Far Cry 6

The island of Yara in the Caribbean has been an isolated nation for decades. But the discovery of a new miracle cancer treatment on the island has brought it immense wealth, most of it funnelled into the coffers of President Antón Castillo and his elite servants. This fuels the start of a brutal civil war, with multiple factions fighting for supremacy. Dani Rojas, a talented fighter, is convinced to fight for the main opposition, Libertad, but also has to unite three other factions under one banner to stand a chance of bringing down Castillo.

Far Cry 6 - actually the ninth game in the series because who's counting? - is perhaps the most quintessential game in the Far Cry franchise to date. Once again, an unjust-but-charismatic villain needs to be taken down and once again a rebel movement that can't find it's arse with both hands is totally hapless until a single figure shows up and does 95% of the gruntwork in the war for it, single-handedly. Along the way there are some fairly superficial musings on the futility of violence (just before you get to commit lots of it) and bloodshed, and the corrupting influence of power on the soul etc etc. If you've played any Far Cry game before - particularly the last three numbered games and their spinoffs - you'll not so much know what to expect, but be able to play this in your sleep before you even install it.

The appeal of the series has always been presenting an open world environment and presenting you with objectives that you can achieve through several means: front assault, stealth, using vehicles, employing allies or some mixture thereof. That element of the series is present and correct in Far Cry 6, with a nice back-to-basics feel to the action. The previous full game in the series - 2018's questionably-designed Far Cry 5 - interrupted its freeform action with an obnoxious narrative that constantly snatched control away from the player for ludicrous cutscenes featuring the most banal cast of villains ever to grace a video game. Far Cry 6 thankfully jettisons this approach. You have your charismatic villain, this time around played by Breaking Bad and The Mandalorian star Giancarlo Esposito, but he shows up relatively rarely, and the game thankfully gets out of its own way to let you undertake missions how you see fit.

The return to a tropical island map also adds to the game's retro feel, recalling the setting of both the original 2004 Far Cry and 2012's breakout game for the series, Far Cry 3. Whilst the first game had you fighting mercenaries and genetically-engineered monsters (don't ask) in an archipelago, the third had you fighting pirates and petty criminals. This one has you fighting a full-blown insurgency against a fascist, corrupt government, which definitely ups the ante.

The map is divided into three regions, each one inhabited by a different rebel faction. As Dani, you have to convince each faction to work with Libertad and, as usual for this sort of game, you have to win their loyalty by, er, fighting every battle of the war for them. Dani is a walking avatar of death at the start of the game and this only intensifies through the story, as they (you can choose their gender) are proficient with every weapon you can think of and also get a ludicrous backpack-mounted superweapon that can do everything from poisoning entire platoons of enemy soldiers to shooting down helicopters to disabling tanks with a massive EMP pulse. You can also take one of a series of slightly ridiculous animal companions into battle with you, who can cause havoc, spot resources for you and sniff out enemies from around corners.

The old levelling system has been jettisoned, with you now customising Dani through the use of cosmetic items, types of armour and weapon mods, which can impact everything from how much ammo you can carry to how you recharge your back-mounted personal WMD. This customisation system is both decent and a little unnecessary: you can play the whole game through with your starting weapons without too much difficulty. In this sense, Far Cry 6 represents a step back from the increasing RPG-like direction of the last few Far Cry  games (and Ubisoft open-world games in general) and something of a return to the hardcore FPS focus of the earlier titles, which I found quite welcome. However, you are definitely a tougher character from the off then I think was the case in any of the previous games, meaning on standard difficulty the game can be a little too easy. I found switching up the difficulty or making self-imposed restrictions, like trying to stealth my way through every mission, a reasonable way of keeping things fresh.

As usual, you progress the game by taking over bases, eliminating checkpoints and performing a large battery of side-missions, many of them adding detail or colour to the large supporting cast of characters, or allowing you to recruit more crazy animal companions. It's all pretty traditional by now and those seeking fresh ideas may be disappointed by the lack of them here; then again, playing the ninth game in the series expecting it to maybe pull off some shocking kind of slide into originality may be a doomed endeavour from the start.

What Far Cry 6 does very well indeed is serving up chunky first-person, single-player (with some co-op modes) action, with a nice side-line in stealth. The graphics are solid if unspectacular, the Cuban-influenced soundtrack is excellent, and the action is frantic and mostly satisfying, even if enemy AI even on the hardest difficulty level is limited, at best. The map is large but not too large, and the game tries to play fair but also logically, with you able to use a variety of vehicles but having some reasonable limitations on doing so (i.e. you can't fly helicopters or airplanes around willy-nilly without degrading the enemy anti-aircraft network first, and driving a tank soon attracts tons of attention from enemy airpower, tanks and AT units). After Far Cry 5 falling flat on its face in a lot of what it was trying to do, Far Cry 6 refreshingly makes sense and doesn't cheap out on the player.

