Jack Carver is an asshole. There, I said it. Sure, he may have a right to drop the F-Bomb every sentence; after all, some sexy lady dragged him along to a mysterious archipelago called Jacutan for personal gain, and then his boat (which is his source of income) gets blown up, he's hunted down and almost killed and then injected with some crazy serum that unlocks the animal instincts innate within us all! But, he had ties to the Mafia whilst in the Navy and supplied illegal firearms in New York like they were going out of fashion (which of course, they never will), so he's still a jerk.

As Jack Carver you pick up right after aforementioned boat is destroyed and aforementioned character is shot, followed by him swearing a lot. On your journey to survive you grab a headset and stay in contact with a man named Doyle, who seems to know the sexy lady. The plot thickens as Carver is injected with the serum and rushes to meet up with Doyle, who plans to surgically remove the implant that not only holds the newfound animal instincts back, but also allows safety weapons to be used against Jack. Most of the game revolves around that, until you accomplish this at which point your objective switches to taking out a mad scientist who has, shock, injected himself with way too much of this serum.

This version of the game also includes a second, and considerably shorter, story mode called Evolution, which focuses on a completely unrelated plot (though Jack still retains the feral abilities he obtained in the first game). The entire game is told through Jack's eyes; even the cinematic sequences are all done in a first person perspective, Half-Life style, which is actually really cool for the most part, though I wish the gameplay itself played as exciting as these sequences look.

Unlike the PC version of Far Cry, Far Cry Instincts: Predator's level design is very linear (with the exception of the beginning of the Evolution story), which explains why so many things were added. The Feral abilities you obtain allow you to leap great heights, run extremely fast, shred enemies with one quick slice of your hand, pick up scents, see in the dark and, in the second story, climb steep trees and rocks. Traps have also been included that allow you to wrap a branch around a tree that swings out and hits an unsuspecting enemy, or you can simply plant a claymore mine on the ground and toss a rock to alert an enemy who you'd like to idiotically walk into your mine, which includes a handy red flashing light that everyone can pretend not to see.

And here lies the downfall of Instincts; also unlike the PC version, the artificial intelligence is completely and absolutely dumb. To make matters worse, enemies do not react at all to being shot. I don't mean that they ignore you when you shoot them - I mean that if you shoot them in the arm, leg, neck, torso - anyway really -they don't react at all and keep shooting or doing whatever animation they were doing before you put a bullet in them. I lost count of how many times I was able to walk behind an enemy and stealth kill him right next to another guard, who didn't even bat an eye and just stood there in awe at the beautiful 2D jungle.

The game simply does not look as good as it could, considering the hardware. If you compare Perfect Dark Zero to this game, well there's no comparison, with the exception of the water effects (although water does not come into play nearly as much as you might think.) The water looks superb, I give it that, especially when you come out of it and the environment is blurry for a split second until your eyes adjust. But for the most part the rest of the game does not look as stellar. The jungle has incredibly ugly 2D borders and if you go into any grassy field and look down you will see that you're not in a grass field, but a field of individual cardboard cutouts that appear to resemble a field of grass when looking straight ahead.

I give it credit though; the game may be ugly overall, but it moves seamlessly between large indoor areas to outdoor areas and the levels tend to be absolutely huge, with no pause between areas within each one. The level named Cliffs, for example, starts in a mineshaft, moves to a huge cliff over a river below (which you can jump all the way down into and continue playing), as well as several other cliffs that you can travel to via bridge or hang-glider. This is perhaps the standout moment for the game, as it even features strange creatures flying all about and is very visually stunning. Now just imagine if they had upgraded the game engine to the 360 fully. It'd look amazing!

That's enough of the graphics though. The gameplay itself, once you get by the horrible AI, is actually quite enjoyable, even with the clunky weapon select controls (which require you to stop moving to swap out weapons.) There's a good assortment of pistols, assault rifles, a shotgun, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, and a bonus treat: turrets that you can rip out of their base and take with you! ATVs, jeeps, hovercrafts and boats can also be driven through the jungles and rivers, and the first person view whilst riding them is really enjoyable... especially when you wreck. Why Carver can't turn an ATV on its side back upright and keep going is a mystery, though, especially with all that super strength flowing through his adrenaline pumped veins.

With two single player campaigns in one game, you can imagine it will take a little while to go through them both, and there's plenty of variety to keep it fresh. The first game alone moves from lush jungles and dense rainforests all the way to canyons, mines and even a volcano. The second campaign sticks mostly to the jungle, which is great, but also has some excellent canyon levels that really challenge you to do a lot of FPS platform jumping, which can be quite a bit of fun and gives a much needed change of focus to a very long campaign. The other extra thing thrown in that's not included in the PC version is an extended multiplayer mode over Xbox Live, with an all-new map editor. Dexter Pearson explored this editor and the online multiplayer modes in depth while I slaved away at the single player...

