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By Keith B (23rd Mar 2007)

Upon first sight, the specs and basic story information for Far Cry: Vengeance make it seem as if all were well with Jack Carver, protagonist of the new installment in this series of famous tropical First Person Shooters. Perhaps, we think, this will even bring us back to the glory of the original PC installments of the game, engineered so masterfully by the guys at Germany-based Crytek. But woe us, the cinematic video sequence introducing the story of Vengeance does away with all that, and once we've started to actually play the thing, all hopes vanish, and it becomes crystal clear: Far Cry: Vengeance is a very far cry indeed from the fingerlicking gory goodness of the original installment in the series.

At the outset of Vengeance, we find Jack wanting to turn his life back to normal after all the excitement and bloodshed of his past adventures. Unfortunately, he has no money left, and no boat. Well, where better to think about what to do next than in the nearest island bar... Bad idea, as it turns out, because very quickly Jack ends up in the jungle yet again, fighting soldiers as a hesitant follower of the rebel beauty Kade. He's still good with the guns and machete, and he's still troubled by the mutations inflicted by a mysterious serum he was exposed to in an earlier game - so he hits the islands to show what he's got.

So much for the story. A little thin, is it? But after all, Far Cry sells action, not story, and once Jack Carver gets really angry, there's little need for any narrative to drive the gore. Just think of a Hollywood B-movie gone pixel and you get the idea. If ever you've played an earlier Far Cry game, you will also remember that the action usually more than made up for the thin story line - and we expect no less from this new release, especially since it's coming out for the wondertoy Wii. Unfortunately, Far Cry: Vengeance doesn't deliver. Not being a port of an earlier game, but also not really a full-on new game in its own right, perhaps Vengeance could be best described as a half-assed attempt to take a hugely popular and playable ego-shooter a step further up the tropic mountains of venerable video game history. Along the way, however, the developers must have stumbled over a corpse somewhere, and slid back down all the way to the muddy bottom.

The attempt is appreciated, of course - who wouldn't be intrigued by the prospect of taking out some feral mutant anger on guerilla fighters in the middle of a jungle with the help of Wiimote and Nunchuk? But Far Cry: Vengeance is too flawed in too many ways to leave a positive impression on any avid gamer. Let's begin with one of the few positive aspects, the game's controlling system. In the beginning, the combination of Wiimote and Nunchuk might seem wanky and incoherent, but after a little while, it turns out to be surprisingly intuitive and precise. Ultimately, the joy of ripping through the jungle with Jack's mutation-enhanced strength and instincts is definitely the highpoint of the game. Compared to the rightout bad controlling schemes of other 3rd party Wii ego-shooters, such as Call for Duty 3, Vengeance is a more than pleasant change. Again, we find the center of the screen dominated by a ‘dead zone' within which the cursor can be moved around to aim, look around, shoot, slice, etc. This works well, and the console responds in a very precise fashion. Moving isn't as smooth, and together with the unrealistic physics programmed into the various vehicles available throughout the game, this gives us a first inkling of the overall shoddiness of the game. Ultimately, one gets the feeling that while the controls, no doubt, are the best thing about Vengeance, a few more months in the studio could have made them the current industry standard for Wii First Person Shooters.

From here, it only goes downhill. The enemies' A.I., for example, is as bad as it gets (let's just leave it at that), and only one example of many grave scripting flaws. This takes all the fun out of stealthily sneaking through the tropical forest, and suggests that no-brain aggressive gameplay is the most effective way to get through Vengeance. Another problem is the size of the individual levels: They appear impressively large. What's wrong with that, you ask? Well, this seems to create problems with the Wii's resources, which are, as we all know, somewhat limited. To compensate, graphics and sound have the low-budget feel of some early cheap PS2 productions: Bad compression rate, bad resolution, problems with incoherent frame rate... As a result, grass starts growing only once our hero is in very close range. Trees and other obstacles pop up out of nowhere, and sometimes you'll even see the odd enemy spawn out of nowher, as if he had supernatural powers to match Jack's mutations. Tropical enemy A.I. ahoy! Furthermore, there is dreadfully little detail in the flora and fauna of the jungle, and even less inside houses and vehicles. It's a little as if the folks at Ubisoft Montreal had either no time, no money, or no developer's manuals for the Wii, and thus simply mangled one of the excellent prior Far Cry installments to somehow fit it to the Wii's basic operating matrices. While it isn't a secret that there are strict limits to what is possible on the Wii, graphically speaking, what we are seeing in Vengeance isn't even Gamecube material. At some points, instead of yelling "Wii!," this game just quietly yawns "N64"... At that point, support for 16:9 screen formats won't make a difference anymore either.

In terms of sound, Vengeance won't blow you away either. It's decent, but nothing special. There is a nice tropical flourish to the music tracks, but the sound mixing is choppy and artificial-sounding, and the narrator's voices as well as the sounds of the weapons appear all too cheaply rendered.

Of the many gamers who loved the earlier versions of the game, most would probably agree that it was the online multiplayer mode as well as the grandiose editor that made PC versions of Far Cry truly great. If that's what you are looking for in Vengeance, look no further. You won't find it... There is a split-screen mode (similar to the one in Splinter Cell: Double Agent), but that's hardly the same thing. The split-screen option does show potential, but unfortunately the developers did not take it anywhere. Altogether, we find 8 arenas to play our deathmatches in. They are big and detailed enough to warrant an atmospheric and suspenseful multiplayer experience. Only problem: The maximum number of friends you can battle in these arenas is... wait for it... 1(!). And what's more, it turns out that in these 1-on-1 battles, you won't even encounter artificial enemies. Ultimately, this renders the multiplayer battle mode even less satisfying than the single player story mode.

As mentioned above, the individual single-player levels are amazingly big. Apart from the repercussions this has for the graphical sophistication of the game, it makes apparent a host of further scripting errors: Since we can choose our own path through the far reaches of the jungle, sometimes we might hit important regions of the game-world at the wrong spot, or in the wrong order. In other words, we will have missed triggers that are needed to advance the linear story line, to unlock doors, or to make enemies appear. As a result, we have a lot of very annoying backtracking to do, and must clear areas we've been to once more until we finally hit whatever invisible trigger the game needs us to hit.

Well, it really all comes down to this: Unless you are a die-hard Far Cry fan, you had better skip this game. Vengeance simply doesn't live up to the older PC versions, and with the shoddy programming, the awful graphics, and the thin narrative, the well-working implementation of Wiimote and Nunchuk is really the only thing that Far Cry: Vengeance has going for itself.