I played the game at medium difficulty, and it’s at times far from easy. It doesn’t take too many bullets to really screw-up your day if you are not careful. There are five difficulty settings, easy, medium, challenging, veteran and realistic and as I’ve gathered, it’s quite a difficult game at times. There is an AI auto balance option to use so the AI won’t be too difficult if you run into problems. The AI is impressive, maybe not F.E.A.R. impressive, but it’s damn good. They will hear you if you make to much noise, they will attack you right on, flank you, call in reinforcements into the fray, sound alarms and if they have vehicles they can be very aggressive and try to run you over. Most of the mutants don’t have weapons so they will usually just pounce at you and rip you apart and it won’t take to long for a mutant to kill you. Overall, the AI is good but sometimes it will take a few seconds for them to spot you even if you are close. The auto save checkpoint system is one of my biggest disappointments with the game, hence the quick save hack I installed. The only game I’ve played that has a good checkpoint system is Call of Duty 2. Far Cry leaves much to be desired. Sometimes the checkpoint system is good and saves frequently, but there can also be a lot of gaps between the checkpoints.
The sounds are effective. The guns sounds heavy, explosions and grenades will make your subwoofer rumble, not to mention that nice sound-mix of animal sounds the mutants have to offer. With a good 5.1 sound system it’s a great listen as you fight your way through the islands. The ambient sounds add the feel of the jungle with birds and other animal noises. The voice-overs are all right, and thanks to the script writer our hero, and most of the characters, have a huge library of one-liners. The voice-overs work, but there are better voice-over productions available out there.
The second biggest issue I have with the single player experience is the ending. It’s ridiculously difficult. I’ve tried to get through this part two times now. I’ve only played the entire game to the end twice and otherwise I just quit near the end. Trying to take on those mutants in the endgame can be done, but only after a lot of trial-and-error. The first time I just enabled god mode and blasted my way through it. I can only imagine how difficult that part would be on realistic difficult setting.
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