Far Cry
Walk-through
Far Cry’s single-player campaign consists of 20 levels, some of which contain about as much landmass as the average FPS does in an entire game. After you get through with the campaign, you’ll be able to try again on a harder difficulty setting, or play on "statistics mode," which lets you select an individual level to play, and will give you detailed feedback on your performance during the level.
Basic Combat Tips
Far Cry is very much a first-person shooter, but the technological implementation of long view distances has an impact on the gameplay that makes the outdoor levels the first of their kind. You should be able to make it through the interior levels just fine if you’ve ever played an FPS before, but here are some tips to help you adjust to the exterior combat.
Approach With Caution
When you come across a mercenary camp or base, you’ll need to scout the area before heading in. It’s especially important to keep to cover as you approach a base, due to the outstanding eyesight of three groups of enemies: enemies manning minigun turrets or mortars, mercenaries atop towers, and mercenaries with rocket launchers or sniper rifles. All of these groups will generally see you before their compatriots do. They’ll often spot you as soon as you come into their line of sight, even if you’re half a click away, so always head towards an enemy camp on high alert, and only after you’ve managed to clear out any of these specific threats.
Use Your Binoculars
Just in case this isn’t stressed enough in the walk-through itself: use your binoculars! While many FPS games throw in binoculars, they’ve never been as useful in a game as they are in Far Cry. This isn’t just due to their ability to zoom on distant enemies; they also lock on to your targets’ locator tags, meaning that any merc or mutant that you scan will appear on your radar from that point on. This can often make the difference between ambushing an opponent and getting ambushed yourself.
Let Your Enemies Come To You
The AI in Far Cry is quite good; mercenaries, especially, will attempt to hunt you down after you make your presence known with a gunshot. You can often use this to your advantage by luring your targets towards your position with a volley of bullets, then taking them down with an automatic weapon as they close in. Lying prone and waiting might not seem like your idea of fun, but this will afford you better accuracy; when you move, most of your weapons will tend to spray bullets in wide arcs, whereas lying down will let you focus on your target’s head. Try to position yourself on the high end of a slope, or near cover, so that you’ll have a place to retreat to in case you get overwhelmed or have to reload.
Duck And Cover...Or Just Duck
As we just said, moving tends to decrease any given weapon’s accuracy a great deal. There’s also plenty of accuracy lost between the standing and prone positions. When dealing with enemies at medium range, you’ll often have a better shot (literally speaking) at killing them quickly if you hit the ground as soon as you spot them. Lying prone and zooming in with your assault rifle’s scope or zoom feature will let you get headshots much, much more easily than will sprinting towards your target and blasting away, and will also reduce your profile, meaning that your enemies will probably hit you fewer times while you’re fighting.
Level 1: Training
As with any good first-person game, you’re going to be given a short obstacle course to run through before you can get to the real fun. If you’re at all familiar with the basic movements of an FPS, none of this should be difficult for you; just follow the prompts on the screen to learn when to kneel, when to lie prone, etc., and you should get through the sewers just fine.
Eventually, you’ll come across a ladder which leads up to a semi-open area. After the cutscene, you’ll be tasked with dashing across the room without the soldier outside detecting you. This shouldn’t be difficult; you can just use your sprint key to run across. If you want to make sure that he doesn’t see you, throw a rock (G is the default key for this) to distract him, then dash across. The roof will cave in behind you as soon as you enter the passage nearby.
After you reach the nearby room, you’ll encounter a rather suspiciously convenient video phone, apparently placed there by Doyle, a scientist elsewhere on the island. He’ll be your plot propellant from here on in, telling you where to go and what to do, which is helpful, considering the large size of the levels in Far Cry. Listen to his advice whenever his voice pops up. For now, he’s got some fairly obvious words of wisdom: grab the nearby gun and armor and get ready to shoot some folk.
Search the Huts for Ammo
When you reach the island’s exterior, you’re going to be faced with a few buildings, around which cluster four or five guards. With your paltry amount of ammo, you’ll be at a disadvantage in a firefight, so your first objective here should be to grab a new weapon. Luckily for you, there’s an M4 Assault Rifle nearby. Unluckily for you, it’s in the building that you’re farthest from. If you walk along the mountain to your left, and keep an eye on your stealth meter, you should be able to walk behind one of the other buildings and get to it unmolested, but keep your gun handy. Enter the building from the southwest side, near the Explosives sign, and your new weapon will be waiting for you on a shelf. Grab it and the ammo on the crate nearby, and you should be ready to take down the mercenaries elsewhere in the makeshift village.
