The original Far Cry is a game I’ve wanted to finish since its release in 2004. It still blows my mind that it came out the same year Half-Life 2. I still remember playing it back then and being very impressed. Then I started dying, a lot. I died so much that I quit, never to play again. Now in 2025, I thought maybe it’s finally time for another attempt. I always thought of it as a classic, high quality first-person shooter. After finishing it just recently, I must say it is pretty difficult to recommend.
Steam Deck Specifics:
Running Far Cry on Steam Deck is dead easy. If you own Far Cry on Steam it’s as simple as install, set your controls(or choose a community layout) and play. If you own Far Cry on GOG, you will need to install via your chosen third-party installer, or use Lutris. Then, you’ll still need to set your controls before playing. This is about where the simplicity stops, as when you start the game you’re in for a world of hurt.
Look, the first couple of levels are straightforward and kinda ease you in. Then the difficulty wildly spikes up into outright unfair territory. Yeah, I can see why younger me bailed out in 2004. This time around I was determined to tick it off the list. I did nearly quit again, but I was in too deep at that point to not follow through. Am I just bad at the game? Heh, probably. But, let’s get a few things straight here. You can walk into a seemingly empty camp into a even more empty looking military tent to refuel on supplies (health, ammo, armour) only to be gunned down from across the map with pinpoint accuracy. The AI doesn’t mess around. You can fire a singular shot and suddenly you’ve conjured the entire map down upon your location to violently decimate you before you’ve even ripped through a full clip. Moving toward the end of the game, you’re to man a mounted machine gun, with limited ammo, while a friendly NPC drives a military-style humvee. Sounds pretty fine, right? Well, this is while you’re being chased by several similar enemy vehicles and a helicopter all with finely-tuned AI gunners like you’re some kind of giant bullet magnet. And just when you think the game is wrapped up, and you will think this a few times along the way, you’ll come up against colossal mutated trigens who will hurl rockets in your general direction until you are blown into a fine paste.
I guess it’s not all bad. For a 2004 release, it STILL looks incredible. The CryEngine was built for Far Cry. Well, the engine was created initially as a tech demo called X-Isle: Dinosaur Island to showcase the capability of Nvidia’s GeForce 3 series graphics cards. But even when compared with Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 from the same year, it holds hits own visually. Those two are also first-person shooters, but the locations or setting of all of them are wildly different. Does Far Cry look better? I guess it is all subjective, but I think it might take the crown for its more open-world jungle style. Half-Life 2 is easily the better game, though. The story here leaves much to be desired, it’s flimsy and twists into ridiculousness approaching the finish. The general gist is that you’re tough guy Jack Carver. Sporting his best Hawaiian shirt, he’s an ex-soldier who wants to leave his past behind him and start a relaxing boat charter business in the South Pacific. When Jack’s boat is blown up after a job taking him to a mysterious island in Micronesia, he is out for revenge. The island, and surrounding islands, are not what they seem as he soon stumbles upon genetically altered beasts called trigens. These islands are patrolled by mercenaries who are very quickly losing the battle. The Trigens continue to get more and more outrageous as you progress through the game. It starts out pretty shaky and continues to slide straight into absurdity.
On the surface, Far Cry appears to be a perfect old-school shooter. You’ve got a tough guy in a jungle setting who kills literally anything in his path. Sounds pretty great, right? There’s nothing quite like a mindless shooter you can get lost in. Unfortunately, this one is definitely not it. In practice, it’s a brutal slog. The AI difficultly makes it nothing but frustrating. The biggest positive in the game is that you have the freedom of choice. You can complete a level however you see fit, whether this be taking the high ground, low ground, using stealth or going in guns blazing. The problem with that is that you will end up trying all of those options. Over. And over. aaaaand over. It gets old very quickly. Dying deep into a level only to restart stops being challenging and just becomes exhausting and frustrating.
So, we’ve got a game that looks great and was groundbreaking for its time. But coming back to it in 2025 is much more frustration than fun. If nothing else, I can appreciate it as an important stepping stone in first-person shooter history. There are some good parts to it, and I think the fact that you can choose your own way through each level is solid. But it’s just not the game I thought it was, or might have been. If you really feel the need to revisit Far Cry, I would honestly pack your finest invulnerability cheat because you’re gonna need it.
Leave a Reply