Far cry is a great game, it just fizzles out 90% of the way through.
Jack starts his adventure in an underground bunker, and I have to say, at this point the visuals are very, very good. When you get out of the bunker though, you'll realise why FarCry is great. You are presented with a vast island full of mercenaries, foliage and eventually mutants.
It is good fun to hide in the bushes and plan out your attack on the merc camps. Rushing at 4 or more mercs guns blazing is likeley to earn you a one way ticket to hell, since damage is more punishing than in other games of the genre- A few seconds of sustained fire at full health and armour will be enough to whittle you down to 0. When you get to the mutants, you will find that two swipes is enough to kill you and your armour.
You have all sorts of equipment at your disposal, sniper rifles, flashbang, frag and smoke grenades, rocket launchers, night vision goggles, Buggies, HANG GLIDERS!- the list just goes on. So what makes the game entertaining almost the entire way through is the sheer variety of ways you can make progress.
As for the general jist of the game, it's almost comical; Macho ex-special forces boat charter guy meets sexy photojournalist who lands him on a tropical island owned by a crazy scientist guy who thinks that the future of mankind is for us all to be 10ft tall and have a rocket launcher for an arm. The quality of the cutscene animation ranges from pretty good to downright awful, but appreciate that this game was rushed by the developers so that they could win the "next gen" race.
There is no escaping the fact that far cry is 100% corny- the voice acting, the sexy female heroin who by custom strips to her underwear at one point in the game for no real reason, the whole mutant business, the way the vehicles handle, the adherance to the strip the player of his well earned arsenal 3/4 through the game. Again the list just goes on. But being corny doesn't make far cry bad, it compliments the game.
The only problem that I had with far cry is the developers idea of a climax was to flood the entire map with every enemy in the game. Once you get to the later stages you'll find yourself using the "fire some wild shots to alert them then run back to a choke point and get out the shortgun" tactic far too much. This gets tedious after a while, as does the extreme difficulty of the last level- you will have to reload many many times.
Its a shame about the end of FarCry in my opinion, because the rest of it is excellent in just about every way, but when I finally beat the game, I had no desire ever to touch it ever again.