by: John Olin

October 13, 2005

When I first got to play early builds of Far Cry Instincts the game was horrible. In the many months after I played however UbiSoft really pushed what the Xbox can do, what Far Cry is, and made completely new elements. The game’s visuals and sound rivals that of Halo 2’s, along with the scope of the campaign. Not only that you now have new Instinct powers, that intertwine within the story, and a pretty good multiplayer experience.

The game has a pretty unique, and interesting story, putting you in the shoes of Jack Carver a guy who is for hire to haul clients around in his boat, but he is also escaping from his past. The game has a very cinematic feel but keeps you within the view of Jack. You begin the game jumping off of his boat that is about to explode, and his vision tumbles as he tumbles into the water, then allowing you to play. As you go through, you eventually are injected with some mysterious serum and through out the game you discover new powers because of the serum. Part of the game play like Doom, as you peer into a laboratory and see a towering beast escape and destroy an entire wall. The entire game though is extremely unique in presenting the story and I haven’t seen anything like it before on Xbox.

The way the game plays is fairly unique. There are basically two ways to tackle enemies—A from far away shoot at people, and plan your move, or B run at them quickly, dodging as much as you can and taking them down with your feral, or as I like to call Instinct powers. In the game you feel like the monster from the Predator movies stalking your prey. You can set up traps such as spiky branches that when you lure enemies into them, they get creamed. You can also put down land mines, and in many cases some firefights you will want to get them ready. Another stealth element to the game is walking up on an enemy, being quiet, and cutting them with your knife from behind. On the radar, you can tell if enemies are aware of you are not by the color of the dot. If it is green, they have no idea you are around, orange they are aware of something stirring, and red they know you are there.

As for the feral powers, you get them as you progress through the game. The first and most used of the bunch that you receive is the ability to run up on someone and destroy them with a single blow, replacing slashing people with a knife. Then next you get the ability to see the smell trail of someone by holding down Y, later the ability becomes more attuned. The second ability you will probably use most is the ability to run much faster, and jump much higher. You also gain the ability to heal yourself, although it happens in small doses. The feral abilities are powered by an adrenaline meter which replenishes when you aren’t using them, or when you find adrenaline packs lying around.

You have a lot of basic weapons that get the job done as well such as sub-machine guns, shotguns, pistols, rocket launcher, sniper rifle, and your artillery guns that are posted up in certain areas. There are also plenty of vehicles to drive around such as the ATV, a hovercraft, complete with a gun, a jeep, a boat complete with a machine gun and more. The vehicles with guns allow you to interchange between driving and shooting, but driving any vehicle overall can be risky and many times slippery business. The view of the vehicle driving is also first person so it can become nerve wrecking at times. There are also plenty of interesting baddies besides human, but I wouldn’t want to ruin that for you. You get one small weapon which you can dual-wield, one power weapon, and one medium weapon that sometimes you can dual-wield. You also have grenades, and the system is setup pretty well. You also have plenty of armor and health power-ups in areas where you will encounter plenty of bad guys.

The game does get easy in certain parts, and seems to follow a pattern of building you up and knocking you down, stripping you of weapons but it works. The AI can be pretty dumb sometimes, but the game tackles that problem with sheer numbers in some areas. It is a bit cheap, but it still works. Overall though the campaign in the game is real nice, with plenty of save points, so that you don’t get frustrated, and transitions that make sense. It is definitely the section of the game that thankfully shines the most.