Said mercenaries may or may not have been alerted to your presence already; it depends on the amount of noise that you’ve made. Regardless, you should probably go ahead and kill them, since they’ll see you on your way out of the village anyway. The M4 on auto-fire can make short work of any of these guys, but try to aim at their heads for one-shot kills. If you just start firing wildly, you may find yourself taking bullets through the wall; you are in a wooden hut, after all. At any rate, kill everyone and take the ammo from their weapons. If you’ve taken damage to your health, you can find another health kit on one of the shelves in the same hut where you found the M4. Check the other huts for a machete and other assorted items, then head on.
Go to the Hut on the Hill to find binoculars
Move out from the huts towards the objective on your radar. The hut on the hill is fairly close by, so it’s represented by a solid dot; objectives that are farther away are usually represented by blue arrows on the outside edge of your radar display. While you’re on your way, flip between the pistol and the rifle to gauge their effects on your walking speed. The pistol is a light weapon, meaning that it has a negligible effect on how quickly you can walk, while the M4 is a bit heavier, and will slow you down while you have it activated.
After grabbing the binoculars from the hut, Doyle will radio in, letting you know that the camp on the far side of the nearby water is where you need to be. Before you head out, though, flip on your binoculars and zoom in on the camp. This will mark each of its inhabitants into your radar, so that you’ll know where they are relative to you when the shooting starts. Be sure to pan to the right to pick up the signal of the marksman in the tower set into the hill a few hundred yards from the base. This guy will be your first target.
Go to the camp
Swim across the water and start climbing the hill towards the tower. When you reach it, you should try to take down the guard above; you can either walk up the ladder and use the machete on him for a semi-quiet kill, or just try to shoot him from below. Keep in mind that you can shoot through the floor of the tower, so if you’re on the ground below, and manage to spot him as he walks to the side, just shoot towards his feet and he should keel over soon enough.
Of course, any gunshots will raise the attention of the soldiers in the nearby camp, who’ll come to investigate, thereby confirming their status as the Smartest FPS Enemies Ever. Your carefree days of shooting people at long range and watching their friends step over the bodies as they unperturbedly walk their pre-programmed routes are over; the enemies in Far Cry will hear you shooting, then come to investigate in force, even if they have to walk a quarter mile to get to you. As, for instance, the soldiers in the nearby camp are doing as we speak.
Luckily for you, you’re on the top of a hill that said soldiers will have to mount before they can get to you. Watch your radar and target whichever signal is nearest, and as soon as you can see your new friend, pop him in the head with your M4. The single-fire mode should be adequate for this task. You’ll need to kill around a half-dozen or so soldiers before you can proceed down into the base, but again, watch your radar to make sure that it’s clear. The soldier in the other tower may have stayed there, rather than come up the hill, so watch for him. There may also be a merc or two who didn’t appear on your initial scan of the facility, so keep your eyes open for any sudden guests.
Find a vehicle
When you’ve cleared out the camp of all of those pesky inhabitants, you can start rooting around the buildings for more junk. There’s nothing of critical importance, but if you enter the Headquarters, you’ll spot a red keycard on a desk; use it in the Armory to grab a bunch of ammo for your M4, and don’t neglect to fill up your health and armor if you lost any during the fighting. You can also run around blowing stuff up here, if you wish; both of the large cylindrical propane tanks can be destroyed. You can also destroy the buggy-like vehicle, but you probably won’t want to do that, given the name of your current objective. Hop into it instead and start-a-driving.
Go to the carrier
Your next objective is to find the wrecked carrier elsewhere on the island. It’s quite a trip, but the buggy should get you there fairly quickly. One of the caveats of vehicle travel, however, is that you’ll be traveling blind; without the ability to use your binoculars, you could come across enemies around every turn. Stay sharp, and don’t forget to use the buggy’s machine gun. Just hit your fire key to fire away, but keep in mind that the turret can’t aim at extremely low angles. Any soldier that gets extremely close to your buggy will get to take free potshots at you, so try to take them down from a distance.
You’ll note that there are a couple of branches to the path; you’ll see a lot of this in Far Cry, where a road splits off into two paths, both of which lead to the same point. It’s a nice attempt at breaking the linear effect of most FPS’, but so long as you focus in on the objective blip on your radar, it shouldn’t be physically possible for you to get lost. It’ll rotate around a few times - the path to the carrier leads around the perimeter of the island - but it’ll always point you true.
