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				Graphics: 7.0 Gameplay: 7.0 Sound: 9.0 Control: 5.0 Replay Value: 8.0 Live play: 8.0 Rating: 7.0 Publisher:  Ubisoft Developer:  Ubisoft Number Of Players:  1-4 (1-16 Online) Cheats Screenshots
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  Far Cry Instincts Predator is Ubisoft’s half-hearted attempt to bring the Far Cry first-person shooter series to the Xbox 360 with as little effort as possible. 360 owners who never played Far Cry Instincts on the Xbox or Far Cry on the PC may find plenty new here to enjoy. Those who’ve been there and done that would do well to spend their $60 on something else.

  The differences between FCIP and its predecessors are significant but not worth the price of a new game. FCIP’s main single-player campaign is a rehash of the single-player mode on last year’s FCI for the Xbox. Only after playing through the campaign can one get access to a new eight-map campaign called “Evolution.” Released alone, “Evolution” would be called an “expansion pack” and would command perhaps half the price of a new game, but Ubisoft apparently felt that including the old content, enhancing the resolution for high-def displays and making a few tweaks to the map editor and multiplayer mode justified full retail price. (Making things even more confusing, Ubisoft’s companion release for the original Xbox, Far Cry Instincts Evolution, contains only the new content and the enhanced map editor. At least it sells for $30, which is the appropriate price point for an expansion pack.)

  The single-player

  You are Jack Carver, a court-martialed Navy man of loose ethics who now lives in Micronesia and makes a living, if you can call it that, providing boat rides to tourists and, most recently, mysterious brunette women who lead him into trouble. His first client is Val Cortez, who claims to be a photographer and who wants him to take her to the Jacutan Islands, an area he knows is best avoided. Cash speaks louder than caution, and as soon as he gets her to the islands, helicopters turn his boat to floating, burning debris.

  Jack must swim to safety and then use his wits and found weapons to survive against the hundreds of mercenaries on the island. He also must adapt to some new abilities he receives through an involuntary injection of serum.

  In the new “Evolution” campaign, your mysterious brunette is Kade, who hires you to help her acquire weapons she shouldn’t have. As before, that’s not the whole truth. Carver apparently never heard the old “fool me once” saying.

  Predictably, you run into hundreds of well-armed baddies as you move through a number of locales. As in FCI, the reason everyone’s shooting at you will reveal itself as you move through the game. And as in FCI, the story is reasonably strong and won’t be further spoiled here. Suffice it to say that an old friend or two show up in this game.

  A new wrinkle that’s important for plot continuity: Jack has not lost the feral abilities he gained from the serum with which he was injected in FCI, thus the “Predator” in the title. So from the very beginning of “Evolution,” you will have the ability to kill bad guys with one melee blow, run like the wind and “see” the scent trails of humans and critters alike.

  FCI players won’t see anything unfamiliar here, especially if they choose to slog through the original campaign again to unlock “Evolution.” (There is a cheat code for FCIP available on many web sites -- including this one -- that will unlock the new “Evolution” content immediately.)

  You move in linear fashion from one objective to another, following the blue objective marker on your radar. (“Evolution” offers the player a few more choices and is somewhat less linear.) Your radar also alerts you to the presence of enemies; enemies shown in green are not yet aware of your presence and are easy takedowns, while those shown in yellow or red are on alert and present – theoretically -- more of a threat.

  Your missions take you through tropical jungles, into abandoned and not-so-abandoned outposts, swamps and shanties. Throughout, you will find health packs and weapons in addition to the ones you recover from enemies you’ve killed.

  As in FCI, the enemy AI characters are incredibly stupid and are no match for you one on one, even in the highest difficulty setting. The closest you might come to being killed is if they simply have you so outnumbered you can’t kill them all, but this is extremely unlikely. In one early level, the only enemy left was a guy on a water scooter who, according to my radar, was highly aware of me. But he kept his back to me and never returned fire. Other enemies took multiple gunshots and never made any effort to take cover.

  Speaking of multiple gunshots, one unwelcome addition to FCIP is a hinky aiming system. With look sensitivity set to its default of 5, it’s impossible not to overshoot your target every time. Getting the round reticule over your target becomes a wrestling match with the right thumbstick. Turning the sensitivity down to 3 or so helps, but there definitely is something wrong here, something that cries out for a patch.

  The aiming reticule also seems larger and less help. On many occasions, I had the reticule trained on an enemy’s head, and it was red, but my bullet would sail wide to one side or another. Luckily for me, most of the AI are dumb enough to stand there and give me multiple shots at them.

  The multiplayer

  Multiplayer certainly offers more variety, thanks in part to custom maps (more on that below), but these days you’ll be lucky to find a game. There simply aren’t a lot of people playing online. On a recent Saturday night, I searched for every game type, every type of map and through both ranked and unranked games and found four – yes, four – online games.

