Weapons and Items

Weapons

Machete

Although Far Cry has pretensions towards allowing the player to adopt a stealthy mode of play, in truth, the distances involved and the acuity of your opponents’ senses makes sneaking up on anyone a good way to get a face full of lead, or perhaps a face full of rockets, depending on whom you’re Garretting up towards. The machete’s really here as the token melee weapon; you’ll probably never use it throughout the entire game.

Falcon .357

Slow, possessing a smallish clip, and woefully inaccurate at anything but extremely close range, the Falcon is useful only for taking down a few enemies in the first level before you finally acquire the M4. Early in the game, before you manage to find four actually decent weapons, you can also carry it around for the increased movement speed that it affords you, or to conserve the ammo of your other weapons when you’re attempting to do things like destroy propane tanks and the like.

M4 Assault Rifle

The M4 is going to be your all-purpose killing device for almost half of the game, so you’d better cozy up to it early on and get used to how it handles. It’s the only weapon in the early part of the game that has dual-firing mechanisms, aside from the MP5. The automatic firing method sprays bullets at your target, and although it may not seem like it when you first pick it up, the M4 is among the most accurate automatic weapons in the game when you need to unload a clip. In small bursts, the AG36 or the OICW is the preferred choice, but the M4 acquits itself well until you grab one of those guns. The alternate firing mode is semi-automatic, and offers even better accuracy at medium range, allowing you to conserve your sniper ammo for the occasions when you’re shooting at someone a kilometer away.

Regrettably, the M4 doesn’t have a scope, but the zoom view is usually enough to pop in enemies that are too far away to be rendered, at least over medium distances. Using it while lying prone will make your single-fire mode the next best thing to a sniper rifle during the first few levels of the game.

P90 SMG

There are few weapons that retain their usefulness throughout the entire game, but the P90 may indeed be one of them. The differences between the P90 and the M4 become apparent as soon as you pick one up; the P90 has a greater rate of fire, but a much greater spread, making it accurate only at short range. When you’re inside a structure, however, where this is less of a liability, the P90 becomes the preferable weapon due to its ability to drop almost any opponent within seconds. The main drawback, besides accuracy, is that you burn through your 50-round clip very quickly. As such, the P90 is best used as a way to weaken enemy forces at the beginning of a firefight before switching over to an M4 or another assault weapon.

MP5 SMG

Although Jack is generally well and able to take on multiple opponents, occasionally discretion actually is the better part of valor, and not attracting the attention of a dozen mercs may be desirable. The MP5 is useful in these situations, as its silenced muzzle makes only a soft clicking sound when fired, thus letting you shoot away without having every soldier in the area immediately homing in on your location. Like the M4, it can switch between automatic fire and single-shot for greater accuracy, with the latter being an excellent way of nabbing stealthy headshots. There’s a drawback, of course, and in this instance it’s the weapon’s power: the MP5 possesses the least stopping power of any automatic weapon. Still, it’s a fairly handy tool for most of the game, but when you start to run into armored mercs and mutants, you’re better off dropping it for a P90 or other more powerful weapon.