One of the best first-person shooter franchises of the last couple of years has come to Microsoft’s Xbox 360: Far Cry: Instincts. Even better, it also includes the new Evolution chapters that recently came to the original Xbox console. The whole package is called Far Cry: Instincts - Predator, and for anyone who bought and loved Far Cry: Instincts in the fall of 2005 and has since added an Xbox 360 to their gaming stable, it is definitely worth a look. Like its predecessor, it still shows some problems that keep it from absolute greatness, but it is one enjoyable ride.

The single-player portion of Far Cry: Instincts - Predator is really two completely separate games. The Instinct chapters are the same story that appeared in the 2005 game. Main character Jack Carver is running a charter boat business in the South Pacific after fleeing the USA due to some rather unsavory dealings. While showing a reporter around the WWII wrecks on Jacutan Archipelago, he runs into trouble with a scientist who is conducting experiments on the island to release the animal powers in all humans. Jack’s boat is blown to splinters by mercenaries and he has to fight his way off the island. In the course of the story he is captured by the mad Doctor Krieger and subjected to his experiments. Jack develops “feral” abilities that make him faster and stronger with keener senses.

The Evolution story line picks up soon after the first story. Jack is off the island and safe but, without a boat to earn a living, his business prospects are dim. One evening while drinking his troubles away, he meets a beautiful smuggler named Kade. After a roll in the sack to make him more compliant, Kade enlists Jack’s aid in backing her up on an arms-smuggling deal with some local pirates. Naturally things once again go wrong and Jack finds himself at odds with pirates, rebels and a group of warriors with feral abilities like his own lead by the very powerful Semeru.

If you have already played through the Far Cry: Instincts storyline on your Xbox and are only really interested in the new Evolution content on the 360, there are a couple of things that are probably going to bother you. First, the standalone FCI - Evolution game on the Xbox is rather nicely priced at $30. FCI - Predator on the 360 is $60. Second, Ubisoft made it so you can’t play the Evolution story until you’ve played the Instincts story. And while there are some nice incremental improvements to the Instincts game on the 360 that are worth seeing, I’m pretty sure this is going to make some folks unhappy. I know it ticked me off a little. I anticipated playing through a few levels of Instincts to get an idea of the improvements to the game and then spending the majority of my playing time on the Evolution content. Needless to say, I found myself playing through the Instincts story to open up the Evolution game. I had fun again, but the been-there-and-seen-that factor was definitely present.

Added to the frustration of replaying a game in which I knew what was going to happen next was the fact that the promised upgrade to the game was really not that significant. Some things like the water effects looked better, but other things like foliage looked about like they did on the Xbox. That is not to say they looked bad, FCI on the Xbox was one of the best looking games of last year. The draw distance is definitely improved. It seems like you can see for miles in the game. The promised improvement in enemy AI was also marginal at best.

The eight levels of the Evolution content add nice new environments, and in some instances the ability to tackle objectives in the order you chose rather than in a purely linear fashion, but for the most part they are more of the same gameplay you encountered in Instincts. What makes them less satisfying than Instincts is that from the beginning you have all the feral powers that were so slowly introduced and learned to use in the first story. The only balance to it is that you tend to use a lot of adrenaline, the mana-like substance that fuels your powers, right from the outset and you have to constantly recharge it. An added element that assists you in restoring adrenaline is a plant naturally occurring in the environment that will give you 100 units of adrenaline.

One new addition in feral powers was a mixed blessing in my opinion. Using his feral sense, Jack can see climbing points up shear walls. Neat little trick, but the game designers used this new feature to bring into an FPS game that which I believe should never be brought into an FPS game: jumping/platforming elements. Designers, this gameplay element shoehorned into an FPS game has been discredited since Turok on the Nintendo 64. If you ever even start to think it is a good idea, immediately begin hitting yourself in the head with a mallet until the thought goes away.

Naturally, since FCIP is a first-person shooter, the guns are the core of the action. Like FCI, FCIP sports a good variety of weapons ranging from pistols to sniper rifles and rocket launchers. Beefing up the arsenal is the ability to pull heavy weapons like machine guns and automatic grenade launchers off their mountings and use them as mobile weapons. The downside to this maneuver is that while mounted these weapons have unlimited ammo; once dismounted the ammo is finite. There are also more explosives to throw. The Molotov cocktail is the venerable gasoline-in-a-bottle bomb that can make things toasty for the bad guys. The pipe bomb is a command-detonate weapon that allows the player to disperse up to four of these little nasties around an area before triggering the whole bunch with the press of a button.

There have also been additions in the vehicle department. On the water is the sampan pirate boat with heavy machinegun. To move large numbers of men around (mainly in multiplayer) the military transport truck can’t be beat. And my favorite, the pickup truck with mounted 40mm automatic grenade launcher. Definitely whup ass on wheels. Unfortunately the driving mechanic is still a bit wonky as you drive with only the left stick and engage targets with the right stick and trigger. The ability to drive and shoot has its uses, but I still can’t decide if this scheme is really a good idea and works as well as the Halo model.

The gameplay tweaks did not stop with the single-player campaign either. A whole new game type has been added to the already good multiplayer mode. The original game offered Chaos, Team Chaos (individual and team deathmatch games), Steal the Sample (capture the flag) and the unique Predator game where one feral-power equipped soldier fought a group of normal mercenaries. New to FCIP is Seek and Secure, a game a bit like the Territories game in Halo. In Seek and Secure an active station on the map must be captured and then held by a team for a certain amount of time until it is secured. Once secured, a new station is activated and the process repeats.