What the game does poorly is narrative. It's been the case that every game in the series since Far Cry 2 has to have lengthy moralising cutscenes on the self-destructive nature of violence, which I'd have more truck with if the games didn't then unleash absolute tons of violence in every single mission. It's a first-person shooter, so that's kind of its thing. It feels like the series wants to tell a more nuanced kind of story about revolutions, how hard it is to create and maintain a democracy and so on, but it can't overcome the limitations of the FPS genre, at least not within the very tight development timelines these games have. A Far Cry game that goes full RPG and offers non-violent solutions to situations might be interesting, but then I'm not sure if it would be a Far Cry game any more.

In that sense Far Cry 6's biggest problem is the competition: more than any other game in the series, it feels like a Wish version of the epic, massive Just Cause 3, which has a larger playing space, a less in-your-face narrative and much more fully embraces manic fun whilst also making you feel more like you're fighting in an actual war with shifting fronts. Just Cause 3 also wipes the floor with Far Cry 6's vehicles, mainly because of FC6's refusal to allow you to use a third-person camera mode when using helicopters or tanks, which makes them borderline unusable in a lot of situations. The influence is even more obvious in that Far Cry 6 borrows both the wingsuit and grapple from Just Cause 3 but fails to implement either in a way that's interesting or fun.

Still, the core gameplay loop of the Far Cry series is still enjoyable in Far Cry 6 (***½). Scouting out an enemy base, marking troop positions (with a smartphone this time, which at least makes more sense than the previous magic binoculars) and then devising an attack strategy is still as much fun now as it was way back in 2004. The on-foot FSP action is excellent and, at a reasonable 35 hours for the single-player story (a lot more if you want to explore every corner of the map, find every collectible and do every side-quest, obviously), it doesn't outstay its welcome as some recent open-world games have. Those looking for something new and fresh should look elsewhere, but Far Cry 6 is as solid an entry as the series has had for some time.

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Far Cry: New Dawn

Seventeen years ago, the world was devastated in an unexpected nuclear war. People are attempting to rebuild, but they are at the mercy of raiders and pirates. One remote community in Hope County, Montana are under siege by a group of thugs known as the Highwaymen. To survive, they call for support from a group determined to rebuild civilisation. Forming an alliance, they reluctantly conclude to stop the Highwaymen they need the help of a third faction...the surviving members of the cult known as Eden's Gate. An alliance of convenience needs to be formed to drive out the lawlessness, and put right what went wrong a long time ago.

Far Cry: New Dawn is the latest game in the Far Cry series (at least until the release of Far Cry 6 later this year) and is the third stand-alone expansion in the series. Ubisoft are determined to get the maximum worth of their development money from this series, so for the last three titles in the franchise they've re-used the previous game's map and set about creating new story from the same source material. Blood Dragon drew on Far Cry 3's map and design, though in a different genre, whilst Primal re-used Far Cry 4's map in a visit to the Stone Age of tens of thousands of years earlier. New Dawn similarly repurposes the map and many of the assets, flora and fauna of 2018's Far Cry 5, but this time in a direct sequel, if not a continuation, of the former game.

Far Cry 5 had a rough reception, with fans and critics praising its graphics, stealth and combat but criticising its bitty, poorly-characterised story, incomprehensible pacing decisions designed to make playing the game as obnoxious as possible and its utterly surreal, non-sequitur ending. Having played New Dawn at least some of the problems are now much clearer: Far Cry 5 is a narratively incomplete game that punts its proper finale off to this sequel, which oddly was not mentioned anywhere in the marketing on release and one feels it perhaps should have been.

New Dawn at least acknowledges some of the criticisms of its forebear. You'll be happy to know that at exactly no point in this game are you inexplicably kidnapped from a helicopter a thousand feet in the air, surrounded by allies, by the bad guys who then inexplicably let you live to murder all of them later on. If you don't want to follow the main story and just want to dick around in the open world shooting rabbits, you are free to do that with no penalty. The game, belatedly, understands that an open-world game means giving the player the choice to do what they want to do, when they want to, and backs off from ramming its narrative down your throat.

That said, the story is somewhat more coherent and interesting this time around, though not exactly original. You are called in to help build the town of Prosperity up and defend it from attack. You can upgrade its walls and services, such as a helipad, herb-growing garden and medical facilities. These not only make the town more defensible, but also impact on yourself: in a nice touch, upgrading Prosperity upgrades your own stats, so updating the medical facility means you enlarge your own health bar. At various points you can take on a main story objective to push the story forwards, although be warned that the storyline is quite short and pushing forwards with it too decisively will make the experience end relatively quickly.

The moment-to-moment gameplay is very similar to Far Cry 5. You'll be attacking outposts and capturing them for the resistance, seizing their supplies to improve your own war machine. In a nice touch, you can now abandon outposts and let them be re-taken by the enemy, so you can attack them again and get even more supplies (including the very rare ethanol, which is needed to upgrade Prosperity's facilities). Every time you do this, the outpost is refortified even more heavily than before, creating an escalating sense of challenge. There are also plenty of much smaller sites of interest you can investigate and ransack for supplies, often with some stories to discover along the way via notes and audio logs.

