Level 20: Volcano
Find Krieger in his facility
If by some chance you weren’t completely restocked by the garage supplies outside the facility, there’s another room off to the left of the start point here with yet more ammo. Grab everything, making sure that your rocket has a full 14 rounds in it, before heading through the nearby door.
The gauntlet here consists of at least nine loaded-out mercs, all of whom possess full body armor, and many of whom are packing riot shields. Now, if you somehow managed to get here without a rocket launcher, well, you should probably quit to the menu and load a saved game from the last level and find one, because you’ll have an incredibly difficult time killing off all of these suckers without one. With a rocket launcher, though, it’s a fairly simple process of hiding behind the second set of pillars from the door, strafing out, firing a rocket at the nearest target, and hiding again, reloading periodically. One of the mercs is packing a rocket launcher of his very own, so follow the smoke trails back to the source and peg him before you take too much damage. For the mercs at the far end of the hall, you’ll have a better shot of actually hitting the ground near them if you fire at the apex of a jump, so strafe, jump, fire, land, hide. You’ll know everyone’s dead when your stealth meter empties out; if it’s at all full, there’s still a bastard hiding somewhere. Grabbing all of the armor here should be enough to get you up to 90 percent of maximum; don’t miss the health kit by the door leading out. Be sure to equip your rocket launcher before moving on, and make sure it has all four barrels full of rockets.
Speaking of bastards.... Krieger’s in the next room, having mutated severely since you saw him last, into some kind of Super Locust. Valerie’s not looking so good, either, but she’s of less concern to you than the four mercs that are packed into this room, along with the big boss man himself. There’s a trick to beating him: be very, very lucky.
Seriously, though: this fight is tough. Not only can any one of the mercs kill you with a couple seconds’ worth of sustained fire, but Krieger himself is packing grenades in addition to his OICW. If you hear a clinking sound on the ground, run like hell! Add in the fact that you die instantly if Valerie takes fatal damage, and you’ve either got a recipe for fun, or a recipe for reloading a billion times. Or both, if you’re really masochistic. If you’ve been looking for a challenge, this is it.
The devs throw you a bone by letting you drop in behind a desk after the cutscene ends. Your ability to kill off the mercs in the room will generally decide your fate within a few seconds. These guys can take a crapload of damage, including an OICW grenade in the body, so your rockets should be used to dispatch them before they can hide. Of course, rockets don’t reload quickly enough to snap off four rounds in a row, so you’ll have to be cagy about firing, ducking behind the desk, then popping back up and firing again. You have the best shot of getting all four of them by proceeding from left to right, but you’ll still need a lot of luck.
To begin with, flip on your night vision to make instant targeting easier. Aim at the wall behind the merc on the left; if you aim directly for him, Val might take splash damage from the blast. This will alert the mercenaries, so act quickly. Duck down for a second until your next round is accessible, then pop back up and aim at the ground to the right of the pillar in the middle of the room; with any luck, the splash will kill off the two mercs in the middle of the room. The merc on the right is probably out of sight by now, and this is where the luck comes in: you’re going to have to aim blindly at the steps on that side of the room in the hope that the splash damage does him in. (To be perfectly clear: we’re not speaking of the stairs leading up to the catwalk, but rather the small set of steps that runs the length of the room.) If you actually managed to kill off all of the mercs with these blasts, you’ll be in a fairly good position to deal with Krieger; if one of them managed to survive, you’ll probably be dead within seconds. The mercs don’t make any noise when they move, instead preferring to creep around silently, making it very difficult to tell where they are before they open fire. And if they’re able to shoot at you, they’ll likely kill you before you can locate them.
If by some twist of fate you actually manage to kill off the mercs without taking severe damage yourself, the fight will be simplified into a Jack vs. Krieger matchup, and this is one fight where there’s no TKO rule. As mentioned, Krieger is now a Locust, and can jump from the floor to the catwalk with ease. Your best bet here is to get him into what Diablo players refer to as "stunlock," which is where your bullets hit him with such rapidity that he’s unable to make any counter action. The best weapon for this purpose is the P90; if you’re lucky enough to still be carrying it, use your OICW HE rounds on Krieger at long range, and when he closes, switch over to your SMG and start blasting away at his head, ducking for cover behind one of the pillars just before you run out of ammo. If you don’t have the P90, the OICW’s bullets should also do the trick.
This is the hardest fight in the game, so don’t be discouraged if it takes you a couple dozen tries before you succeed. Well, you can get a little discouraged if you wish, but not enough to make you quit; Far Cry’s an excellent game, and you deserve to see the ending, insanely difficult boss fight or no.
