[Necromancer]

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

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.

Big Truck

Speaking of trucks, the big truck is seen in only a few spots in the entire game. Given its relative level of inutility, you probably won’t want to get inside of it even when it does pop up. Although its wide body makes it ideal for running down foes, it takes forever to get a head of steam with this truck, and it has no armament at all. To its credit, it can take a significant amount of damage before being destroyed, but as you’re still able to take damage yourself while driving it, it won’t help you overmuch to be in a car that can survive damage that you yourself cannot.

Forklift

The forklift pretty much tops the list of vehicles to avoid. It’s slow, has no weaponry (although you can somehow use your handheld weapons while driving it), has very little maneuverability, and is completely open to gunfire from nearby enemies. You wouldn’t want to be caught dead inside one of these, since being dead is exactly what will result from a trip past any hostiles.

Hang Glider

Although the appearance of the hang glider in the first Far Cry preview movies gave the promos a bit of a wow factor, in truth, you won’t be using a glider to replace your ground vehicles very often. In every instance where a hang glider appears in the game, you’ll have to option to take a ground path, either on foot or in a truck, and in almost every case, you should beat your feet rather than flying off into the sunset. Although it would seem like the glider would carry you over threats on the ground, you’ll still be easily spotted by mercs in the area, and since you’re barely capable of moving the glider itself, let alone your body, you’ll be easy pickings for anyone with an assault rifle. You can still fire weapons while suspended in mid-air, but the speed of your flight will send your accuracy plummeting.

If you do intend to soar with the eagles, it’s useful to know the basic controls. Pressing forward will tilt your glider downwards, thus giving you a boost of speed, but at the cost of altitude; pressing backwards will slow you down a bit, but won’t actually regain lost altitude. (Glider trips are generally a one-way ticket to the ground, albeit a slow one.) Your left and right strafe keys will turn your glider to the left or right; this is useful for circling down to the ground when you’ve reached where you want to be, but are too high up to safely disengage. Keep in mind that if you have to bail out when taking fire, you can safely do this from any altitude, so long as you’re over deep water. Landing ten feet out from the waterline on a beach will send your femurs through your brain, as will landing on any solid surface, but if you can spot where the water suddenly drops off, feel free to hit your Use key and fall into the drink.

Helicopter Gunship

Given Kreiger’s apparently unmatched prowess at securing venture capital, it shouldn’t surprise you that he’s outfitted his army of mercs with dozens of combat-ready helicopters, such as the helicopter gunship that you’ll be seeing a dozen of or so throughout the game. The gunship is primarily intended to gun you down from the air, with a side-mounted minigun; to convince the pilot that you’re not to be trifled with, you can either shoot out the merc at the minigunner position, after which the helicopter will disengage, or hit the copter itself with a rocket, which will destroy it. It can also drop a limited number of troops off into a combat zone, although it doesn’t do this as often as does its big brother, the cargo chopper. Unfortunately for you, Jack won’t run across a flyable helicopter in his travels, so this is strictly something to be destroyed.

Cargo Chopper

Achieving mobility on a system of islands like the one in Far Cry is apparently a tough task, and although the mercs apparently have a nigh-endless series of boats at their disposal, the most pressing situations will force them to bring out the cargo chopper. This airborne beast doesn’t carry any weaponry; instead, it acts as a troop transport, allowing small strike teams of mercs to insert wherever they’re needed, which generally seems to coincide with wherever Jack is at any given time. Like the gunship, most instances of the Cargo Chopper can be taken down with a rocket; if you manage to hit it before it drops its mercs off, then you’ll have killed four or five birds with one stone, in most instances.