After you pass the hut on the beach and head inland a ways, you’ll come across a couple of soldiers manning a 4WD vehicle. Four-wheel drives aren’t as speedy or maneuverable as the buggy, but they’re a bit more rugged, and possess one heck of an option in the form of a roof-mounted rocket launcher, along with the standard minigun. You can flip back and forth between the two weapons with your ammo selection key. For the moment, if possible, rely on your minigun to take out the roaming mercenaries you encounter; you may need the rockets later.
If your vehicle survives the trip to the carrier, get out and scope out the deck with your binoculars. You should spot a half-dozen or so soldiers on the ship itself, at various elevations. Although your rocket launcher can’t zoom, it does possess admirable accuracy, so aim it as best you can at the mercenaries; hopefully you’ll manage to take out a few of them before you have to approach the ship itself. There’s also a gunboat in the water near the carrier, which you can use the 4WD’s minigun on. After you’ve weakened up the opposition, head towards the blip on your radar and swim into the side of the carrier.
Level 2: Carrier
Find Valerie if possible
After you’ve managed to breach the walls of the carrier, swim through the passageway nearby and climb the ladder into the ship’s guts. Four or five mercenaries are wandering through the nearby hallways; they’ll probably come running for you as soon as you open fire. Feel free to use a few grenades to empty out the hallway immediately next to the ladder, then utilize your M4 to clean out the rest of the rabble. One of the nearby rooms has a healthkit and a few flashbang grenades; pick these up and use them when you run across the two mercs who’re packing P90 sub-machineguns, then off them and loot their corpses.
After you exit the boiler room where the P90 soldiers were, take a left into a little broom closet-ish room where you can pick up more health and armor. From there, move on into the torpedo storage room; don’t be startled if one of the soldiers here turns on the alarm - you can just disable it after they’re all dead. Also, be alert for more troops who will rappel down the shaft in the ceiling of the room - you can get headshots fairly easily as they disengage from their rope.
You’ll soon reach a ladder and will be able to head up to a higher level of the ship. Clear out the enemies nearby, and you’ll find a passage leading to the ship’s deck, but don’t go outside until you’ve checked all of the nearby rooms for ammo.
Walking around outside is, or at least should be, slow going: there’s plenty of mercs to worry about, including a few on the upper levels of the ship who’ll shoot down on you, and one manning a stationary minigun at the ship’s bow. The MG merc will be difficult to see until you’re exposed to his fire, so don’t be afraid to hide behind something and lean out to snipe at him with your M4. Last, but not least, there’s a semi-obscured soldier that’ll blast you as you approach the ladder leading up to the second level here; approach it walking backwards and looking up, and you should spot him before he sees you.
Find the boat
There’s another short interior segment of the ship where you can restock your supplies before you head on to the really difficult fight on the ship’s deck. Make sure all of your weapons and reloaded and are set to automatic fire. You’re going to have two immediate problems upon reaching the deck: first, an attack helicopter will buzz up the side of the carrier, with a minigunner leaning out the side; and second, another soldier will be manning a mounted minigun on the other side of the carrier, ready to turn your body into small bits of goo. Oh, and there’s also the 10 soldiers on the far side of the ship that’ll start running towards you as soon as they see you, but they’re the least of your problems.
First off, hide behind one of the crates so that the mounted minigunner can’t spot you, then start shooting away at the minigunner on the helicopter. After a full clip or two from one of your weapons, he’ll fall off of the helicopter and it’ll fly away, not to return. While it’s moving off, reload your M4, set it to single-fire mode, and lean around one of the crates to headshot the other minigunner. After both of those primary threats are dealt with, you can drop back down into the hole whence you came to restock on armor and health, if indeed you left those supplies where they were before you came up. Otherwise, just reset your weapons to automatic fire and start blasting away at the troops as they approach you. They’ll dash in and out from between the many boxes on the deck, so watch your corners as you proceed.
Some of the mercs will stay on the far side of the deck; switch back over to single fire and take them down before proceeding across the rickety bridges leading to the south end of the ship. You’ll note your objective, a small propeller-driven boat, hanging from a couple of chains here. Shoot off the chains, and dive into the water (don’t worry, you’ll survive).
Drive the boat east
Perhaps you should drive the boat east.
Level 3: Fort
Get to the fort ruins on top of the mountain
To begin with, just drive your inflatable boat onto the beach directly in front of where you begin the level and get out. There’s a bit of a hill that’ll give you cover from the mercs on the dock nearby; there are four of them in total. Before the gunplay starts, use your binoculars to scout the area, and try to zoom in on the beach far in the distance; you should be able to tag a whole mess of the island’s inhabitants and get them on your radar. This’ll help ensure that you’re not shot in the back later on.
