"Wow" sums up my fresh experience with a neat new demo released from UbiSoft - a slightly lesser-known title by the name of "Far Cry". Having played through this neat (yet slightly oversized - 400+ megs!) little presentation repeatedly, I must say that it's been some time since I've felt this good about playing an FPS title. Developer Crytek Studios has set out to develop and license out a completely new game engine ("CryEngine") rife with a bunch of awesome features, and Far Cry is the first title used to show it off. Here's some impressions based on my experience with the game.

The demo starts off with the player (Jack Carver) arriving via pontoon boat at a tropical island, rife with trees, thick jungle, and a bunch of bad-ass mercenaries armed to the teeth with pistols and assorted assault rifles. After a small vocal briefing from one of the player's contacts (one "Harlan Doyle" - the demo doesn't delve into the game's storyline or characters at all, unfortunately) informing him that he must reach and destroy the communications facility near the top of the island, the player is left to his own devices. The PT boat I arrived in is completely controllable, so I could either motor up to the island and start with a frontal assault (difficult given the dinky pistol and knife I start off with), or putter in close, dive overboard, and opt for a more stealthy approach. Since I felt the urge to unleash the Solid Snake within, I decided to size up the situation before making my move. Hitting the key to bring up my binoculars, I brought my little boat out wide to get a clear view of the area and checked out what was going on.

Scoping out the terrain, the game's beautiful graphics became immediately apparent. The game's astonishing view distance allows for the entire island to be seen at once (in a limited fashion of course - the mountains and trees limit visibility, but the terrain is quite evident), and using the binoculars I was able to see enemies all the way over the huge distance required to make it up to the satellite dish. The binoculars themselves are incredibly handy, allowing not just for zoom levels up to 24x, but can mark out distant contacts (which appear on the player's radar) and also make out far-away noises, such as gunfire, footsteps, or even conversations (which are sometimes hilarious to listen to). After I had scoped out the conversation and marked as many targets as I could ("marked" targets will remain on the player's radar indefinitely until the target dies - unsure if this is affected by difficulty level), I brought the boat in close to one of the distant fishing huts and disembarked some distance out, electing to swim the rest of the way rather than risk being spotted. Switching to my pistol and going down to a prone position (the game allows for standing, crouched, and prone positions, as well as some nice leaning controls that actually let players shoot around corners for a change), I slowly moved up the beach until I came across a small hut with a trio of soldiers standing around chatting up the joint. Taking careful aim with my pistol (there's a dedicated "Toggle Scope" button which can be held down with conventional weapons to zoom in slightly and get a more accurate shot), I squarely delivered a bullet to the head of the nearest guard. Watching his corpse instantly drop to the ground in a realistic manner, the other two guards quickly panicked and started hunting for me. One ran onto the docks to my right and took cover behind some crates, popping up occasionally to lay down covering fire, while the other cautiously advanced over the sand trying to discover my hiding place in the bushes. Remaining prone, I waited for the guard to get close enough, switched to my machete, and leapt out of the bushes to chop him down. Following a grisly display of gore, the third guard yelled and open up with his P90, but a few moments of dodging bullets and vainly shooting my pistol at him yielded satisfactory results.

The guard AI in this game is impressive - not perfect, but far more effort has obviously been put into the AI for this game than that of many others. After I had cleared the first cabin and looted for some extra weaponry and ammo, I found another trio of guards hanging out in a small outpost overlooking the beach (whom, oddly enough, hadn't heard the shooting and screaming from their comrades). When I opened fire on one, two of the mercenaries ran for cover and started laying down covering fire while the third surprised me by retreating instead of blindly running at my hail of gunfire, yelling over his shoulder "keep him busy, I'll go for help!" Before I could stop him, he had gotten to a nearby radio and called for backup, and the next time I ducked behind a rock to pop a fresh clip into my weapon I ended up being distracted by a distant buzzing noise - apparently, the remaining mercs from the other side of the beach had heard their friend and had piled into an attack boat to come assist (well, two of the soldiers anyways - the rest had to go the long way around). I'm fairly positive that this wasn't just specific pre-scripted behavior though, as subsequent runs through this part had the enemies taking cover behind different objects. It's obvious that the AI seems to have a fair idea on how to react to situations and handle an aggressor, though I'll need to play more before I grasp the full extent of how this works. Like I said though, it isn't perfect - I've seen several enemies react with a fair amount of idiocy when I lunge at them with a knife screaming like a psycho (maybe that behavior is intentional), or when I sit myself in a decent position and just pick them off from far away. I've also somehow managed to gain the attention of certain mercenaries who simply fired away at me blindly with pinpoint accuracy no matter where I was - even if it meant emptying entire clips into a hillside. One attempt to sneak up on a sniper even had him whip around mysteriously when I got close and shoot me in the face, even though I had gone through every attempt to be stealthy.

Anyways, moving on, the level design is incredibly expansive - and yet, also straightforward. I like to think of it as "linear in a non-linear fashion", simply because of how many ways there were to approach doing this demo, even if the eventual objective is always the same. After I had cleared the beachside and moved on to the main encampment, I noticed I had a choice of two paths; either head directly onwards to the base up the road, or take a small path around a hill that led to a second inlet nearby. Opting for a little exploration, I wasn't disappointed. After dispatching a couple of guards, I came across a neato, fully drivable buggy. The vehicle had a top-mounted machinegun controllable via the mouse, with the vehicle itself handled by the keyboard. And what a nice, sweet vehicle it was. The physics system in this game is very nicely done, with vehicles being no exception. Indeed, the buggy handled itself closer to what I'd expect from Halo's legendary Warthog than something annoyingly "stiff" like, say, Command & Conquer: Renegades. As I pushed my way through the thick jungle foliage, mowing down bad guys left and right, I found several areas where the developers obviously figured no vehicle should fit in, but I had little difficulty cramming it through right spaces and up steep staircases nonetheless. I would've even brought it with me all the way to the (explosive) end of the demo mission if a thick concrete slab hadn't been blocking my way around the turn, though I'm fairly certain I could have shoved the vehicle in there somehow if I had tried hard enough. But indeed, the raw amount of open-endedness and detail in the demo mission was astonishing, a trait I sincerely hope carries over to the final game (also, I have two distinct words for the developers: co-operative play - GIMME!), and if you want to learn about all the different ways to win the mission, you'll just have to download it and try for yourself. I counted at least three worthwhile ways to get onto the island (and even more for approaching the actual communications facility), and there may yet be other methods awaiting discovery.