Although the game uses the Far Cry 5 map, it's a now a post-apocalyptic setting (with some surface similarities to the Fallout series). Some parts of the map are no longer accessible, having taken direct hits from nukes at the end of the first game and now covered in radiation, whilst the wildlife has been mildly mutated. Some areas are now flooded. The most striking change are flowers, which are now coloured purple and give the landscape a dramatically different look and feel, even though the topography is identical. Newer buildings have been erected in areas where in Far Cry 5 there was only grassland or forest, whilst older buildings from the previous game are now overgrown or partially collapsed. The new feel to the game is quite well-done, and exploration feels more rewarding.

Stealth and combat is still the cornerstone of the Far Cry experience and both are reasonably well-handled, with satisfying gunplay and the relative scarcity of supplies making some old tactics a bit harder to implement; there is no silenced sniper rifle in the first weapons tier, meaning it'll be a while before you get your hands on one, which encourages a change in tactics. NPC allies are also less overpowered than they were in Far Cry 5, meaning no more calling in tactical air strikes to wipe out an outpost before you wander in and take it over. However, I did encounter more problems with hitboxes in New Dawn than any prior game in the series; several times sniper bullets went straight through enemies without harming them, which is a very strange problem, one not present in earlier games in the series (including the near-identical Far Cry 5).

To pump out its otherwise short playing time, the game has the usual roster of activities (including hunting and combat challenges, a small number of treasure hunts, stealing enemy fuel tankers, freeing prisoners etc) enhanced by a new idea: Expeditions. These are short, focused missions taking place in completely new locations off the main map. These include objectives like assaulting a beached aircraft carrier captured by the enemy; salvaging the crashed International Space Station; and ejecting enemies from a flooded amusement park in Louisiana (which I was not aware was in comfortable helicopter range of Montana, but okay). These are fun missions, but surprisingly easy and with very few enemies to fight off. In fact, it's completely doable to just rush to the objective, then to the evac zone without even engaging the enemy (perhaps only to fend them off whilst waiting for the chopper to arrive). I discovered later on that this is because the missions are supposed to be repeated like the outposts, with each mission getting a lot harder each time. This way they get 21 Expeditions out of just 7 locations (the same as getting 30 outpost missions out of just 10 outpost locations). I kind of respect the idea - getting the most out of limited and expensive assets is sensible - but in practice it means that you're not seeing these locations at their best the first time you visit them, which doesn't give much reason to return. You can also satisfyingly finish the game by visiting each Expedition location only once and doing the Outpost cycle maybe twice at best.

Eventually, once you've upgraded Prosperity, retaken the outposts a couple of times and completed all the Expeditions, you can press on with the story. As with most Far Cry games, the writers have tried to create iconic villains, this time around a duo of dastardly sisters, Lou and Mickey. They're better adversaries than Far Cry 5's godawful Seed family but still not that particularly interesting. Even worse, the game brings back the aforementioned godawful Seed family in its closing chapters, which I could have done without. Still, at least New Dawn rounds off this most tedious of storylines for good.

New Dawn is not a long game - seeing everything of interest in the game will take you south of 25 hours - but it does pack a more condensed and focused version of the Far Cry experience into an accessible package. It's not as obnoxious as Far Cry 5, and its combat and core gameplay loop is fairly enjoyable. However, it is straining at the limitations of obvious budgetary and time limitations, forcing you to repeat mission tasks and locations rather than just giving you more mission and locations of interest. I'm also not a huge fan of the developers using New Dawn to fix problems from Far Cry 5 instead of fixing the mothership game itself, although I suppose this is better than the problems going resolutely unignored.

Far Cry: New Dawn (***½) is a solid, medium-sized entry to the series and provides a good few hours of enjoyable action gameplay. However, the format that the series has employed through no less than six games since Far Cry 3 is starting to creak from overfamiliarity, and it'll be interesting to see if the forthcoming Far Cry 6 can freshen things up at all. The game is available now on PC, X-Box One and PlayStation 4.

Far Cry 6, Dragon Age 4 and Obsidian's "Project X" all to be unveiled this month

It's a busy week for some of gaming's biggest franchises and most interesting developers.

First up, and most interestingly, is that Obsidian will finally unveil their mysterious "Project X" that they've been working on in the background for the past three or four years whilst releasing smaller games like Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity. This game is the brainchild and a labour of love for Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, the co-creators of the Fallout franchise and numerous other classic RPGs, including Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines and Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscure. Boyarsky was also a creative lead on Diablo III and its expansion Reaper of Souls for Blizzard, whilst Cain worked on games for Obsidian including Fallout: New Vegas.

The images revealed so far don't give much away, but hint at an SF RPG set in a retro-futuristic setting, possibly influenced by the likes of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. We'll find out for sure tomorrow when the game is fully unveiled.