  Once I got into one, it was enjoyable although plagued with the same horrible aiming as the single-player campaign. A lot of people have complained about lag, but my games were smooth and lag-free. Vehicles are still hard to control but a blast to use; they are effective weapons in their own right.

  Multiplayer includes all the previous game modes, like solo and team Chaos (kill the other guy, with respawns), Steal the Sample (a variation on Capture the Flag), Predator (players with feral abilities take on players without), plus one new mode, Seek and Secure. In Seek and Secure, you take and hold positions on the map.

  The map editor: still fun, but not much improved

  For many of us, the map editor was the best part of FCI. Making maps – even those that weren’t good enough to share with friends online – was downright addictive. FCIP brings back the map editor with a few small tweaks based on player suggestions.

  The best thing about the map editor is the ability to instantly drop into the map to test it. There’s no need to save and exit the map editor in order to play it – the back button puts you into the map and takes you back out of it to continue editing. This feature makes the FCIP map editor the most user-friendly I’ve ever experienced, including those with PC games.

  But the improvements to the map editor aren’t worth the price of admission. For example, fans of the map editor were excited to learn some time ago that the new editor would include the ability to make tunnels. Mapmakers who had been creating tunnels using trenches with roads or buildings laid across them looked forward to a new tool for making tunnels through existing terrain the same way one could make mountains with the bump tool or carve rivers with the dig tool.

  That did not come to pass, however. What we got instead was a new object Ubisoft calls a tunnel. It is nothing more than an oblong, hollow structure one would, presumably, place into a trench in segments (or not, if the tunnel is to be above ground). But since there’s no way to cover it with earth, it can’t be hidden from players on the surface. Laying roadways and buildings over trenches is still the best way to create tunnels, because at least then they’re somewhat camouflaged, if that’s important to you.

  One welcome addition is the zipline. Always a feature of single-player and the canned multiplayer maps, it makes its map editor debut in FCIP. There’s no more thrilling way (other than perhaps the hang glider) to get from Point A to Point B; besides the sensation of speed and height, there’s the vulnerability. With just a pistol available to you as you grip the line and shoot with the other, you are nothing more than a bird on a wire to enemies below.

  There are also new vehicles and weapons. There’s a large transport truck that will haul several players, a pickup truck and a Sampan longboat with a mounted machine gun. New weapons include blowguns for stealthy attacks and pipe bombs and molotov cocktails for not-so-stealthy attacks.

  Quirky and unrealistic graphics, now in high-def

  Far Cry has always been a fairly pretty game. The lush tropical environments and creepy swamps gave the player a real sense of the exotic. But FCIP brings back the annoying graphical quirks and shortcuts that plagued FCI, and this time they are in high resolution.

  Cutscenes, for example, will have you clenching your teeth until they’re over. Characters are bizarrely rendered. Kade, in your bed and in just a bra, has admirable, um, assets, but her face is distorted and unattractive (you can see where the studio concentrated its attention). Her neck is a little too long, and her posture, along with that of other people in the cutscenes, is stooped and unnatural. People and objects also have see-through seams that add to the amateurishness. Faces on all characters are waxy with little texture. This is the next generation, boys – time to bump up the polygon count.

  The graphical glitches continue during gameplay. Enemies fall, and their guns poke through their bodies. What should be a pile of dead bodies is actually a tangle of intersecting corpses. Foliage looks nice from a distance, but moving through brush and trees brings you face to face with the almost comical lack of depth of the leaves. Not only do you move through it without disturbing it at all, it looks flat and almost tiled.

  The one obvious (and much-touted) graphics improvement is in the water effects. FCIP has the most realistic water I have ever seen in a video game, and it is in all modes of play. The water moves and reflects light realistically, even reacting as it should to the presence of a boat or your character.

  Sound

  FCIP sounds pretty much like its predecessors – even the music is the same. However, the sound is one of the things FCIP got right. Surround is accurate, and the weapons all sound distinctive.

  The voice acting is decent; actor Stephen Dorff reprises his role as Carver. As in most games, AI have context-sensitive canned shouts which can at times be comical. In one level, I was crouching on a rock outcropping that crosses high over a creek. Three bad guys were in the water below, fully aware I was up there and just trying to get a clear shot at me. At one point one of them came into my pistol range, and I wounded him, prompting him to yell, “Who shot me?” Um, the guy over your head whom you’ve been trying to shoot for the last couple of minutes, maybe? Doofus?

  Also, parents, FCIP is rated mature for more than just the over-the-top violence. The language in the game is uncompromising, with the F-word used liberally.

  The bottom line

  Those who had the game on the Xbox and don’t own that console any more might consider buying, but only if you’re addicted to the map editor and don’t care much that there might not be much company out there on Xbox Live. For first-timers and everyone else out there, this one’s a rental at best. There are far better first-person shooters on the 360 that are more worth your $60.

4/24/2006  Tracey 'Jerri Blank' McCartney