The thing is, for me it was kind of the same with Far Cry, first third of the game is really good battling mercs for the most part then the Trigens show up and the standard dropped a bit for me, although it picks up again in places like a level where you handglide around over a bit battle taking places between Trigens and mercs.
I've played FC1-3 and Blood Dragon, not got to the newer ones yet. Personally I'd say:
- Far Cry is an excellent game with incredible visuals for the time (remember this came out before Doom3 and HL2). Relatively open ended approach to the outdoors missions, kind of like a baby Crysis (to be honest, I suspect Crysis Remastered is a better game that would make more sense to play than FC). It is quite unforgiving in places due to the oldschool healthpack mechanics, it lacks some of the quality of life improvements you tend to find in modern games. It's probably one of those 'you had to be there' things, there wasn't much hype about it and then I tried the demo and was blown away but the incredible graphics, it was a bit ahead of it's time with different rendering modes, HDR, they also added 64bit support.
- FC2 you can skip, has some silly mechanics like respawning enemies and weapons that degrade very quickly, plus a couple of game-breaking bugs (search Far Cry 2 88% bug, I had that one).
- FC3 is good, introduces more of the RPG-lite mechanics like crafting which is tedious at first but has a decent if somewhat crazy storyline, some good set pieces. Maybe a good starting point.
- FC Blood Dragon I thought was terrible. I like arcade shooters, Serious Sam and stuff like that, but I find this really boring.
