Far Cry Vengeance review

If the first words you blurt out upon starting Far Cry Vengeance's main story aren't "Sweet Miyamoto, my eyes! I'm blind!" you're playing a different game than the rest of us. Muddy, low-resolution textures and grass draw in mere yards away as you move, the screen tears any time you move too quickly thanks in part to the limping, stuttering speed at which everything is drawn, and no quantity of cosmetic products could make any of the angular enemies palatable. It seems like even the developers realized this, since some cut-scene sequences, like the fateful first meeting with arch-villain Semeru, are excised without any explanation.

Over time, you can learn to accept the crappy visual quality, but compromised aesthetics are only an appetizer for the main course of pain the more persistent flaws cook up. You see, somebody somewhere believes that the trick to ensuring hand gestures become an effective part of gaming is crafting them to mimic the movements that on-screen characters must perform. Snipers don't really thrust their guns forward to look down the scope, and yanking the Nunchuk controller up doesn't make jumping any more exciting - but we're meant to think this is the case. Just the simple act of turning to face firing enemies is torturous - even at the highest sensitivity level, Jack Carver (read: you) displays all the predatory speed of glacial ice.

Though there's a new introductory sequence of maps, half the things that made Far Cry Instincts Evolution (the Xbox version) enjoyable in the first place are inexplicably missing from this mess. Setting branch-whip traps is no longer an option, and the supernatural abilities Jack Carver earned in his previous adventure are suddenly accessible only by filling a "Predatorine" meter with head shots and melee combat. Crippling Jack like this might be intended to keep your mind off the fact that enemies are dumber than a sack of rocks even at the highest difficulty setting, but it's actually just irritating.