Aaaahhrgh. That’s good. The Pacific. I just pumped a lung full of fresh tropical air. And a little smoke, I guess … some cordite, burning hair. Wait - what’s burning in here?

Quick, some Thorazine! Art’s losing it again. I was immersed, just now, in two inches of crystal-clear ocean water. Movement in the bushes off to my right alerted me and I went prone. With one eye glimmering through the sight on my CAR15, I waited in the surf for my quarry to emerge. But he never did and I fell back on the youthful tendency to roll around and play with seashells. For fun I dug a hole with an anti-tank rocket. It was an innocent act, and no one was alerted by the sounds of my frolic. It turns out that I was way the fuck off in the blue yonder with my orange rubber dinghy bobbing just offshore. It’s lucky I didn’t accidentally blow it up – it would be a bitch of a swim back to the battlezone.

FarCry gives you quite a bit of freedom, especially for a game intimately tied to the concept of first-person death. Here’s the thing – in FarCry, you don’t have to step in every goddamn trap in the level. You are rewarded for being sneaky, evasive, and violently decisive.

Small encounters with reconnaissance patrols will turn ugly if not dealt with quickly and quietly. The A.I. players in FarCry have very sensitive ears; they use the radio, and provided they are in the vicinity of a skirmish, will come looking for you.

This makes the play incredibly dynamic and variable. But STOP Art, you forgot the ART! This game is BEAUTIFUL! NO game has ever depicted an outdoor environment with such gorgeous detail and extent. Prepare to spend a good deal of your gaming time just looking around. Gaze over this fantastic and lifelike tropical environment.

Then throw a grenade.

I can’t really put this game into words, except to say that your girlfriend will like it, and she will enjoy spinning around the islands in a rubber boat. She may even kill something. It could get a bit kinky.

The designers of the game spent a hell of a lot of time creating a realistic archipelago. At high detail there are tropical birds, fish, insects, and need I say, foliage. Those with a taste for Angel Fish will find it hard to resist the urge to grenade-fish.

And the evenings are majestic.

The dramatic scale and detail of the outdoor environment does not come at the expense of the quality in-doors. You may stumble upon a darkened entrance in the side of a hill, flip on your flashlight and tiptoe in. Soon you will be deep in some earthen bunker, fighting room to room with gritty excitement. Hanging lights swing, and cast dynamic patterns. Pipes belch steam and heat haze, and floors and walls have rich, rich texturing.

Don’t slip on these torpedoes; they’re rusty and slick with condensation.

So, now that I’ve burned out your visual cortex, I ought to focus the magnifying glass on your temporal lobes. Let’s get some words cooking here.

Um, has any part of you ever wanted to hunt people in the bushes? Hear a snap, dive to the ground, and crawl twenty meters through the undergrowth to get a proper bead on your target? Maybe toss a grenade to divert attention and then charge out of the weeds with a CAR15 blazing at the hip? Yep. You can do that here. Over and over. It’s one close firefight after another.

The vehicles, on the whole, are decent. The jeeps and buggies are a bit awkward, for the simple reason that four wheels don’t do well driving through thick foliage on rocky and uneven jungle floor. But the boats are wicked. The patrol boat is super-fun. You can spin around at top speed, spray high-calibre lead, shoot rockets, jump the boat, flip the boat, beach the boat, and then push it back into the surf. This process is extremely fun. They have a hang-glider, which is a novel item. I usually end up killing myself with it, but with practice you can experience some breathtaking moments in flight. Sometimes a hostile chopper will spoil the moment.

The theme is comfortable and familiar. It brings up my wealth of memory about Guerilla War for 8-bit Nintendo. The main character in FarCry even has a red Hawaiian shirt like Player 2 in that old 8-bit favourite. It also brings back, with a wave of emotion, potent memories about the sci-violence film extraordinaire, Predator. FarCry has a set of night-vision goggles called CryVision that are basically the same thermal vision that the Predator enjoyed. Embrace the stereotype of tropical hit-and-run fighting.

I would have tired of FarCry had it remained from beginning to end as a hunt-the-mercenary-through-the-jungle experience. But to extinguish any possible tedium, the designers decided to release a horde of genetically modified apes and humans about one third of the way into the game. This is a Half-Life/Doom tactic, and it shines here too. These creatures are wild, ugly, mean, and kill with little or no forethought. Soon you are locked into a 3-way battle with the Mercs and the Mutants. These awful mutant apes are extremely dangerous. Their main attack is to launch themselves at you, landing with a deadly downswing of the left claw. It has a devastating effect on your well-being if they manage to connect.

This threat teaches you to be fast and accurate, which is a lesson that will stand you in good stead in other games and in life in general. When you detect one of these murky primates, draw a bead on its chest cavity and let go of the whole clip while negotiating a pronounced strafe-dodge to the left or right, preferably behind the cover of some heavy object. It is best to meat one of these ugly apes at close range with a fully loaded automatic shotgun.

This is a uniquely beautiful game. It gives you a lot of freedom and encourages any non-linear exploratory instincts that you have. I like that. And, in my mind, it totally owns the Tropical Guerilla Fighting genre. This game is also incredibly scalable. All of the screenshots you see here were taken at very high detail settings. When I play for pure action-enjoyment I tend to go a little shy of this quality. FarCry offers great control over which details gets shed for performance. I usually keep the foliage and water detail really high, because these are ubiquitous aspects of the landscape. I short on the icing, like dragonflies and parrots. Even though this game is a few months old, it is definitely still worth your money. The system you bought last week will make the CryEngine sing for you.

I have very few complaints to mention about FarCry. Let's think...um...it never rained. A windy, rainy jungle battle could have been nice. On the other hand, the sky did turn red and lava flowed over the earth, and this was very satisfying. The multiplayer side of the game bored me, but I think that is because I am slave to Battlefield Vietnam. I see no reason to spend my online time any other way. That’s about it. FarCry has easily earned my respect. Now get out there among the ferns, Gamer. Get a screen-tan and a couple of kills, and enjoy your Tropical Guerilla Vacation.