Far Cry Vengeance (Wii) Review

Jack Carver is a man on a mission – well, a mission to relax on an island, actually, but within minutes of the game beginning he’s battered down by some rotten soldier types and imprisoned. Taking matters into his own hands, Carver nicks some guns, escapes and becomes embroiled in an arms dealing plot with a random girl he meets and exchanges not-so-subtle innuendo with in a bar right at the start. Thus begins an adventure wholly comprised of Carver shooting people on tropical islands as he battles his animalistic side (developed thanks to a serum by a mad doctor in Far Cry Instincts). Carver can move closer to this wild side by attacking enemies at point blank range to increase a meter, and with enough murders behind him he can unleash a Predator mode to increase his speed and allow him to use fierce feral attacks to the bane of his foes.

We had high hopes. Far Cry has been well received on PC, Xbox and Xbox 360, so it seemed natural to assume that this would follow in its foot steps. Perhaps this was a tad optimistic, considering that we didn’t know about its existence until quite late on, probably meaning it had a very short development cycle, but still we persevered. Another decent FPS to add to the roster fairly rapidly into the Wii’s life! Sometimes, though, hope just isn’t enough, so we might as well be blunt: Far Cry Vengeance is a mess. As soon as you load it up, warning bells ring out. In fact, it happened to us before we’d even booted it up – the first time, the game refused to load. The game was brand new and had no marks on the disk, so we can only assume that it was the Wii trying desperately to stop us playing before all hell broke loose. If only it had succeeded…you’re presented with a plain looking title screen and upon starting your single player campaign from here the horror begins.

These have to be the worst frame rates we’ve seen in a game in years. Even within the opening cutscene, the screen jerks around and struggles to keep up with the ‘action’, which involves the camera moving back and forth all of 180 degrees. In game is not much better, Carver’s eyes apparently harbouring some kind of deficiency that he’s been keeping quiet, things juddering around even as you’re moving around as slowly as possible with little looking about. Similarly, the graphics are utterly, incredulously, horrendous. Ignore the first screenshots that Ubisoft released, as it looks absolutely nothing like them – for a start, the water doesn’t look anywhere close to decent aside in cutscenes, instead appearing pixelated, having all of five frames of animation and no reflections whatsoever. Carver’s hands look like they belong to a zombie with a suntan, character models are poor, blood spurts out as an unsanitary brown slime, every texture is disgustingly murky or otherwise rubbish, the grass consists of random mashings of green pixels seemingly put together in MSPaint. The draw distance is insulting, with some grass and trees only appearing when you’re within a foot of them, while ‘shadows’ pop up under your feet (if you call pixelated – noticing a pattern, here? – greyish blobs shadows). We could go on, but instead think of it like this: take an N64 game, downgrade it to run through a PSOne, plug it into an LCD TV with a composite cable and shove the result in a food processor, just for added fun. We give you Far Cry Vengeance’s graphics. The game looks its best when you emerge from water – everything is slightly blurred and actually looks competent, so why this couldn’t be applied to the whole game we don’t know. Speeding about in Predator mode also looks fairly decent for the same reason.

The enemies are also a good few years behind in what we expect from games; most of the major problems are associated with them, so it makes sense to talk about them all at once. A big issue is that of hit detection: if an enemy can be seen and clearly targeted, they should be able to be shot at. Apparently not. Only when the reticule turns red can bad guys be shot at, which gives the bullets in the land of Far Cry a trajectory of approximately 4 metres (with the exception of those fired from the sniper rifle). There are no hit zones to speak of on the enemies at all – we don’t expect them to be able to react differently for every single different region they could be shot at, but is it really too much to want to be able to shoot somebody in the leg and have them act accordingly? Hell, head shots should be possible; Far Cry Vengeance manages to completely miss the concept of ‘bullet to the head equals death’, and it takes the same amount of bullets to down somebody if you shoot them repeatedly in the head or the groin. To make a further mockery, the enemies don’t appear to have had any artificial intelligence coded for them either, with their patterns roughly being ‘run at, shoot’. We had one guy, fully loaded gun in hand, attempt briefly to shoot at us then turn and flee completely randomly. We chased after him for two minutes, directly behind him, without receiving any kind of attempt at an offensive back. Then we put him out of his horrid-algorithm-ridden misery.

The sound is a step up – it seems some actual thought was put into areas of it, with ringing/screeching in your ears if you’re too close to an explosive when it goes off, and slightly foggy sound when you’ve just gotten out of water, as though liquid is filling your ears. The voice ‘acting’ is appalling though, whether it’s Carver giving another embarrassing quip within the cutscenes (which we presume are supposed to drip with some sort of sexual tension, but instead end up playing out like scenes from the worst of budget films) or a random soldier telling us to eat our own excrement. Charmed.

What’s most tragic of all is the control scheme, because it’s actually quite good and is dragged down by the rest of the game. Moving around is a cinch, aiming is accurate, and holding down A allows you to stop turning and aim even more precisely. It has its problems: even on highest sensitivity, turning can feel a bit like you’re rotating in a vat of sludge, pushing the remote forward to zoom in is annoying, and for some stupid reason jump is assigned to flicking the nunchuk up awkwardly rather than a simple button press, but there’s a feeling that it could really work in a halfway decent game with some modifications. Oh, and we didn’t get to test out the multiplayer much, as nobody else was brave enough to be near the game for more than a minute at a time. What we did play wasn’t very good, though, and only supported two players.

Ultimately, we don’t want to blame the developers alone for this. We’d make a quick guess that they weren’t happy with it and didn’t want to release it in its current form, but were pressurised to by Ubisoft to capitalise on Wii’s launch sales. What you have here is a poorly finished game that could have done with a good few more months development and testing, rather than being pushed out as launch pap. It’s a Far Cry from being a competent game – just who are Ubisoft trying to get Vengeance on by releasing this?