Following that, on Friday, Ubisoft will unveil the future of the Far Cry franchise. The previous five games in the series have been - more or less - contemporary open world games with a very light dusting of science fiction and fantasy ideas, along with a couple of spin-offs (Blood Dragon and Primal) that had the licence to go much weirder. Far Cry 6 - assuming that's what the game will be called - sounds like it will be a full-on post-apocalyptic story, following on from the "good" ending to Far Cry 5 where the United States is (extremely randomly, as it had nothing to do with the plot of the game) devastated by a nuclear surprise attack launched by, er, North Korea. On the one hand, this may freshen up an increasingly bored franchise (Far Cry 5 was one of the weakest games in the series to date), or it may just be a case of the exact same game with a different paintjob. We will find out more on Friday.

Coming later this month, Electronic Arts and BioWare are poised to reveal some more information about the next Dragon Age game. BioWare's fantasy roleplaying series began back in 2009 with the solid Dragon Age: Origins and continued through the interesting-but-flawed Dragon Age II (2011) and the awful Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014). BioWare, once the great market leader for Western-style RPGs, has seen its thunder thoroughly stolen first by Bethesda and more recently by CD Projekt Red. Its last few games (Inquisition and last year's Mass Effect: Andromeda) have been underwhelming in the extreme, and there is little excitement for its next game, a generic multiplayer-focused, story-lite action-SF game called Anthem, due for release in March 2019. Dragon Age IV, or whatever is finally announced, has got its work cut out for it if it is to regain the stronger critical and commercial performance of earlier games in the series.

FAR CRY: PRIMAL announced

Ubisoft have announced Far Cry: Primal, a side-game in their monstrously popular Far Cry series of first-person shooters. Like Blood Dragon, this isn't the next full game in the core series, but a stand-alone interlude which experiments with different ideas and mechanics to the main game series.

In this case, Primal takes place at the dawn of human history with you playing the member of a hunter-gather clan. You fight rival clans and hunt sabre-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths. There are no guns, vehicles, radio towers or, apparently, conversations in modern English, all of which the previous games in the series relied on. Instead the game will double down on the crafting, hunting, stealth, melee combat and use of bows that were side-features in Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4.

It's definitely a bold and unusual move for a huge, AAA franchise, and a welcome one for a FPS series that used to defy expectations and be more experimental before it became so massively successful.

The game will be released in February 2016 on console, followed by the PC version in March.

Far Cry 4

Ajay Ghale returns home to the country of his birth, the remote Himalayan kingdom of Kyrat, to lay the ashes of his mother to rest. He finds his homeland embroiled in a brutal civil war between the dictatorial king, Pagan Min, and the rebels of the Golden Path. Reluctantly recruited into the Golden Path, Ghale must help overthrow the tyrant, deal with the internal conflict within the Golden Path and fulfil his promise to his mother.

The Far Cry series has established itself over the past eleven years as one of the most reliably entertaining in the first-person shooter genre. The series has forged its own identity for setting its games in large open worlds instead of sequential levels (aside from the first game, which was a linear sequence of very large islands which allowed you to approach the objective however you wished). It has also experimented a little with narrative, particularly its focus in the second and third games on the nature of violence and the impact it has on people, particularly untrained civilians who turn into walking arsenals of death in order to complete the game objective.

The fourth game in the series is unusual in that it's the first game not to feature an abrupt shift in mechanics, tone or setting. Far Cry 2 introduced the large open world idea, whilst Far Cry 3 brought in radio towers, crafting and the notion of a free-flowing war going on outside of the storyline, with you able to fight in battles and take over enemy outposts at will. Far Cry 4 surprisingly does little to change this formula, instead refining what came before and, slightly awkwardly, stepping back from some of the things the previous game attempted. On paper the setting may sound very different, but a lot of the action takes place in the lower Kyrat valley which is extremely lush and you may forget which game you are playing until you look up and see the mountains.

In terms of gameplay things are less 'similar' than 'identical' to Far Cry 3. There is still a mix of focused story missions, optional side-quests and environmental challenges, alongside a whole host of other activities (like racing or escorting deliveries). It's just all happening in the Himalayas rather than the Pacific Ocean, so less sharks and more yaks and weaponised elephants. There's more variety in the design of the radio towers and enemy camps (which are now a lot more interesting and challenging to take on), and things are made more complicated by the introduction of fortresses. These larger, more heavily-guarded camps make for a more formidable challenge, introduced just at the point when your character is developing into an unstoppable one-man arsenal. All of this is still good fun to play, of course. If you want a really boring review, if you really liked Far Cry 3 you'll probably really like this. I wouldn't play them back to back, and there is a question if a glorified reskin of an existing game is worth full price, but Far Cry 4 is certainly enjoyable.

Kyrat elephants are unusually tolerant of people riding them into battle and firing auto-cannons from their heads.

