Summary

absolutely beautiful graphics and gameplay. great weapons and power ups along the game.

Sound

great gun shots and explosions, plus you will hear a few scary sounds throughout the game.

Gameplay

great and fast paced.

Summary

Far Cry Predator certainly packs a lot of great ideas onto a single disc. Most of those good ideas went into the first-generation Xbox title (many of which are probably on loan from the original PC version, though the console version was substantially different), and first and foremost among Predator’s good ideas is including the original campaign. Most of the 360 version’s improvements are minor and/or confined to the (relatively weak) second campaign, so if you didn’t play the original Far Cry Instincts (which is back compatible, if you’re keeping score), Predator is the very picture of bang for your buck.

The campaign follows Jack Carver, a Navy dropout and former black-market gunrunner now running…fishing gear. The glory is gone, but he seems happy enough in his new tropical home. As we meet him, a contract to escort a “journalist” to a nearby island has gone bad, and an army of mercenaries is hunting him down. He’s captured, and a latter-day Dr. Moreau gives him an injection that restores the animalistic strength, agility, and instincts that humanity hasn’t needed for soft civilized life. It’s at this point that Far Cry distinguishes itself; it plays a lot like Halo, but Master Chief can only dream about Jack’s feral powers. You can fly at enemies and tear them apart bare-handed; you can track by scent in total darkness; you can outrun a mercenary’s quad bike; you can rip a machine gun off its turret and carry it around. Face-ripping never gets old, but the guns-a-blazing approach isn’t the only option. (Plus, the standard pistols/SMGs/rifles/shotgun/rockets/snipers are old news.) You can take enemies out quietly with silenced pistols or a well-planted butterfly knife, or set traps called “branch whips” for an instant kill. The environments are a bit linear, but the gameplay is diverse enough that it never feels repetitive.

The enemy AI is better than most, but still weaker than anyone should be making these days. The original Halo, five years older, still has smarter enemies. They’re clever enough to take cover and hide in the bushes (maybe that’s an accident—most of the place is covered with bushes), but they still don’t mind running in front of a machine gun turret. They’re reluctant to chase you, unlike the morons in Perfect Dark Zero, but Ubisoft should really know how to do better. Supposedly, the PC version had a brilliant AI; if only they’d kept it.

Visually, FCIP is pretty nice. The lush foliage, crystalline waters, and soft sandy beaches are lovely; the game’s fictional islands would be a great vacation spot, if not for that psycho doctor. It’s best not to look to closely, though. The 360 game offers little more than a high-definition version of the original graphics, and while the polygon counts are better than the average original Xbox game, it retains a distinctly last-gen look. Frankly, this is one of the 360’s uglier games, except for some of the launch titles. I personally don’t care—low-poly mercs bleed just like Locust—but FCIP isn’t a reason to buy a better TV.

The first campaign’s plot was good enough for a game, but it wasn’t anything special. The voice work was average at best; Stephen Dorff put a little feeling into his curse words, making his tepid performance the best in the game, sad to say. FC’s plot won’t drag any players away from, say BioShock. The second campaign’s plot, though, is just a flimsy excuse to kill some pirates. Jack, penniless without his boat, takes a lucrative contract with Kade, a laughably generic femme fatale who’s one-dimensional enough to make a Bond girl look like Lady Macbeth. If this were a movie, Tara Reid would be overqualified to play her. The plot makes no sense, and the dude with the tattoos is up to…well, no good (we don’t know what he’s actually up to). He has feral powers, like the first campaign’s Richard Crowe, but he serves no purpose beyond being the Big Bad Guy. The good news about the new campaign is that you have feral powers from the beginning; you can start clawing faces the minute you start. You also get remote-detonated pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails in addition to grenades; the former is good for setting traps, and the latter is useful for blocking off routes that they could use to flank you. The wild card is the blowgun; I’m sure it’s good for something, but I don’t know what. It seems to do some damage, it robs the later enemies (and you…) of feral powers, and it’s silent, but since it takes the same weapon slot as a rocket launcher or sniper rifle, I don’t like it.

One thing that deserves mention is the boss fights. If by chance you’ve read my reviews of GoW, PDZ, and GRAW, you know I don’t like boss fights in shooters; how exactly does high rank make your head bulletproof? Crowe’s and Semeru’s heads look like heads to me. Still, these particular fights are reasonably enjoyable, even if they do follow the same stupid conventions we’ve known about for twenty-odd years now. The first game’s last fight starts with an arena situation, pitting you against hordes of enemies before putting you head to head with Crowe. Crowe himself falls easily enough, if you’re smart about cover and stay away from his REALLY BIG GUN. At least he’s not magically invincible, unlike GoW’s General RAAM or Halo 2’s Tartarus. Semeru is arguably a little easier, though the lead-up is tougher. In an interesting twist, you start the fight without your feral powers, recovering them for the second half. Yes, there’s a second half, marking the return of another venerable and stupid boss-fight tradition. I wish these guys would just die when shot in the face—GRAW’s Carlos Ontiveros was kind enough to do so—but they’re two of the best bosses in any shooter, the big frogs in the small sewage lagoon.

FCIP has some of the best multiplayer I’ve seen. The maps are well designed, all the best gametypes are here (plus the “Predator” gametype, where one player with feral powers takes on everyone else), and generally, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. The quick controls reward fast reflexes as much as strategy. Feral powers and branch whips add a neat element that no other game has. If only it had objective-based multiplayer, or even single flag CTF; the branch whips are just a novelty in deathmatch or 2-flag CTF. Without more options, sorry to say, FCIP’s multiplayer is basically a well-done retread of Halo’s multiplayer, which it feels a lot like. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great multiplayer, but Halo already did most of the same things better. But it’s still good.

If you never played the original Xbox game, go out and get this one right now. So what if the best parts are recycled? It’ll give you many happy hours of gunplay and stalking, and feral attacks will get old just as soon as the GoW chainsaw, e.g. never. If you already have FCI, you’re still getting the new campaign, pipe bombs, retouched enemy AI, slightly better graphics, and upgraded multiplayer. An improvement on the original, and a far cry (heh heh) better than the wretched Wii version, FCIP is one of the best shooters out there.