Multiplayer

Although first-person games have evolved towards increasing degrees of specialization over the past few years, with most games either tilting heavily towards either a single-player or multiplayer focus, Far Cry offers a compelling and well-designed multiplayer component in addition to its incredible single-player adventure. There aren’t an amazing number of gametypes, but those that are included are great fun.

The main caveat here is that you can’t just hop online and start playing. In fact, you can’t play online at all unless you register for service at ubi.com. Registering is free, so hop online and get an account before booting up Far Cry’s multiplayer component. You’ll also need to enter your CD key into the game before you can play; the game won’t accept the key unless it’s typed exactly as it appears on the back of your manual, dashes and all, so get it right. Unfortunately, the un-user-friendliness continues from there; every time you want to play online, even if you’re launching the game from a third-party utility like All-Seeing Eye, you’ll have to click-through for your user name and password before you can hop onto a server.

When you do get online, though, you’ll find yourself playing one of three online game types.

Game Types

Free For All (FFA)

Deathmatch should need no introduction. It’s kill or be killed, as every other player on the server will be looking to have the most frags at the end of a round. You start with just a machete and a pistol, and will have to find more weapons scattered throughout the levels, or on the bodies of your foes. If it moves, kill it.

Team Deathmatch (TDM)

Team deathmatch is a team-based version of deathmatch. Your goal is still to kill your enemies, but in TDM, you’ll be placed on one of two teams, and tasked with killing only the members of the opposite team. You’ll still need to find weapons before heading out into the fray, if you’re not content with the Falcon .357.

Assault

The assault mode is Far Cry’s class-based, objective-based gameplay mode. In it, members of one of the two teams will have to assault and overrun objectives held by the other. The assaulting team will spawn either in its base, or in the last position it captured; the defending team will always spawn in the position that the assault team will be attempting to overtake next.

Before you join a server, you’ll need to choose from one of three classes, and select which weaponry you’d like to start with. (Unlike the other two modes, in Assault you’ll begin with a full loadout of weapons. You can still pick up ammo from dead players, but you can’t pick up their weapons when they die.)

Grunt
Grunts are the basic soldier class, capable of carrying a wide variety of weapons. As such, they’re generally the best assault troops, well-able to lead the charge towards an enemy position. If you want to rack up kills, the Grunt class is your best choice.

Your first two weapon slots will always consist of a machete and pistol initially, at least until you drop them and pick up something better. Your third slot can either hold a Jackhammer or P90; the P90 is by far the better choice. It’s the fourth slot that will give you trouble; you’ll be able to choose among the AG36, the OICW, or the machinegun. There’s little that the AG36 can do that the OICW doesn’t do better, so you’ll need to choose between the machinegun and the OICW based on your own preferences and on the map that you’re playing. If you find that you usually wind up face-to-face with your enemies, the machinegun will make short work of anyone who gets in your way; if you consider it likely that you may have to engage enemies at long range, the scope of the OICW may make it a better choice. If you do find yourself consistently taking down targets with your scoped OICW, you may just want to become a sniper instead.

As an assault team grunt, you’re going to want to be on the front lines, clearing out enemy positions and capturing the flag. On the defense team, you’ll either need to be manning turrets and other defensive positions, or camping the flag to prevent the assault team from controlling it long enough to convert it.

Support
The support class is the engineer of assault mode. Support players are primarily tasked with building structures for their team to use, or destroying the structures of the other team.

The Support class’s ability to construct and repair walls is critical to any defensive effort.

The first weapon slot for support soldiers is always a pistol, but your second slot can be configured for either an M4 assault rifle or for droppable health packs. The health packs aren’t full refills, as they would be in the single-player game; instead, they refill around one-third of a health bar. Since you can fit three at a time into your inventory, you can essentially pack two lives into one, if you can avoid death long enough to drop them and pick them up again. Of course, they can also be given to wounded teammates. The third inventory slot will always be explosives; you can drop these near an enemy structure to detonate it, but some enemy fortifications may take more than one explosive to destroy. Explosives can also be used as a last-gasp offensive weapon, although getting an opponent to wait around for ten seconds can be a trick. Your fourth slot contains a wrench, which can be used next to the small structure boxes that surround each flag to construct one of a few different types of structures, depending on the box’s label. Everything from minigun emplacements to towers and pillboxes can be built, but the bigger the object, the longer it’ll take to construct. Support troops get smoke grenades from ammo boxes.

On the assault team, support soldiers are primarily tasked with joining the grunts in their forward movement and destroying enemy structures, especially gates and walls that block access to a flag. As such, you’ll likely want to take an M4 along with you, instead of the health packs, although either choice is valid. On the defending team, your goal is simple: build every structure you possibly can. You get points for structures built, so keep building until you can’t find any more construction boxes.

Sniper
As you might expect, the sniper class is able to sit well behind the lines, picking off enemy soldiers from extremely long distance. Although this is probably the least flexible class, having only three weapons, and the ability to choose which weapon they wish to possess in only one of those slots, some players may still find it an exciting alternative to the more dangerous, front-line classes.

Every sniper packs a machete and a pistol, but the third weapon slot can be switched between the sniper rifle and the rocket launcher, which may seem incongruous, but can give you a way to adjust to the changing battlefield conditions as the round wears on. If you initially decide to snipe from a tower in your base, but eventually get killed as the enemies assault your position, you can flip over to a rocket launcher and take down any infantry or vehicles as they come through your fortifications. The sniper rifle is almost useless in close-range fighting, and while the rocket launcher is precise at any distance, the time required for your missiles to travel to their target will generally be long enough to ensure that your target is no longer there when it hits. So, you’ll have to gauge whether your team needs massive splatterage or pinpoint precision when selecting your loadout. Sniper loadouts include smoke grenades, but you’ll have to pick up an ammo pack before these are accessible.

For assault, a sniper rifle can be quite useful to take out enemy defenders, if you can find a spot overlooking or with a good sightline to a flag. Many bases, especially the third, will become heavily fortified in short order, which will result in the opposing team having a lot of people manning miniguns and towers, thus supplying you with a good number of targets that won’t be moving much. (As is ever the case, though, if you snipe too often from the same spot, you can expect someone on the other team to spawn with a sniper rifle of their own to take you down.) Defenders can make equal use of either weapon; the sniper rifle can be used to pick off infantry who didn’t manage to catch a ride to your base, or the rocket launcher can transform you into a one-man wrecking crew, easily defending a choke point entry into a base by your lonesome. If you do choose a launcher, keep an ear open for the sound of vehicles; you’ll be far more able to destroy buggies and the like than your teammates.