There are several problems with the game, although they seem to stem from a genuine desire to make up for problems in its predecessor. Far Cry 3 took some flak for its use of the 'white saviour' trope and for its storyline about how the main character was corrupted by all the death and destruction he caused, which felt a little like the game having its cake and eating it. Far Cry 4 uses a native main character, which is a nice touch if one that has absolutely no impact on gameplay, and dials back the moral erosion stuff. It's been done before and would have been redundant to do it again, but it does remove any kind of emotional or character arc from Ghale's story. Jason Brody from Far Cry 3 may have been an utter tool, but at least he had a storyline to follow. Ghale spends the entirety of Far Cry 4 in a state of vague bemusement at what's going on and ultimately becomes a total non-entity. They may as well have gone for an unnamed silent protagonist.

In terms of characters, the game struggles to come up with any that are interesting. The Golden Path leaders are fanatics and Pagan Min is entertainingly psychotic but a pale shadow of Far Cry 3's Vaas. The game does break with convention by bringing in returning characters (CIA agent Willis and inept mercenary Hurk both return from Far Cry 3) and referencing others (Jack Carver is mentioned, placing FC3 and 4 resolutely in the same universe as the original game, surprisingly). There's also a really weird subplot set in the mystical realm of Shangri-La which features a magical remote-controlled tiger, exploding arrows and gigantic bells which transport people between dimensions or something. These interludes feel like a completely different game has suddenly rammed itself into Far Cry 4 for no reason, but get points for just breaking things up a bit.

So, Far Cry 4 (***½). It has less interesting characters, a duller storyline and rather less innovation than its forebears. It's also still quite a lot of fun and allows you to shoot honey badgers up the backside with arrows (although they don't care). Playable, enjoyable but the first game in the series which is almost completely disposable. Pick up when it's going cheap. Available now in the UK (PC, PS3, PS4, X-Box 360, X-Box One) and USA (PC, PS3, PS4, X-Box 360, X-Box One).

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon

The year is 2007. The world was laid waste in a nuclear exchange between the USA and Russia in the 1990s. As the survivors struggle to rebuild civilisation, the villainous Colonel Sloan goes AWOL on a remote island with an army of mercenaries. CyberCommando Sergeant Rex Power Colt is dropped on the island with orders to eliminate Sloan and wipe out his army before he can use some remaining nukes to wipe out the rest of the world. Or something.

Blood Dragon is the screaming bonkers stand-alone expansion to Far Cry 3, with which it has very little in common apart from the game's basic structure of linear missions accessible through an open world. The game is a (somewhat redundant) mickey-take of 1980s action movies mixed in with more amusing deconstructions of the Far Cry series itself. The game opens with a terrible tutorial in which Colt is asked to do stupid basic tasks by his AI helper because of satire. This raises a brief laugh, before it goes on for way too long and ends up being really annoying. The game's 2D, 1980s-esque cut scenes are a bit like this as well: it's amusing to see these throwbacks to how narrative was handled back in the days of the Commodore 64, but then they go on for way too long and the dialogue goes from being deliberately corny to flat-out terrible. As a satire of 1980s action movies Blood Dragon doesn't really work, because the sort of films it is taking the mickey out of are beyond satire.

Luckily, the game itself hews closer to the traditional Far Cry formula, which remains fairly compelling. A lot of the more surreal makework from Far Cry 3 (like having to go on elaborate hunting expeditions in order to carry extra flamethrower ammo) is fortunately missing, with the emphasis more on exploration, liberating bases (helped by laser-armed scientists) and blowing a lot of stuff up. The game is really a neon-drenched reskin of Far Cry 3 with added laser-firing dinosaurs, and the illusion wears a bit thin sometimes, but it works pretty well. Unlike it's cut scenes and tutorials the game itself doesn't outstay its welcome, clocking in at well under 5 hours in length which is about when the joke starts wearing seriously thin.

Blood Dragon (***) is too superficial a game to really write much about: it's a very violent, vaguely amusing and totally disposable action game which raises a bit of a smile and passes a few hours, but you'll probably have forgotten it even exists in a fortnight. Enjoyable dumb fun, but for the love of everything that is holy, don't even think about spending more than a few quid on it. Blood Dragon is available now as a digital download for the PC, X-Box 360 and PlayStation 3.

FAR CRY 4 confirmed

News of the existence of Far Cry 4 leaked a few weeks ago, but it's now been officially confirmed by Ubisoft.

Far Cry 4 will be released on 18 November on PC, X-Box 360, X-Box One, PS3 and PS4. Like its predecessors, the game will be an open-world, combat-focused first-person shooter. You will be able to follow a linear storyline, undertake side-missions, engage in optional tasks to improve your character or mix them up as you see fit. The game will be set in Kyrat, a fictional region of the Himalayas where some dude (presumably the blonde guy on the cover) has set himself up as a king. Your character, I will hazard wildly, has to defeat him through the application of lunatic, gun-based ultraviolence.

Intriguingly, there will be a narrative link from Far Cry 3 to Far Cry 4, with the character of Hurk reappearing (and being playable in several DLC missions). This marks the first time two games in the franchise have been linked together by a recurring element. The previous games did not share locations, characters, storylines or, in the case of Blood Dragon and maybe the original Far Cry, even universes.

