaming's most divisive series.

Few games are as divisive as the Far Cry series. Call of Duty might have a massive fan-base and an equally large cluster of detractors, but there are as many people in between who simply shrug their shoulders at the title. Not so with Far Cry: it’s either unbridled love or unfettered hatred, and the strangest thing of all is that it doesn’t boil down to a question of taste. Both camps can easily build a coherent, logical argument about why these games are so utterly terribrilliant.

Far Cry has always strived to push the FPS out of its comfort zone, and this is what leads to such a polarised audience. Released in 2004, the original emerged out of a tech demo created for Nvidia named X-Isle: Dinosaur Island. CryENGINE 1 was capable of rendering vast, colourful environments previously unseen in the industry, and Crytek did what all tech-focussed developers do: used that amazing engine to make a game about guns and killing people.

Fortunately, it turned out to be quite a novel one. Far Cry was one of the first mainstream shooters that encouraged players to be clever and creative, to observe enemy movements and form a plan of action rather than running blindly forward and clicking on everyone until they fell over. It wasn’t a true open world game, and in a way stuck to a corridor shooter style of forward progression. It just so happened that many of Far Cry’s corridors were several miles wide.

The finest example of its divergent approach was a later mission simply titled “Boat”. Giving the player a small orange dinghy and a couple of guns, the objective was to destroy three radio towers scattered across a small archipelago. It was a perfect balance of player choice and developer direction. The islands were sequentially placed behind one another, encouraging you to tackle them in order, each larger and more difficult to conquer than the last.

At the same time, the three islands could be infiltrated from any angle. You could park your little boat on a silent shore and vanish into the trees, cutting through the hilariously brawny mercenaries with a machete and silenced MP5. Or you could find an area of high ground, and use the game’s amazingly powerful sniper-rifle to thin the enemy ranks. Alternatively you may have chosen to commandeer a gunboat patrolling the crystal-blue waters surrounding the islands, using it to pepper guard posts with bullets from offshore. Lastly, it was possible to eschew tactics altogether and charge headlong into the fray.

"Boat" brought together everything that was great about Crytek’s breakthrough shooter. It’s worth pointing out, however, that being allowed to traverse its wide open spaces felt particularly good because the previous mission, named “Cooler”, was built from the worst aspects of Far Cry - namely small, dark, linear corridors filled with the game's other enemy type, the notorious Trigens.

Far Cry was a difficult game throughout, and eight years of experience hasn’t made it any easier. But at least its apple-obsessed mercs could be outsmarted. In contrast, there was only one way to defeat the game’s mutant monsters; brute force and lots of hysterical swearing.

Each Trigen was infuriating in its own special way, from the speedy, jumping monkey bastards that enjoyed playing swing-ball with your nose, to the rocket-firing flesh-mountains that Crytek decided would be fabulous fun to fight in corridors tighter than a US election race. And just in case you couldn’t get enough of the Trigens’ unique brand of island hospitality, toward the end of the game Crytek also took away all your weapons and placed you alone in a jungle crammed with those demented creatures.

Enjoyment of Far Cry depended largely upon how Trigen-tolerant you were, and this is why opinion remains split as to its quality. Yet if you ask me, Far Cry isn’t a patch on its sequel, which is probably the single most divisive game ever made.

After Far Cry, Crytek partnered with EA and began work on the Crysis series. Ubisoft, still holders of the Far Cry license, moved development in-house. In the next two years, their Montreal studio developed an array of titles including (prepare your brain) a tweaked version of the first game named Far Cry: Instincts, a sequel to the tweaked version of the first game called Far Cry: Evolution, and an Xbox 360 version of both the tweaked version of the first game AND its sequel, which was called Far Cry: Instincts: Predator, because apparently one colon isn’t enough.

Then in 2008 came Far Cry 2, which despite the name was entirely separated from its predecessor: set in Africa, powered by a new engine (Dunia), with a fully open world and, most importantly, no bloody Trigens. It too made enormous efforts to innovate on the FPS template, reworking many established conventions of the genre.

The player character literally held the in-game map, and would use his hands when interacting with the environment, opening doors and repairing cars. It sported a complex “buddy” system, in which a set of NPCs could assist you on missions, and rescue you if you were seriously injured. Even healing went way beyond health packs or regeneration, involving a tiered health system and some rather grisly animations. The one where the character relocates all his fingers still makes me flinch.

Most of all, it pushed the boundaries of emergent gameplay, with a wide variety of weapons and vehicles and a dynamic fire system that acted as both a useful tool and a potential hazard. My favourite trick was to drive into the middle of an enemy checkpoint, leap out of the car, chuck a grenade under it and sprint cackling away into the jungle. Finally I’d use my sniper rifle to pick off any stragglers who survived the ensuing explosion and inferno, before hopping in one of the checkpoint’s cars and driving merrily on.  

I loved Far Cry 2, more so than the first game. But a lot of people loathed it, and I fully understand why. Its mission structure was formatted to the point of tedium. The NPC companions were almost completely devoid of personality, making the buddy system less effective than it could have been. And AI was so aggressive you’d be forgiven for mistaking enemies for the first game’s Trigens. There may have been a lot of interesting systems in Far Cry 2, but they were so obviously systems that they caused the game to feel very artificial.

So it’s interesting that Far Cry 3 appears to be assimilating elements from the first two games, melding the bright aesthetic and more tailored mission structure of the first with the openness of the second. And ironically that leaves me in two minds. Hopefully it will lead to a more consistently enjoyable game, but I worry that it won’t push boundaries in the same way its older siblings did. Perhaps Far Cry is always destined to annoy someone, and perhaps that is for the best.