Far Cry definitely took some of the wind out of HL2's sail though. Many of the special features in HL2 were present in Far Cry, things like pretty water, physics, clever AI, story-driven game. Arguablly Far Cry did many things better, it wasn't linear like HL2, you could do things in many different ways, and I don't mean 'do I use this gun, or that gun?', I mean you could jump off the island, go round a bit, then come up behind the enemy. You could lay traps, you could take a completely different route. I've played Far Cry many times, and I'm still finding different ways of tackling the same problems. The checkpoints are critical to this, in that they are usually around a point where you have a few choices as to how to tackle the enemy. Sometimes there is a 'wrong' path, and if you quicksave down that path, you're going to do a lot of quicksaving and quickloading.
Take the aircraft carrier at the beginning. Once you've found the documents there are around 3 ways of handling the upcoming battle (including helicopter). There is the direct route, there is the semi-direct route, and then there's the clever route. The clever route will have you not firing a single bullet from your gun (although you will still shoot something, with ease), and then sailing off into the sunset with out having shot anyone on the flight deck.
Pity the last couple of levels have the difficulty cranked up too high that most people give up, and I don't blame them one bit.
HL2 is great, better than Far Cry. But that doesn't make Far Cry any less of a quality game that is underrated to the extreme. HL1 is better than HL2, HL2 is still great
I remember being scared half to death when playing the HL1 demo 'uplink' (what happened to demos that don't rip chunks out of the main game? So sad). But thats the only game (demo
) thats actually scared me. Since then I've played Doom3 in the dark, HL2, etc. and nothings been that scary. Actually, no, there was one. AvP2, playing as the marine, scary once again
