far cry instincts

after a cursory 15 minutes of single-player which seemed… good enough, but not very interesting, Kal and i jumped into the mapmaker.

what an awesome mapmaker this is.

being outdoors, i knew it would work similar to Pariah’s, but the differences end there. while Pariah’s mapmaker is well, shithouse, Instincts has all the usability you’d expect from a good mapmaker… and a whole lot more.

many of the elements such as vehicles i’m sure come curtesy of the original single-player campaign, but they have so much awesome potential for the mapmaker.
HANG-GLIDERS!
THERE ARE HANG-GLIDERS! you can make a wonderfully detailed map and then FLY AROUND IN IT! it’s so AWESOME!
i’m letting my excitement get carried away and need to focus if this is to make any semblance of sense…

one raises and lowers the land as per the Pariah, you can change the size of the area you will effect, ranging from really freakin huge to probably about the size of a single player’s overall footprint, by that i mean their character model, not their actual feet. sure you can end up with some jaggies by varrying the size of your circle, but there is a handy smooth tool you can use to make the terrain look as natural as possible.

what excites me about the mapmaker, is the ‘brush’ sets as they’re officially called, or really the tilesets. they are amazing. i think some people might find the tilesets a little sparse in respects to variety, but the mapmaker simply allows you to place so many of them – up to 500 trees! my god! 500!!! sure if you put them all within sight of each-other, it probably will chug like well, Pariah does… with any kind of geometry on screen… but the great thing is once you jump into your map to test it, there’s a performance meter up in the top right corner that tells you how your xbox is doing and how many objects are visible! amazing! what an awesome tool!

some of the tiles are just fantastic though. huts, open huts, jetis/piers, bambo fences, towers, walkways, rocks and some basic buildings as the main focus is outdoors, not to mention all the smaller objects like office chairs (?!?), crates and computer consoles, it just has so much potential. you can raise and lower them into the terrain, and you can even shape the terrain under-water!

i know right now that half of the maps i make won’t actually be for deathmatching – they’ll be just to look at and be in and fly around in! with the huts and piers, i’ve got heaps of ideas for building fantastic tropical resorts, gliders, jet-skis and all!

all of this i would love regardless of the controls and weapons, but i’ve got to say after playing Pariah… for any amount of time… Far Cry works brilliantly – with the sensitivity ramped up to 10 the controls are very responsive and satisfactory for me. as for weapons, some are better than others – i’m not a automatic weapon kind of person as i hate ‘spray and pray’ play… which all rhymes XD… but some of the weapons really kick. the tactical sniper rifle, you’ll have to forgive me for not being familiar with the official names just yet, kicks like hell when you let a shell fly, and the sound is like a
thunderclap, reverberations and all. other good notables were the assult rifle with the underslung grenade launcher – i love the sound of the grenades popping out – also with a satisfactory kick. the rockets from the rocket launcher leave hell-obvious trails, and grenade and projectile explosions look and sound great.

sure you can tell it’s been scaled down graphically, even not taking into account the PC version, but it works really well, and it just looks brilliant.

i just can’t wait to get mapmaking… it’s reeeeeally going to eat into my time…
this is going to be waaaay too much fun. while the Timesplitters mapmakers have always been great, and of-course more versatile for indoors,