The control system to this demo was a little overwhelming at first, simply because I ran out of buttons to assign to my usual WASD preference (the game's defaults are decent enough, but I usually like to change a few keys like reload and alt-fire) due to the sheer amount of functionality available. As I already said, there's buttons for crouching, prone, and leaning, but there are also a variety of other controls. Grenade throwing has it's own button, rather than requiring the player to select it from his weapons inventory, disarming his current toy, and there are some other features I rarely see in FPS titles, such as "hold breath", which steadies the player's aim briefly (at the cost of endurance, which depletes while "sprinting" or swimming underwater), or "drop weapon", which is a little more common but has an actual use here, as the player can only carry four weapons at a time. Certainly a nice slant on the game's realism, a factor the game makes concessions to on many occasions. This definitely isn't a wide-open action title like Serious Sam - in fact, a player who runs in shooting without the right tools will usually die, as even a couple of shots to the noggin can result in near-death. Sure makes gun battles a lot more intense. One realism decision I really don't care for at all though is the reliance on checkpoints. Try as I might, I couldn't find any way whatsoever to manually save my game. Expect massive, endless annoying bitching and moaning on my part in a final review if the game ships with this glaring flaw. Do I really need to go off on another rant about how much I hate doing difficult parts of a game over and over again just because the game won't let me manually save every time I make a little progress? Yeesh.

As I've also already said earlier, the graphical presentation is stunning. The island in the demo was teeming with activity, not just from assorted mercenaries and flying bullets, but also from more natural elements. Look in the water and see fish zipping to and fro (I think there may be an active shark somewhere, though I haven't seen it for myself). Birds take off and fly away when a shooting battle erupts, and insects buzz around and become an annoying nuisance whilst poking around in the jungle. Trees and foliage in general are very accurately depicted (though the coloring is a little bright), and the water effects are incredibly nicely done. I think my only real complaint is that the entire presentation is a little cartoony, but that's not necessarily always a bad thing. There's even some very convincing shader effects utilized, and when a player takes damage or dies, his entire perspective goes fuzzy and fades out in a very realistic and gritty way that looks utterly awesome. Gamers will also appreciate all the "little touches" included, such as the ability to see aspects of the game world through the scope of his sniper rifle (on the actual model, not just when zooming in). The engine itself performed very well at maximum detail on my Barton 2500+/Radeon 9600 Pro gig with no noticeable graphical errors (I even hear reports from people with lower-end GF4s getting acceptable performance) or crashes - though I found if I jacked the texture quality up, the game tended to thrash my hard drive like crazy every time I performed an action (like pulled out a gun or firing) and took about three hours to unload when I was done playing. I guess 512MB of RAM isn't enough for today's gaming… *sigh*

Not everything is super-peachy with the graphics engine, of course. While the physics are very well done and being able to shoot a corpse repeatedly and see bloody holes appear everywhere is amusing for hours, I noticed a discernable lack of significant decals in the game world following a pitched fight (maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough - explosions and bloody corpses at least leave a mark). Even more annoyingly was the fact that corpses outright vanished every time I turned my back. I'd massacre an entire platoon of enemy soldiers, turn to see if anyone was coming up to jump me, and then noticed all the corpses and blood stains had completely vanished, leaving nothing more than stray weapons and items lying on the ground, all perfectly clean. What's the point of having these neato awesome ragdoll physics to batter and fling corpses around with if the bodies just vanish after five damn seconds? I see this happening in many modern titles, and it annoys me to no end. Quit taking my corpses away, dammit!

Sound is another fine presentation the demo offers. While the dialogue for the main characters felt a little off (what little there was of it, admittedly), the effects and music are excellently done. I have to say, it's nice to finally have a game that's not afraid to give me some meat when I'm charging at something wildly (and uselessly) shooting off an M4 like a psychopath. Gun sounds are beautifully done - in fact, this game should rest as a template for future titles to follow in this regard. Guns make big noises. I'm so sick of titles that give me awesome legendary magnum pistols that sound like the cap guns I used to fiddle with when I was thirteen. General ambience is done nicely too when slinking around inside the thick jungle, and there's a dynamic background tune that changes every time the action picks up (it gets a little repetitive on occasion, but I've heard worse). Fans of good audio definitely won't be disappointed with Far Cry.

So, in closing, I think this title has a chance to make quite a bit of headway. With the final product supposed to ship with full objective-based multiplayer support (I'm still praying for that co-op play) and an awesome map editor that reportedly even a three year old could use (supposed to be some kind of integrated dealie that lets mappers drop objects into the game engine and flesh out their maps on the fly with simplicity), I'm seriously looking forward to this. Here's hoping the developers can address some of the gameplay and stability issues that have come up (other users have reported problems launching or even installing the game properly, and some have even encountered an odd issue where the drivable jeep won't even spawn for them). Expect Far Cry to hit stores by March 26th, failing any spontaneous delays.