Thursday, March 23, 2006
Fearin Paradise - FarCry ( NOT FOR ASSESSMENT PURPOSES)
2004's FarCry saw a new development in First Person Shooters in terms of the dynamics of the genre. Take an ordinary tourist, steal his girlfriend and steal away to tropical island to continue your evil genetic experiments. Simple.
Whilst most FPS titles have placed you attacking evil super-enemies in insane blast-away confrontations, blasting shotguns in their faces in a blood-splattered mess, FarCry delivers a lot more finesse and style than any before it.
Titles such as Doom III, Quake and Unreal have often relied on fairly simple mechanics to please the FPS fan, long corridors and space-station style environments, large guns and larger foes. FarCry takes a different approach, trading in futuristic space-ware for lush, jungle environments (with the occasional command centre with all the trimmings) and losing the super-weapons in favour of (for the most part) ordinary real-life weapons
(ABOVE) Some of the scenery in FarCry is genuinely beautiful, the scenes thems are brutal
The enemies you are squared up against are ordinary merc-style hired gunmen, though they are decidedly more observant and clever than your typical goon. Included in your on-screen display is (a first for FPS) a monitor that shows how, among other things, how alert the enemy are to your presence, similar to stealth-style games. However the element of stealth isn't that significant, enemies still have to be killed with standard 3 in the chest or 1 in the head marksmanship.
The firepower you are up against takes more of a touch on realism too, a few bullets is enough to end your adventure unless protected by armor.
To aid you in your acquisition you have binoculars to identify the enemy around you through electro-tags they all wear for identification, and they then appear on your stealth-o-meter in the corner. This element shows off one of my favourite features in the game - the seemingly inifinite draw-distance in the game. You can see enemies that are so far away that you can't see them at all without the use of binocular vision.
(ABOVE) The binocular vision is used to identify and 'mark' potential targets
Despite that, your weapons have very long range too and weapons such as your trusty M4 Carbine can shoot enemies so far away that the appear only as pixels, and when playing an earlier level I managed to accidentally shoot someone so far away it took 10 minutes of running to get him (this was totally by accident i will admit).
The aiming system in this game is also physically accurate, the four pointers around the crosshair approach or retract depending on your aiming poisiton and how fast you are moving - if you are lying down in the undergrowth your shot will be almost 100% accurate, running backwards from some guards holding fire will mean many bullets miss the target. Also to make your shots even more accurate you can hold right-click to 'zoom' on your target and hold your weapon up to eye level and aim more accurately. As aforementioned, there are three firing positions - standing, crouching and prone. Standing is obviously best for running and movement, but less so for accuracy. Crouching is about average, and obviously lying prone makes it harder to move and easier to aim.
