(11 old generation games left.) I hope you like jungles, lots and lots of jungles intermixed with long loading times. Far Cry looks rather nice; they clearly spent a lot of time developing the tools to render such impressive scenery (jungle, beaches, a few caves, rain forest, cliffs, swampy jungle etc.) but the gameplay is incredibly repetitive and I feel like some of the levels could have been designed by a program rather than a person. I can not remember the last time I was so aware of how boring the level design of game was, which is striking to me because the levels look gorgeous for a game of this era: they just aren’t interesting in how they are put together.

I can encapsulate the Far Cry experience as such: you sneak through the jungle, you reach a clearing with some manner of mercenary encampment, you can choose to attack or sneak around or just run through really fast, it doesn’t matter there because is another encampment a 5 minute walk away, repeat until you get to a boss fight! They include an assortment of vehicles which is kind of fun but at times feels more like a design decision to let you skips huge chunks of the uninteresting levels. Later in the game you get “feral powers” which apparently was added to the XBOX port and wasn’t in the original PC version of Far Cry. The feral powers make combat a little but more interesting, you can kill people with your bare hands (bear hands?), and see at night and such. In comparison the PC version must have been pretty dull and just a straightforward FPS without them. So a neat mechanic, but I tended to just use the “run very fast power” to skip past areas that were particularly dull.

I couldn’t beat the final boss after a dozen or so tries, but I am sufficiently bored of the game that I have moved it off the “to finish pile.” Usually I wouldn’t bother writing a review for a game I’m so “meh” about but I figure I’d write about these last few last-generation games I have. I had thought about trying to beat all of these before picking up a 360 but given that I have 11 to go and there is at least one 30 hour RPG. (I think my game completion rate since starting grad school is about 4 per year…) Then I thought I should just finish the XBOX games (only 2 remaining in the pile) and then I can unplug that and pack it away, but a recent time sensitive special deal I saw for GTA4 with an XBOX 360 might defeat even that idea.