Vehicles

Vehicles are primarily intended to get you from one place to another very quickly; with the levels in Far Cry being as massive as they are, you’ll often want to find some mode of transportation that’s a little more speedy than your feet. Many of the vehicles have on-board weaponry, which can be aimed independently of the direction of your vehicle, and fired even while you’re driving. Be this as it may, on the hardest difficulties, you won’t want to use a vehicle to engage enemies at anything but very long range: because you can’t physically move your body while inside a vehicle, you don’t have the same kind of precision of movement that you do when you’re on foot, making it obviously rather difficult to duck and cover when you come under fire.

If you do find yourself forced to drive a vehicle near a group of enemies, take advantage of the situation and try to run them down. Mercs and mutants alike are united in their displeasure at getting run over; this will kill most mercs on contact, while the bigger mutants, like Fat Boys, will usually survive, but will still take a lot of damage.

Inflatable Boat

Inflatable boats are pretty much your standard, utilitarian mode of transportation; they’ll get you from point A to point B, and won’t do much else. There’s no onboard firepower, although you will be able to use a weapon while you’re piloting. Ditch these as soon as you can find a place to land and head to your objective on foot; getting somewhere fast isn’t of much use if you get killed as soon as you arrive.

Patrol Boat

Since water stretches over such great distances in the game, you’ll occasionally be able to use a patrol boat to blast at enemies that are too far away to return fire, with either the mounted minigun or the on-board rocket launcher. If you do get close to a group of enemies, don’t stand still long enough to be shot to pieces; you should always be moving at top speed when you take enemy fire. Your accuracy will suffer, of course, but you won’t be as likely to get shot.

Note that you can disengage from the patrol boat (by pressing your Use key) and fire your handheld weapons from it, if you wish. The bobbing of the craft in the water makes sniping from it, with any weapon, almost impossible, however, but you can use your binoculars to get an eye on where distant enemies are before blasting them with rockets.

Buggy

The buggy is the first land vehicle you’ll run across in Far Cry, and a fairly dependable vehicle it is. Although you’re quite exposed to fire while driving, due to the open-chassis design, the Buggy is speedy enough to zoom by (or over) groups of mercs before they really get a bead on you. You can use your mounted minigun as a drive-by weapon in these instances; since it can tilt down further on this vehicle than on most others, you’ll be able to take down nearby enemies with relative ease.

4WD

The dual rocket launcher/minigun weapon rack atop a 4WD makes it an incredibly potent offensive tool.

Many of the mercs on the islands use converted Hummers as their transportation of choice, and considering the piles of bodies you’ll be leaving behind in your travels, you’re naturally going to run across a few of these vehicles, hopefully in a relatively undamaged state. Although not as maneuverable or as speedy as the Buggy, the 4WD is a bit tougher, and provides you with much greater protection from armed assault. The inclusion of a rocket launcher is a big plus; its pinpoint accuracy will let you kill off mercs from insane distances, so long as you can actually spot them. As with the patrol boat, it helps quite a bit to periodically get out of the car, use your binoculars to scout the road ahead, and use your findings to blast off a few rockets. You only have thirty rounds at your disposal, but in most cases, this will be sufficient to outlast the working lifetime of the truck.