I don't see what's so amazing about this game... it's just overrated, plain and simple.
First off, an issue a lot of FPS's are having these days : the user interface. By all means, it sucks. They didn't use any sprites, it's just big uni-colored blocks of colors, re-mindful of the old DOS days. Also, they decided to go against common sense by having a movie file playing on the background every times you go to the pause menu. It takes forever to come up.
The story felt really uninteresting to me, too. A rich gets his girl kidnapped from Mexican bandits (and while you don't see any of it, they're obviously raising cocaine on that island). Couple that with low budget voice acting that sounds forced and it really throws off the whole *sneak, stab and run* atmosphere you were trying to build up.
Talking about atmosphere, this game hardly has any. Not only are the NPCs BADLY voiced but their AI is absolutely horrendous and is probably the game's biggest throw off. Every time an enemy spots you, a -really- annoying song starts up . It means you're detected and they're coming in for you. Except... a lot of times, they don't come. A lot of times, you don't eve see them. It's like, you're expecting danger or a mad jeep driver to rush at you, but no, nothing. And that happens so freaking often.
The AI also feels like it has the sharpest God dammed eyes ever. Sometimes they're as small as a black little dot on your screen and they still see you - no matter if you're standing right out in the open or if you're hiding in the jungle's leafs and bushes. It's like if they had zooming X-Ray goggles constantly equipped, what the hell? Other times, you can be standing right in front of them, crouched but they won't see anything. What, they thought that crouching automatically sets Sam Fisher's visibility to zero? Lmao.
The gameplay is pretty straight-forward and gets repetitive early on. You're basically set loose on a set of islands with a couple of dirty jobs to do. Bombing up the guerrilla's equipment, slicing throats and everything else that's become a custody in FPS's.
You have access to another common feature, sprinting. However, like mentioned above, you barely ever do that since the enemies spot you way too easily.
As you progress through the game, you start finding better guns and equipment ranging from the standard M4 to the steady P90. Again, this game fails because all of the guns have the same recoil power, the only thing that changes is the fire rate. So in the end you just end up using one gun that suits you best and forget about the rest.
Eventually (but soon enough) your character gains the ability of morphing into some kind of beast. He runs faster, gets almost invincible and uses claws like Wolverine etc. etc. I gotta say this feature was actually quite cool, I suppose that sending flying old Shader 2.0 ragdolls everywhere was kind of fun for a while. But they really seem to think that this one little feature would be strong enough of a base to withstand all the other major problems, and it doesn't sadly.
Vehicle control is horrible and to be avoided at all costs. Camera keeps on locking in trees and the FOV (field of view) keeps changing too for no apparent reason - it just gave me a headache, honestly.
Okay, I'll start giving the game it's proper credit.
First, the graphics. They're very good when considering the time at when Far Cry came out. Nice and crisp textures, excellent clipping distance lets you see a whole island, very decent skyboxes too. You can choose from a rather vast option of shaders that filter the whole screen's saturation to give the game different visuals. Cold makes it more realistic, Toon makes it cel-shaded (nice for a few seconds but you'll turn it in a matter of minutes, lol) and three more which are basically three levels of Bloom ranging from Low to Hard. Yeah I guess it was cool changing every now and then when walking through the same endless textures was getting old.
I'd say that's the main problem with the graphics. They're very cool to watch but all the islands look the same - once you're done with the first one, you almost saw everything the game had to offer. What's left are the varying levels of cliffs and bumpmaps. Enemy models, while quite detailed, are re-used a lot. I kinda missed some corals and aquatic lifeforms too, when you dive underwater all you see are little bubbles here and there and a huge blue fog that covers everything, reminiscent of vanilla Oblivion's underwater fog. Fugly.
So I guess that's about it. I won't bother outlining the game's pros'n'cons since it's mainly was all cons to me. I enjoyed this game for a few hours - it's definitively worth a rental just to see the amazing islands - but all the major gameplay flaws overshadows the rest.
I give this game a 6/10.