Overview

Pretty

The Far Cry demo has been released in all its half-gigabyte glory. Far Cry is, for some odd reason, one of the best-looking and innovative first-person shooters and has not managed to catch one ounce of hype. So here’s the demo, your chance to try the game. And we’re here to help you decide whether or not it’s worth downloading.

Far Cry takes the player to a remote island filled with enemies. Yeah, it’s you against the world – what’s new, right? Well, the difference is that the Far Cry island is literally island – it’s not a series of levels. For the purposes of the demo, the player is limited to a relatively small section of it, but that relatively small section is still huge.

The lone demo mission has the player tasked with the destruction of a radar facility on top of a hill on the island. You start on a boat, approaching a smaller mini-island, armed with nothing but a pistol.

The immediate impression, even at the lowest graphics settings, is of wonder. This is a real island, it’s huge, it’s green, the sky is a bright blue, the sand is clean and the water sparkles. No game up until now has offered such an incredible sense of immersion thanks to its graphics and style.

After landing, it’s best to sneak up on your opponents, take aim and drop them from cover. Here, the first two small disappointments manifest themselves. The gun controls are somewhat sluggish, like in Deus Ex: Invisible War before the patch. There’s a feeling of mouse lag, and while it doesn’t disrupt gameplay, it certainly doesn’t feel as crisp as Call of Duty. We were also hoping that Far Cry might have “iron” sights, like Call of Duty, Vietcong or Operation Flashpoint. This small detail adds greatly to immersion, as you’re staring down the barrel of a gun rather than through abstract crosshairs.


After picking up the weapons your enemies drop, it’s off to the next stage of the mission. The auto-save should kick in unless you skip its activation area – an unfortunate state of affairs because there is no manual save option. However, the autosaves are frequent and conveniently timed, and never left us feeling as if they were poorly spaced so as to increase the challenge.

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