Even Crysis, which was a game everyone bought a new graphics card to be able to play, felt like an iteration on Far Cry, rather than a monumental moment. We may be impressed by how realistically a cloth flutters, or notice that the reflections in the water ripple in extraordinary ways, but it feels small, specific, and most of all, incremental.
It was the last time I can remember thinking, "I can't believe my computer can do this!" "You've got to come over and see this! You won't believe it!" And people would visit my flat above the Spar and oooh and coo at the luscious vistas, the green forests against the blue sea and sky, alive with parrots and feral hogs. It was one of those big turning point games, and boy did it help get itself a lot of attention by looking so damned pretty.įar Cry was the last game I remember inviting people to my home to see. It's big open islands covered in drivable cars and boats and hang-gliders, with its enemy encampments with alarms and reinforcements and guards in tall towers - without Far Cry you've no Just Cause, probably no Assassin's Creed, and on and on and on.
But I don't think there's any argument to be made that FC1 wasn't seminal. While Ubi marketed Far Cry 2 as a direct sequel, it barely had a thing to do with the original, not least in comparison to the real sequel, Crysis. There is of course one big difference between FC1 and all those that followed: this was the only one made by Crytek. So let's talk about Far Cry Brackets 2004. And I feel like the first gets a bit missed. People who want to look cool and pretend the entire game wasn't one enormous clown car of broken AI like to say how Far Cry 2 was the best game in the series.Įveryone else likes to bemoan the terribad writing of all the variously problematic sequels that have poured forth from the Ubisoft's Incredibly Complicated And Detailed Sausage Factory ever since. But I mean this Far Cry, the very first one. Sure, yes, absolutely, they make one every other year. This may sound a bit silly, but I feel like Far Cry has gone a bit forgotten.
Let me tell you about a time when we were made of sturdier stuff, way back in the distant fogs of 2004. Feeble little twigs, snapping at the mildest first-person breeze. Past Perfect is a retrospective column in which we look back into gaming history to see whether old favourites are still worth playing today.