I'm a fan of the Far Cry games (particularly the first one), so I'm looking forwards to this. Sadly, the snowy setting and open-world gameplay means that many, many Far Cryrim jokes have already been made, and doubtless many more are to come.

Far Cry 3

A group of American tourists in Bangkok are convinced to visit the isolated Rook Islands, a beautiful tropical paradise off the normal tourist track. Unfortunately the islands are also in a state of civil war, with the native Rakyat tribe battling pirates and drug-runners who have taken over the area. The Americans are taken prisoner by the pirates, but Jason Brody manages to escape and find sanctuary amongst the Rakyat. He is trained in the ways of war, but as he seeks out his friends and tries to take down the pirate leader, Vaas, he risks losing his soul as the violence and conflict intensifies.

 
Far Cry 3 is the third title in the Far Cry franchise, though it is not a true sequel. It does not share any story or character elements with its two predecessors and can be played fully independently of them. What it does share is the same ethos: a dedication to providing a story-driven single-player experience within a sandbox environment, giving the player immense freedom in deciding how to proceed.

Far Cry 2 was heavily criticised for featuring a similar approach, but not doing enough with it. The game's annoyances - almost non-existent characterisation and of course the frequent road checkpoints with near-instantly respawning enemies which made travel across the map excruciatingly frustrating - overwhelmed the game's conceptual strong points, such as its 'buddy' NPC system and rich atmosphere. The designers of Far Cry 3 seem to have borne the previous title's problems in mind and provided a counter for every one of them whilst reinforcing those elements that did work. In short, Far Cry 3 finally fulfils the potential its predecessor squandered, and redeems the franchise.

The game employs a number of different systems which work in tandem to make it more engrossing for the player. There's a campaign story which you can follow, in which Brody rescues his friends one-by-one before trying to kill Vaas and his ally, the drug-runner Hoyt. However, at the start of the game Brody is a nobody with no combat training and no ability to carry lots of guns around. To improve your chances of survival, you can undertake training missions for the Rakyat or go hunting animals to improve your aim. Skinning these animals also allows you to craft holders, bandoliers and backpacks, allowing you to carry more ammo and gear. However, your map at the start of the game is almost devoid of any useful information: to open up more map information, you have to ascend radio towers and download information from them. Travelling around the islands is also hazardous due to enemy checkpoints and strongholds. To reduce the number of enemies roaming the islands, taking out these outposts is essential. Unlike Far Cry 2's instantly-respawning bases, however, the outposts in Far Cry 3 stay cleared once cleared. In fact, Rakyat forces soon show up and these outposts become havens for resupply and re-equipping between missions. Outposts also generate their own missions, with side-quests, further hunting challenges and assassination assignments becoming available.

In short, there is rarely a lack of something to do in Far Cry 3. It's up to you whether you pursue the single-player storyline to the exclusion of everything else, or put it on hold whilst clearing up all the side-quests first, or (more satisfyingly) mix and match as you proceed. There are whiffs of the Elder Scrolls and GTA series in the game's freeform structure, with the same potential for unintentional dark comedy: laying down a minefield to trap  unwary enemies only for the mines to be detonated by a wayward crocodile, or standing triumphant at the entrance to a freshly-liberated outpost only to be run over by a jeep carrying your over-exuberant allies. The game's addition of upgradeable skills and experience points continues the franchise's evolution into a pseudo-RPG, whilst it is a huge improvement over both its predecessors due to its much stronger characters. I can't remember the name of a single NPC from Far Cry 2, but the likes of Vaas, Hoyt and Citra definitely rank amongst the more memorable characters from recent first-person shooters.

Graphically, the game is lush and even beautiful. Whilst not quite the equal of the still-astonishing Crysis in its depiction of a jungle environment, it is still a remarkable graphical environment. Combat is much more satisfying than its predecessor, with a pleasing mix of long-range sniper and close-up assault options. The 'magic binoculars' from Far Cry (and missing from FC2) return, allowing you to 'tag' enemies and keep track of them even through walls. Whilst still being completely nonsensical, they are nevertheless a vital and welcome tool to help plan attacks.

On the negative side, the game is tonally disjointed. The main storyline features a thematic element in which your character's evolution from urban city-dweller to mystical jungle warrior (complete with magical tattoos) is commented on, with a sideline in musings on the corrosive effects of violence on the soul. Whilst it remains interesting that a game which features shooting people in the head actually takes time out to dwell on the consequences of such violence, it's also the case that this element is not particularly developed very far. Also, every violent game of recent note has done this, leading to the suspicion that such an element is being thrown in as a sop to justify its violence rather than a genuine attempt at commentary. Less philosophically, the game sometimes feels like a bit of a mish-mash between a linear, story-driven adventure and an open-world free-for-all, with the two sides of the game not meshing as well as they could.

