Developer: Ubisoft

Let’s get something out of the way first. Far Cry for the consoles isn’t as pretty as the PC version. Well, maybe except for the one developed for the Xbox 360, but let’s not talk about that. For those living in a cave for the past five years, Far Cry is a first person shooter set in the jungle and the tropical islands of what is apparently southeast Asia. You play as Jack Carver, a genetically modified (after the first game) soldier with the instincts and senses of a predatory animal. You could jump great distances, run really fast, and hit really really hard. Hit a man from the back and they’ll flail helplessly while flying through the air. On the PC, it was one of the best-looking games ever made at the time of its release.

Pretty last gen. Ubisoft released Far Cry for the original Xbox, and it immediately garnered praise for its impressive visuals. It featured impressive lighting effects, reflective water surfaces, dense foliage, highly detailed bump mapped polygon models and environments. Now when I got Far Cry for the Wii, I was expecting graphics that were at least on par with a 4-year-old game running on last generation hardware. It’s not.

Lower than standard def. The minute you boot up the game, you’re greeted with the grainiest in-game Full Motion Video in First Person Shooter history. I’m not sure if they wanted it to look like crap to match the rest of the game, but they sure did a pretty good job of lowering your expectations. You start out in a prison, and the first thing I’ve noticed was that the arms on the character weren’t bump mapped anymore. Now they were just blocky - I could forgive that. Very few developers used bump mapping in Game cube games, so maybe they just didn’t know how to do it yet.

Jungle book. After fighting your way out of prison, you get to the jungle. That’s if a jungle was a place where plants popped out of nowhere and didn’t cast any shadows. The draw distance was horrendous. Entire bushes would warp in and out of existence. The sun was nowhere to be seen. Not that it mattered - most of the shadows were static and fake, and the rest was so pixilated you’d think you were playing a game on the Atari 2600.

Redeeming feature. “So everything looks like crap”, I said to myself, “maybe they sacrificed all of the other effects to keep the reflective water surfaces intact” Such wishful thinking and any hopes for a decent game faded away upon reaching the beach. The water looked like gray odd colored mud. It was about as detailed as the water effects on Shenmue 2, a 10 year old game for the Sega Dreamcast.

Still I would have kept playing. The Wii had the best FPS controller setup ever devised. It was still kind of fun, the control was intuitive, move with the stick, aim and shoot with the remote. But the game just doesn’t want me to go on. Control seemed ok in tight confined spaces, but once outside, the frame rates dropped horribly, along with any chances of accurate aiming.. What were intense fire fights in the Xbox version, turned into exercises in futility, one moment you were turning around, game chops up and the next scene is your body floating in the gutter.

They did ok before. Ubisoft had problems using shading on its games on Game cube hardware before, but at least whatever they released was still playable. Far Cry Vengeance on the Wii is just inexcusable. There’s no reason for anyone to play this game, not even for the Wii’s excellent control. Sure it has a few more levels but anyone would trade all of that for a game that could actually be played..

Save your money for the Xbox version now that Microsoft’s no longer supporting it. A copy of the game on the old Xbox shouldn’t cost too much. Anything would be better than this pathetic rush-job.