Imagine running and gunning your way around a giant tropical island filled with cunning and well-equipped terrorists and grotesque mutants, all intent on seeing you dead. Now imagine that you had free reign to explore every environment, using terrain and a deadly arsenal to take down each enemy in whatever manner you desire. Now ask yourself this question: Do I care why I’m here?

It’s a good thing you answered no, because Far Cry, the newest pickings from Ubisoft and Crytek, has the best gameplay yet seen in a frames-per-second (FPS), but with the most paper-thin plot this side of Spy Kids 3D.

To be fair, there’s some explanation given for the events of the game. You’re Jack Carver, an ex-special forces soldier on vacation in an ambiguously Caribbean tropical paradise. When your boat crashes in mysterious circumstances you’re left stranded on an island on which an insidious world-threatening plot is brewing. It’s up to you and your useless female sidekick to make short work of the evildoers.

The Far Cry engine is the most advanced yet seen in a first-person shooter. Huge outdoor areas filled with lush vegetation are rendered fully detailed. Moreover, with the aid of a sniper scope or binoculars, you can spy on and take down enemies from any distance—no artificial barriers restrict your vision. Water in this game is orgasmic, both above and below the surface—light reflects realistically off the surface from any angle and underneath, all is murky and calm. The engine suffers slightly in indoor environments due to a relative lack of detail, but the indoor light-rendering more than makes up for this.

Gameplay is fluid and self-directed. It is linear in the sense that you must get from point A to point B, but everything else is up to you. The most notable example I found was midway through the game, when your character must move down a murky river, with overhanging rock walls and vines. You can either hop in a boat you “borrowed” from the mercenaries and speed past their sentries, risking death by machine gun fire, or move slowly down the riverbank, taking out each machine-gun nest from afar. Each situation in Far Cry allows at least two possible paths, and usually many more.

Your arsenal is varied and solid. Submachine guns, assault rifles, heavy weapons, a shotgun, a rocket launcher and a sniper rifle are all at your disposal. Several vehicles are also available, most with mounted weapons of their own. And you’ll need all of these tools to take down the enemy, which is armed with pretty advanced AI. The human opponents use cover, move realistically, flank spontaneously and call for backup in the form of an attack chopper. The mutants are less organized, but their attack methods are nonetheless very fluid and responsive to your actions. The best AI feature is per-pixel sight, which means enemies only “see” you if a certain percentage of your body’s pixels are in their line of sight. What this means for you is that taking cover behind leaves and shrubs keeps AI from homing in on you like a missile, as is common in many first-person shooters.

There are minor graphical glitches throughout the game, especially light artifacts in the indoor areas. Facial models are markedly un-detailed, and some character animations are forced and jerky. Most importantly, the game is very system-intensive. You’ll need a monster rig to run Far Cry at more than basic settings (though it still looks great even with everything turned down). However, given the scale of the entire game, these are minor worries.

What’s really terrible about the game is the plot. Come on, how much more un-original could they get? You’re stuck on a remote island with mutants and terrorists with an evil scientist sequestered in a secret volcano lab and a useless female side-kick who keeps getting kidnapped? Sounds (and plays) like a bad Schwarzenegger movie, and not in that good bad way either. To top it off, the voice acting is absolutely rank, and the computer generated cut scenes would have looked significantly better if they’d been rendered in-engine.

So if you like bad action flicks, and you want some of the best first-person action yet to hit the PC, pick up a copy and ignore the plot. Just remember: use the spacebar to skip cut scenes.

Highs: Huge-scale engine, great graphics, highly enjoyable game play, advanced AI

Lows: Everything having to do with plot, voice-acting, and plausibility is terrible.

Final Rating: 85%