Ultimately, Far Cry 3 (****½) is a ridiculous amount of fun. As a pure first-person shooter, it's the finest example the genre has thrown up in several years. It's a careful and successful refinement of the best elements of its predecessors, with the negative factors mostly removed. Whilst not as broodingly atmospheric as the recent Dishonored, in terms of a game being a sheer joy to play, it's a triumphant success and one of the best games of the year. The game is available now on the PC (UK, USA), X-Box 360 (UK, USA) and PlayStation 3 (UK, USA).

Far Cry 2

A small, failed Central African state is gripped by a terrible civil war. Two rival factions, the UFLL and APR, are fighting for supremacy and both sides have drafted in foreign mercenaries to fight for them. One such mercenary is on a secret mission for an outside power, however: to find and assassinate the Jackal, a noted arms dealer who is providing weapons to both sides.

The original Far Cry, released in 2004, was an excellent first-person shooter. The game employed a structure that was both linear and freeform: a linear sequence of missions taking place on islands, but each island was fairly substantial in size, with multiple ways of completing each mission. The successor - Far Cry 2 isn't a true sequel as it does not feature any of the same characters or locations as the original - takes this to the next level. The entire game takes place on two immense open maps, with multiple missions available at any one time, as well as the ability to simply go exploring for the sake of it.

It's a pleasing evolution of the original Far Cry formula, but very quickly flaws become apparent. Having an immense open-world game as an RPG, with dialogue and skill trees and the ability to complete missions non-violently, makes a lot of sense. However, Far Cry 2 is still a first-person shooter. People talk to you, but you can't talk back. There are multiple missions available but they pretty much all involve killing people and blowing things up. A few missions can be completed by stealth, but the game's stealth mechanic is extremely under-developed (in fact, it's less successful than in it's four-year-older forebear) and making a single noise allows enemies to zero in on your position from hundreds of yards in all directions, even through trees and grass, making it a difficult option to pursue.

In addition, whilst you can choose from a plethora of optional side-missions (which pretty much all involve killing people and blowing things up), your progress through the game is determined by a series of core missions for the two rival factions. So Far Cry 2 demolishes much of its early open-world promise by not giving you much freedom to do things other than the way the game wants you to: killing everything in sight and doing the same sequence of main storyline missions. This problem is intensified by the fact that, aside from a few characters in neutral areas, everyone in the game is unrelentingly hostile to you on sight. People driving down the road will stop and open fire on you for no reason. There are checkpoints where the guards don't bother stopping or searching you, but just instantly attack, even if you are doing a mission for their side. Wiping out the checkpoints is pointless as they respawn within minutes, and the canny player will soon be driving off-road to their objectives or will be taking to the rivers, which are marginally safer (thankfully the second map is based around a huge lake, which makes it much easier to avoid the checkpoints).

In terms of writing, the game makes a half-hearted stab at political commentary: the two sides in the civil war are indistinguishable from one another and make cynical deals with one another and outsider mercenaries several times through the game. The plight of civilian refugees in such conflicts is also intermittently highlighted, with you having the option of helping an underground railroad which is transporting refugees across the border. The game does at least get across the idea that Africa has been badly mistreated by outside powers for centuries and that cynicism and greed constantly undermine attempts by its people to bring law and order to the continent. However, it also undermines that idea by portraying every single person in the game (bar only two characters of note) as a psychopathic lunatic armed with a machine gun.

In terms of game mechanics, Far Cry 2 has some great ideas - weapons that degrade and rust easily, the freedom of attacking a target any way you like, some good use of vehicles, 'buddy' mercs who sometimes help you out on missions - but then enforces repetition. 90% of the missions in the game unfold in a very similar way, with some fairly solid combat (let down a bit by the ludicrous number of bullets it takes to kill someone) that becomes old hat very quickly. A few missions stand out, such as an early assault on a floating village and a later battle in a cliff-side town, but much more frequently you're fighting in some nondescript villa or mining camp. However, the final mission - a homage to Heart of Darkness - is excellent, a tense and dark adventure that is unrelentingly linear but also well-paced and atmospheric.

This gets to the root of Far Cry 2's main problem: the game is open-world and freeform, something that is usually a welcome change from linear corridor-shooters, but does nothing interesting with the concept. It might as well have been a standard shooter, and the final excellent mission even suggests it might have been better off to have taken this course. A few memorable moments and a great setting aside, Far Cry 2 is ultimately a let-down after its excellent predecessor (and even the flawed-but-solid Crysis games being developed by the original Far Cry developers in parallel to this). Its ambition is laudable, but its execution is lacking.

Far Cry 2 (**½) is available now on the PC (UK, USA), PlayStation 3 (UK, USA) and X-Box 360 (UK, USA).

Wertzone Classics: Far Cry

Deep in the Pacific Ocean lies a chain of isolated islands which the reclusive Dr. Krieger has taken over in order to pursue his enigmatic 'research' into genetic engineering. Ex-special forces agent-turned-boat-captain Jack Carver is chartered to take an unusual young lady to the islands, but his boat promptly gets blown up by a bazooka. Before he knows what is going on, Jack's been drafted by the CIA and finds himself having to fight his way through multiple islands packed with heavy weaponry-wielding mercenaries and bizarre genetic mutants as well.