At any rate, when you’re ready to begin the carnage, use your M4 to shoot the propane tank near the fishermen; this’ll kill them both right off, leaving you with two more targets to dispatch. A few more of the soldiers will be approaching you from the south, so wait for them to approach and then take them out.
After things quiet down, you’ll be able to scout out the area a bit more thoroughly. If you stand near the building with the shark outside of it and use your binoculars to scout up and down the mountain to the south, you should be able to spot around two dozen soldiers combined, with most of them arrayed on the beach. A frontal assault is certainly possible, but on the harder difficulty levels, you’ll want to be a bit more subtle, so push your inflatable boat back into the water and head out to the east. There’s a small bit of land that juts out between the soldier’s beach and another, smaller beach, where four more soldiers are mulling about. Land your boat here and walk towards the four soldiers, killing them as you approach. If you can’t kill them all quickly enough, a couple of them may drive off in the buggy here, but don’t worry; you’ll catch up with them soon enough.
From the beach, walk up the path into the jungle. There’s a set of well-guarded stone steps nearby that you’ll need to surmount if you wish to reach the ruins, so kill off the guards and take their weapons. If you’re low on ammo, health or armor, you can follow the northern part of the trail and use the minigun above the beach to wipe out the soldiers there. There’s a set of supplies in one of the huts here, along with a very handy sniper rifle. You won’t have a very good angle on the soldiers in the fort from the beach, so save your ammo for later.
As you walk up the stone steps, your path will branch again. The left trail leads into a bunker, while the right is a more straightforward path to the ruins above. The bunker is a bit longer, but it winds up being the safer of the two due to the ease of using grenades to kill the soldiers inside. Either route will get you where you’re going, however. The bunker’s main room also possesses a silenced MP5 sub-machinegun, which is a useful enough tool to justify the trip, in our opinion.
Whichever path you take will eventually lead you to the ruins, though. Work your way through it, methodically killing off the half-dozen or so inhabitants. On the fort’s north side, there’s a small pillbox with a ladder leading to the roof; you can use this as a sniper spot, or to lure soldiers into the pillbox itself and grenade them to death. Whatever your methods, you’ll want to kill off the soldiers before proceeding towards the door to the communications facility. As luck would have it, it’s locked, but at least someone had the good manners to leave you a rocket launcher nearby. You don’t need it to blast the door open - that’s Doyle’s job - but you may want to keep it to deal with one of the incoming helicopters.
Defend yourself until Doyle hacks the door code
As Doyle hacks into the door’s controls, you’ll come under assault by the aforementioned helicopters. Depending on where you move about, you may face a single helicopter of the guy-leaning-out-with-a-minigun variety, or a more advanced model that’ll hover about while more soldiers rappel from its interior down into the fort. Either way, you’ll want to take cover, as there’s also a patrol boat in the harbor below that’ll start sending up mortar rounds near the entrance to the door.
The obvious course of action here is to just hide until Doyle radios you and lets you know that the door’s been unlocked. If need be, use the rocket launcher on the minigun helicopter to encourage it to leave you alone, then time your dash towards the door so that you don’t get blown away by the mortar rounds.
Get inside the comm center and kill the commander
The commander of the facility is in the door to the immediate left of the entrance. He’s a tough bastard, and his helmet prevents easy headshot kills, so either use a spare rocket round on him, or throw down a flashbang and get up close before finishing him off. He’s not incredibly more resilient than most other soldiers, though, so if you’re out of these items, just whip out your M4 and unload a clip on him until he falls.
Find an explosive pack and plant near generator
The explosive pack you seek is in an armory near the commander; grab the keycard off of his body and use it to unlock the gate to the armory, wherein you’ll find the explosives and more ammo for most of your weapons.
The generator is down the hall from the control room, with a big red spot on it where you’re supposed to place the explosives, so place away and start running like hell.
Level 4: Pier
Find the Mercenary Camp
You begin this level in one of Far Cry’s more impressive vistas, but don’t stop for sightseeing; kill off the mercs nearby and pick up any ammo they leave behind. If you’re feeling saucy, you can try to kill the soldiers down the hill by pushing the barrels down the path, but, of course, a bullet to the head does the same job.
After the mercs are out of the way, you’re forced to choose between proceeding down the hill on foot, or taking one of the gliders nearby. The glider is the more dangerous choice: although you’ll be able to fire your weapon while flying, you won’t be able to take any cover while moving about, rendering you little more than a moving target to the helicopter and patrol boat that shortly appear. Better to just walk it. If you still have the sniper rifle, you can use it while lying prone near the glider to pop off a couple of soldiers on the hill in the distance.
