In the movie The Ring, a haunted, malevolent videocassette kills viewers seven days after watching. It's been roughly six days since I started playing Far Cry Vengeance for the Wii, and honestly, I'm starting to get a bit tetchy. Though nobody seemed particularly interested in Far Cry Instincts: Evolution or Instincts: Predator, Crytek and publisher Ubisoft further prove they aren't above a quick cash-in with Vengeance's release for the Wii. Despite having the seeds of what could have been a rewarding FPS experience for the fledgling Nintendo console, the Wii installment is a titular far cry from being entertaining, good, or even really finished.

In Far Cry Vengeance, players resume the role of gruff, testosterone-heavy Jack Carver as he sits in a beachside bar, despondent over the loss of his boat. When he falls in with a mysterious beauty expecting a romantic interlude, he soon finds himself in police custody. And, in true genre style, just after that, everyone and their brother starts shooting at him. The storyline is nearly identical to Evolution's, but with the addition of some new levels and weapons. Unfortunately, anything that makes the game longer is less a feature and more a curse.

The burning question about Far Cry is ‘how does it control?' To its credit, the game takes advantage of the Wii's controller pretty fully, eschewing the tacked-on feel that other ports exhibit. The thumbstick on the nunchuk moves Jack, and the remote aims, and this is a fairly serviceable alternative to traditional keyboard-and-mouse control. From there, the little touches mostly seem intuitive - pushing the remote forward or pulling it back toward you will zoom in or out, respectively; slashing the remote like a sword will swing Jack's melee weapon, and holding the Z trigger and faux-lobbing the nunchuk will toss a grenade with surprising attention paid to the arc and force it's ‘thrown' with. When the trigger isn't held, jerking the peripheral upward will make him jump. Jack can use his ‘predatorine meter', which rises with each melee kill or headshot he inflicts, to heal himself by waggling the nunchuk side to side. He can also wait for the gauge to fill up and enter ‘predator mode', which is spiritually similar to the bullet-time that's become nearly mandatory in shooters in the past few years, by pressing the remote's A button. The remote's D-pad handles crouching and switching weapons, and the C button on the nunchuk is reserved for context-sensitive actions.

On paper, that sounds good, but in practice, Far Cry's gameplay is too shoddy to make it work. Using the remote to aim and control the camera lacks precision, and sometimes, turning quickly will leave players trapped in a ‘spiral of death', where Jack continues to turn and turn as he gets shot full of holes by foes, spinning right past the intended target. The game will occasionally stop acknowledging the remote gestures briefly, on top of that, no matter what distance or angle the player is at from the television and sensor bar. Aiming the grenades is an exercise in futility, as the slightest tug to the left or right when thrown appears to make the projectiles yaw wildly, and, even accounting for a slight delay after making a gesture - the nunchuk seems to work only when it chooses to.

While all of that can be explained away as a hardware issue, the awkward controls don't hold a candle to the other problems with the game. The game is so irredeemably ugly that its cutscenes look like something out of Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, and I say that with only the slightest hyperbole. The character models are uniformly lackluster and the environments are flat and lifeless. In fact, very nearly every defining feature of the CryEngine is totally absent from the game. As part of a series noted for its textures, ragdoll physics, eagle-eyed draw distance and advanced enemy AI, what Wii owners get from Far Cry is unrecognizable. Landscape detail doesn't appear until Jack is maybe five feet in front of it. The series' lauded water effects are absent, and the AI is wildly inconsistent. In some cases, I've walked right past enemies without them reacting, not even making an attempt to be stealthy. In other cases, blowing a soldier's head off won't raise a stir from the guy standing right next to him as long as Jack is far enough away.

All of this would be damning enough, but Vengeance is buggy on top of all of this. During the time I spent playing the game, Jack walked on air for about five seconds after a jump and an enemy didn't fall down after having an entire clip emptied into his face at point blank range.

Unless you are a Crytek employee's mother, I wouldn't even think about buying this game, even in the Wii's post-launch drought. Far Cry junkies won't even find the series' hallmarks here beyond names and locations. Vengeance continues Ubisoft's trend of releasing rushed port after rushed port to the Wii in hopes that gamers are indiscriminating enough to buy a game they've already played with added motion control. Given another month or two in development, it might easily have been worth it. In its current state, however, Far Cry Vengeance is harsh, glaring proof that this strategy isn't working.

Jan 9, 2007 | 0 comments
Jeff Stolarcyk