Far Cry was released in April 2004, with newbie developers CryTek getting their first game out ahead of that year's eagerly-anticipated Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. With the help of a demo tactically timed to come out two months before the game, the title blindsided many players who hadn't even heard of it before, but with its (for the time) awe-inspiring graphics and unusual amount of freedom for a first-person shooter, it quickly won over many fans. Although enjoyable, Doom 3 didn't really bring anything new to the table and its graphical thunder had definitely been stolen by Far Cry, and whilst Half-Life 2 did become a major success thanks to its tense, dramatic storyline and memorable characters, its extreme linearity did limit replayability.

Far Cry, despite a generic, corny story and a meathead protagonist, works so well because the game basically just sticks you on a boat or on the beach of an island with an objective, a gun, a hearty clap on the back and then lets you get on with it. There are multiple paths to each objective, some employing stealth, some allowing for a running-in-with-all-guns-blazing approach, sometimes with vehicles available for use, sometimes not.

This allows Far Cry to tap into the primeval appeal of the first-person shooter genre: running around with a gun shooting bad guys. All too often this very basic component of the genre is overlooked in favour of gimmicks like bullet-time or physics puzzles, but Far Cry puts it front-and-centre. Running around in the jungle outflanking squads of mercenaries, making use of cover, or shimmying up to a treehouse and deploying a sniper rifle to pick enemies off from 3km away is tremendously satisfying, as is executing a well-planned attack on a fortified enemy position after a careful and painstaking reconnaissance of the enemy position. You can use binoculars to 'mark' enemy troops on your radar which makes absolutely no sense in a literal context but gives you a feeling that recon missions are actually worthwhile. You also have a remote mike you can use to eavesdrop on enemy soldiers' conversations, which sometimes results in plot-advancing information or a random comic exchange, which adds to the game's atmosphere.

The game being five years old, it is now possible for most modern PCs to run the game with settings rammed up to the maximum. With the 1.4 version patch installed with new particle, smoke, haze and HD lighting effects, the game still looks jaw-droppingly good. Not as face-meltingly brilliant as Crysis with everything turned up to eleven, of course, but still pretty awesome. The sheer sense of scale is also incredible. These islands are vast and if you can see a location, you can probably travel there, whether it's by boat, car, hang-glider or on foot. In short, heavy weapons-driven ultraviolence has rarely looked so good or been so much fun.

There are several downers. Almost immediately noticeable is the total absence of a quick-save system in favour of a checkpoint system. Most of the time this is fine and it actually achieves its goal of making you genuinely think hard about your decisions, knowing that getting killed aimlessly will result in a 5-minute trek to get back to where you are right now. However, there are a few times when the checkpoints are way too far apart with several intense firefights and no health kits in between, and getting past those bits without ripping your monitor from its mount and hurling it through the window in rage can be quite difficult.

Rather more famous is the fact that whilst the mercenary enemies are clever, intelligent and satisfying opponents, the mutant enemies are a complete pain in the backside. Even the lowliest mutant grunts can jump about thirty feet through the air and kill you with one hit, and by the time the invisible ones armed with machine guns show up, the joke is starting to wear a little thin. That said, the mutants aren't actually the game-destroying factor they are sometimes represented as: unlike Crysis (where the human enemies vanish quite soon after the even more annoying aliens show up), the mutants and human enemies remain interspersed throughout the whole game, and the mutants actually disappear for quite long stretches of the later levels, but they are fairly irritating. Vehicle handling is also a bit on the oversensitive side and in some parts of the game walking is actually quicker than driving slowly so as not to wrap your jeep around the side of a tree.

As I mentioned earlier, the story is quite corny and your main character is a pretty unlikable dunderhead, but oddly this works in a sort of retro-1990s FPS flashback kind of way. Carver is cut from the same cloth as Duke Nuke'em (not quite so ludicrous though) and the fantastically-named John Blade from SiN, and his macho antics are almost endearing in an age of dark and tortured game heroes like that guy from FEAR and whatshisface from Splinter Cell.

But Far Cry is all about the gameplay, and the gameplay is superb. I played the game through from start to finish for about the fifth time for this review, and I was still finding new routes, new tactics and new combinations of weapons and vehicles to beat each map. Far Cry has greater replayability than almost any other FPS I can think of (discounting pseudo-RPGs like STALKER), even more than its quasi-successor Crysis. It is simply, an excellent and slightly underrated game.

A couple of words of clarification: there were several semi-spin-offs released on consoles with names such as Far Cry Instincts, which used a cut-down version of the main game engine and were not developed by CryTek. There is also an 'official' sequel called Far Cry 2 which has absolutely nothing to do with Far Cry at all and has had a very mixed reception.

Far Cry (*****) is available on the PC in the UK and USA. I'd steer clear of the X-Box conversions which are really not that great.