Of course, said ending won’t be occuring right away. If you didn’t pick up on the connection between your "antidote" and the sudden outbreak of greenskinitis, and somehow managed to overlook Doyle’s sinister tone in his communications from the last level, he’ll appear on the hologram now to make it perfectly clear that you have one more person to kill.
When you regain control of Jack, hit the elevator switch and locate the armory. Schwarzenegger’s character in Commando probably didn’t expend as much ammo as is located inside this room; there’d be enough to load out two players, if there were a co-op mode in this game. There are also a few weapons to be found, so make sure that your loadout includes a machinegun, a sniper rifle, and a rocket launcher, with the fourth weapon being your choice. An OICW works well, but the other three are the critical ones. When you’re locked, stocked, and ready to rock, equip your sniper rifle and head down and out the doors leading outside.
When you cycle the lock for the second door, immediately hit the ground prone next to the keypad and use your sniper rifle to bust a cap into the Locust on the far left side of the caldera. In total, there are four Locusts and four Fat Boys in the cap of the volcano. You can’t really run out from the doorway, due to the Locusts; these guys are sharpshooters with their AG36’s and will whittle your health down before you manage to get anywhere near them. You’ll need to take them out with your sniper rifle from a distance, but your first shot will have alerted the Fat Boys, who will have to be your first priority.
Although the sound of the Fat Boy footsteps may be ominous, you should stick right where you are by the keypad as they approach. Shift into a crouching mode and arm yourself with the machine gun. As the Fat Boys arrive, start blasting away at their heads with the MG; if you’re lucky, you’ll get them into stunlock and they won’t whittle your health down too far. Keep track of how many you’ve killed, but keep in mind that your machinegun only has enough ammo to kill two at most before it needs to be reloaded. If they come in a dense enough group, you’ll probably have to restart from your save point.
After the last Fat Boy bites the dust, you’ll be able to turn your attention back to the Locusts. There are likely two on the right side of the caldera, so activate your heat vision and pick them off before they can take you out. The final Locust will be further back in the base of the caldera, and may be difficult to spot, so proceed cautiously lest you get taken down by an unseen enemy.
When you’ve managed to eliminate all eight of your original enemies, two more Fat Boys will pop out from a chamber at the bottom of the caldera, so get busy killin’. Even if you’re low on health, you should be relatively safe taking them on at close range, so long as you don’t let them get the high ground on you. Try to stay close to one of the boulders so that you have something to duck behind if need be, and hold off on using your rockets if possible; you’ll need them soon enough. The elevator activation panel is in the chamber from which they emerged, so hit it and take the lift up to the top of the stabilizer, and to the last save point in the game.
You have one last major fight to get past before you can reach Doyle, against another group of eight or nine fully-armored mercs. Your approach to this fight is going to be dictated by your levels of health and armor. Considering the fact that you just got done taking down six Fat Boys at near-point-blank range, you’re probably not feeling too healthy at the moment, but take heart; it is possible to beat these guys without taking a hit, although you’ll likely have to try a few times to get it right.
The first thing to be aware of is that the mercs don’t actually exist when you reach the top of the stabilizer; they only get spawned into the level when you approach their position. Since you can’t actually see them in either case, this is something of an academic distinction, but you’ll still want to get them to spawn in before you start unleashing your rockets on them. So, walk up the ramp until you hear some radio squawks, then back off back towards the pillar that overlooks the entrance to the ramp. From here, whip out your rocket launcher and start pelting the pillars near the staircase with rockets. Aim over the not-propane tanks (whatever they are, they don’t explode) so that your rockets hit anything on the far side; all of the mercs are in this area, and the splash damage will start thinning their ranks severely. A few of these guys possess rocket launchers of their own, however, so you’ll probably have to sprint out of harm’s way once or twice. If you don’t have enough room to move side to side, charge up the ramp to avoid the splash.
This whole business may require one or two tries before you actually survive. Regardless of your health, though, just keep chucking rockets at the walls around the mercs until you either run out, or your stealth meter bottoms out. Either way, you’ll have to move up and grab the armor that the mercs have left behind. There aren’t any health boxes around, but that won’t matter, because although Doyle is your final enemy, he’s just a regular lab tech, easily taken out with a shot to the head, or, if you’re a real coward, with a few grenades banked into his room from outside the door.
So, you’ve just beaten Far Cry, one of the best (and longest!) first-person games in years. Congrats! If the final cutscene is any indication, you can expect to see a Far Cry 2 at some point in the future.