Level 20: Volcano

Find Krieger in his facility
If by some chance you weren’t completely restocked by the garage supplies outside the facility, there’s another room off to the left of the start point here with yet more ammo. Grab everything, making sure that your rocket has a full 14 rounds in it, before heading through the nearby door.

Since the mercs start a distance away from you, you shouldn’t have to worry about splash damage from your own rockets.

The gauntlet here consists of at least nine loaded-out mercs, all of whom possess full body armor, and many of whom are packing riot shields. Now, if you somehow managed to get here without a rocket launcher, well, you should probably quit to the menu and load a saved game from the last level and find one, because you’ll have an incredibly difficult time killing off all of these suckers without one. With a rocket launcher, though, it’s a fairly simple process of hiding behind the second set of pillars from the door, strafing out, firing a rocket at the nearest target, and hiding again, reloading periodically. One of the mercs is packing a rocket launcher of his very own, so follow the smoke trails back to the source and peg him before you take too much damage. For the mercs at the far end of the hall, you’ll have a better shot of actually hitting the ground near them if you fire at the apex of a jump, so strafe, jump, fire, land, hide. You’ll know everyone’s dead when your stealth meter empties out; if it’s at all full, there’s still a bastard hiding somewhere. Grabbing all of the armor here should be enough to get you up to 90 percent of maximum; don’t miss the health kit by the door leading out. Be sure to equip your rocket launcher before moving on, and make sure it has all four barrels full of rockets.

Speaking of bastards.... Krieger’s in the next room, having mutated severely since you saw him last, into some kind of Super Locust. Valerie’s not looking so good, either, but she’s of less concern to you than the four mercs that are packed into this room, along with the big boss man himself. There’s a trick to beating him: be very, very lucky.

Seriously, though: this fight is tough. Not only can any one of the mercs kill you with a couple seconds’ worth of sustained fire, but Krieger himself is packing grenades in addition to his OICW. If you hear a clinking sound on the ground, run like hell! Add in the fact that you die instantly if Valerie takes fatal damage, and you’ve either got a recipe for fun, or a recipe for reloading a billion times. Or both, if you’re really masochistic. If you’ve been looking for a challenge, this is it.

The devs throw you a bone by letting you drop in behind a desk after the cutscene ends. Your ability to kill off the mercs in the room will generally decide your fate within a few seconds. These guys can take a crapload of damage, including an OICW grenade in the body, so your rockets should be used to dispatch them before they can hide. Of course, rockets don’t reload quickly enough to snap off four rounds in a row, so you’ll have to be cagy about firing, ducking behind the desk, then popping back up and firing again. You have the best shot of getting all four of them by proceeding from left to right, but you’ll still need a lot of luck.

To begin with, flip on your night vision to make instant targeting easier. Aim at the wall behind the merc on the left; if you aim directly for him, Val might take splash damage from the blast. This will alert the mercenaries, so act quickly. Duck down for a second until your next round is accessible, then pop back up and aim at the ground to the right of the pillar in the middle of the room; with any luck, the splash will kill off the two mercs in the middle of the room. The merc on the right is probably out of sight by now, and this is where the luck comes in: you’re going to have to aim blindly at the steps on that side of the room in the hope that the splash damage does him in. (To be perfectly clear: we’re not speaking of the stairs leading up to the catwalk, but rather the small set of steps that runs the length of the room.) If you actually managed to kill off all of the mercs with these blasts, you’ll be in a fairly good position to deal with Krieger; if one of them managed to survive, you’ll probably be dead within seconds. The mercs don’t make any noise when they move, instead preferring to creep around silently, making it very difficult to tell where they are before they open fire. And if they’re able to shoot at you, they’ll likely kill you before you can locate them.

If by some twist of fate you actually manage to kill off the mercs without taking severe damage yourself, the fight will be simplified into a Jack vs. Krieger matchup, and this is one fight where there’s no TKO rule. As mentioned, Krieger is now a Locust, and can jump from the floor to the catwalk with ease. Your best bet here is to get him into what Diablo players refer to as "stunlock," which is where your bullets hit him with such rapidity that he’s unable to make any counter action. The best weapon for this purpose is the P90; if you’re lucky enough to still be carrying it, use your OICW HE rounds on Krieger at long range, and when he closes, switch over to your SMG and start blasting away at his head, ducking for cover behind one of the pillars just before you run out of ammo. If you don’t have the P90, the OICW’s bullets should also do the trick.

This is the hardest fight in the game, so don’t be discouraged if it takes you a couple dozen tries before you succeed. Well, you can get a little discouraged if you wish, but not enough to make you quit; Far Cry’s an excellent game, and you deserve to see the ending, insanely difficult boss fight or no.

Of course, said ending won’t be occuring right away. If you didn’t pick up on the connection between your "antidote" and the sudden outbreak of greenskinitis, and somehow managed to overlook Doyle’s sinister tone in his communications from the last level, he’ll appear on the hologram now to make it perfectly clear that you have one more person to kill.