Far Cry is a game that shows what a single player FPS should be. Stunning visuals, excellent audio design, high quality ai, and a great story too boot.

The game was the tech demo game of it's day with huge draw distances and amazing rendering of every piece of foliage. Despite this, I was able to run the game on max with 4xAA and 8xAF at 1280x1024 with a 7600 GT. The game's character models look a little dated, and the textures are showing their age too, but overall the graphics actually look quite nice.

The audio in this game is fairly good. It supports EAX 3.0 and makes use of positional hearing, which adds to game play nicely. The music is interesting and has a nice little effect where it increases the tempo and intensity of the music. The voice acting is also pretty good, but there was a few little dubbing issues.

The game play is what really shines in Far Cry. The game has a realistic damage model where if you shoot an armoured enemy it does very little damage, but a head shot will kill an enemy instantly. The damage model rewards accuracy, but if that were all the game would be a standard run and gun. The combat is non-linear, meaning that the battles will play differently every time. If you want you can be sneaky use the silenced MP5 to kill a guy then take out another without them ever knowing. You could also shoot a guy with the m16 then relocate to confuse your enemies. Or you could also charge into the base with your m249 blazing. While the final option is usually not a viable option the game doesn't necessarily need stealth. The ai is very good and will flank and kill you unless you are better. The ai responds quickly and is overall very good. Sometimes you'll wonder why the ai knows where you are or doesn't see you, but overall it's excellent and probably the best I've ever seen.

The single player is long and has a rich story, while the story has it's problems it is one of the best I've ever seen in an FPS. There are twists and turns and unfortunately also a few clichés. I can't review the multiplayer since I have the ad-supported version, but I'd recommend picking up the game just for the single-player, which will probably last you for 30-40 hours on the challenging difficulty.