The path leading down to the water is uninhabited, but you’ll probably get a fly-by from the helicopter, which appears regardless of what method of travel you take. Again, a full clip or two from the M4 into the minigunner will generally persuade your aerial friends not to bother you, after which you can proceed down to the pier. The patrol boat will also be floating around down here, along with a couple of land-based guards; clear everyone out and swim (or take the boat, if it’s nearby) to the other side of the river and begin your ascent.
If you didn’t snipe out the soldiers on the hill before, they’ll be here now, manning an emplaced minigun. Kill them, take their items, then turn your attention to the gentlemen in the sniper’s tower to the south. The view from this tower overlooks the mercenary camp that you’ve been instructed to find.
After you’re up in the tower, pick up the sniper rifle, or get the ammo if you still have your rifle from the last map. Assuming you have at least five shots, you should try to hit the yellow propane tank next to the two soldiers at the edge of the camp closest to you, then the two snipers in the towers above the camp. One of the towers is easily spotted from your viewpoint, but the other one is obscured by the tree line, so use your binoculars to pick up all of the soldierss signals, then zoom in on the signals until you find the second sniper. While using your binocs, don’t forget to scan the jungle outside of the camp; there’s a patrol of five or six mercs to the northeast of the camp, with whom you’ll have to deal before you reach it. Best to have them on your radar before you make your approach.
Blow up the armory to create a diversion
As you move in on the base, you can expect to have some unwelcome company, in the form of yet another attack helicopter that’ll fly over the base. If you wait around on the perimeter, it’ll back off and wait to move in; take the opportunity to use your binoculars on it and lock onto one of its passengers. This will let you know its position if you have to duck into one of the buildings here while shooting at it. After you pop the gunner, it’ll attempt to land and drop off a couple of soldiers, but after that, it’ll make a hasty getaway.
Another thing to worry about in the base is a soldier with a rocket launcher; he’s in one of the sniper towers in the southwest corner of the camp, above the armory. If you’re lucky, he’ll aim a rocket at you and wind up hitting the side of the tower instead, thus killing himself, but otherwise, you’ll have to either snipe him from a distance or run up close and chuck a few grenades up there. Also, don’t necessarily think that you’re safe just because there’s nothing on your radar; there are a few roustabouts inside the buildings here, so keep your guns at the ready as you enter and exit the structures.
When all of the threats have been eliminated, grab the green keycard from the Admin building and the explosives from the Briefing building, then head into the armory, grab whatever ammo you need, and place your explosives.
Steal a vehicle and head west to the pier
Before you move out of the base, climb the sniper’s towers to recover the ammo that the soldiers there dropped. Sniper rounds are, if not rare, then in somewhat more short supply than those for the M4 or your SMGs. It never hurts to be thorough in the search for munitions.
When you’re ready to move on to the pier, grab one of the buggies and start moving along the road. If the oh-so-subtle sound of the engine from the nearby garage didn’t alarm you, keep your minigun pointed backwards towards its door as you roll out; a 4WD with two soldiers on it will soon emerge. Gun them down and steal their vehicle.
After progressing down the road a bit, you’ll come to a roadblock formed of a few vehicles, some with mercs actually inside them. If there was ever a time when your mounted rocket launcher could come in handy, this is it. Blow the roadblock away with a liberal application of projectile explosives, then push whatever flotsam remains out of the way with the nose of your truck and ford the river. You should be able to spot a sniper’s tower in the distance at this point, so get out of your car and scope it with your binoculars. If you couldn’t tell, the weapon that the merc atop the tower is toting is a rocket launcher, but luckily for you, you should possess one of your own on your 4WD. Shoot a few rounds towards the tower; if no rockets come flying back at you, you’ll know that your prey is dead.
Go ahead and drive up to the tower and grab the rocket launcher. Assuming you’re packing an M4, a sniper rifle, a P90, and an MP5 at this point, you can fairly safely drop either the M4 or the P90 to exchange for the rocket launcher. While you’re on the tower, feel free to scope out the pier below and get the locations of the soldiers on your radar. You can also snipe out the soldiers that are visible on the pier; you’re going to have to kill them later anyway.
Kill all enemies in this area
Before Doyle will meet you, you need to clear out the area of all mercenary presence. If you take your 4WD down to the pier, you can use your rockets to kill anything that moves; that will usually take care of this objective. After your objectives update, walk down to the end of the pier and hop on Doyle’s boat to end the level.
Citat