While Chris is swimming through the murky pond that is the single player, I, Dexter, the king of map editors, the man who lives for multiplayer games, am checking out the chocolate pudding of Far Cry - the social side. Chris is right. The single player is similar to the Xbox version and the only difference is you're getting both Xbox versions on one disc. How generous. However, having purchased an Xbox 360, like lots of other people out there, you can expect the multiplayer modes to be bursting with more people to kill than the Xbox versions.

Far Cry has a few multiplayer modes that are worth mentioning. You've got your traditional deathmatch modes, both free for all and team play, and then you've got Steal the Sample, which is just like capture the flag. What's unique here is the Predator mode, which is akin to the Juggernaut mode that you occasionally find in shooting games. Somebody becomes the Predator, who runs faster, attacks with his fists and can kill you in one hit if you're not careful, plus he scores points for killing people and you're his snack in the scale of things. The idea is that you kill the Predator and then you become this unstoppable cannibal yourself, jumping high, ripping foes to shreds and scoring points like there's no tomorrow!

Up to sixteen players can participate online, providing you're playing on a dedicated server. If you prefer to host and have control over map selection amongst other things, then people with a connection speed like mine, which is 2MB, can expect to host up to eight players without many problems. To be honest, I prefer the matches with eight players to ones with sixteen - if there are only eight players to kill then you're more likely to form unholy vendettas against certain players. Nope? Just me then! You're going down, Farcrymaster69!

Far Cry has lots of maps to suit every occasion, from large ones with plenty of vehicles and loads of vantage points, to close quarter islands that only support a smaller number of players but are a lot of fun nevertheless. If you feel cheated though, there is a map editor included in this game. Regular readers may already know that I have a thing for map editors, FPS games in particular. TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, another joint review of ours, was a game and a half, thanks to all the fun I had simply making maps until midnight. Sure, you can laugh at me, call me a geek if you will, but there is something to be said for crafting a map that you, your friends and a bunch of strangers can play and have a lot of fun on. So, let me tell you how this works.

It's a long process to make a map of sheer quality. First of all, you have to select from certain item pallets, which include dozens of themed items; choosing a military themed pallet gives you access to items like abandoned tanks and buildings, bomb shelters, bunkers, all related to that pallet. I found myself picking the jungle themed ones, with huts as opposed to bunkers and fences as opposed to barbed wire, but the pallets are there for you to play around with. My only regret is that you can't mix them. Standard items, like trees, vehicles and pick-ups, appear on every pallet, so there's no need to fret over not being able to pick the jeeps if you don't choose a jungle theme! After selecting a pallet, you pick a setting that determines the colour of the sky and the clearness of the water, amongst other things. A tropical setting gives you a clear sky and clear sea to match, whereas a swampy jungle gives you a sun scorched sky and murky water for maximum aqua hiding possibilities!

Once you've got the difficult decisions out of the way, crafting a map couldn't be more time consuming! Alright, you can throw together a crapper in a matter of minutes, but me, well, I'm a perfectionist. So I start my raising the land (as what you see to start with is just miles and miles of water) in the shape of an island. Once you've drawn the outline by raising the land, you can just fill the middle by selecting things like large land brushes. You now have a pretty level island surrounded by sea. Things to consider - do you want the entire map open? Do you want players to be able to hide underwater, miles away? If not, and it's advisable not to if you're supporting modes like Steal The Sample, where a player could steal and hide for the duration of the game, then you need to build big steep hills around your desired area of play. You don't have to hill in your land in a perfect circle - you might decide to build a harbor like I did, with land and quite a large sea area in front, with a beach. I made sure that the left and the right of the harbor was hilled in, so people couldn't swim around the island and hide for the entire match.

That didn't stop me from digging a few secret passages into these high hills though, as doing things like this can really encourage map exploration from the player, so the strangers that join your game will only compliment the secrets that hide within your domain. Anyway, now you've got yourself an island, hilled in, you have what I like to call a canvas. It's simple now, all you have to do is fill it with objects, and you're set, right? Wrong! If you want to do this properly, I wouldn't suggest having an entirely flat arena that's hilled in. You have to go around your island and build mini hills, and then flatten them out with the highly customable land raiser tool. You can create steps (to an extent) and make your hill just raised enough to climb. Having a hilly map creates places to hide; it also gives your map a bit of dimension, too. My suggestion is to have four or five cool parts to your map; for example, one of my maps had a hill that you could climb really high and at the top lie in wait as a sniper. On this hill you overlooked everything, so being on that hill would give you an advantage. However, hills being hills, there were quite a few ways to get up there. So if you're the bastard on the hill with the sniper rifle, expect somebody to climb up there and stab you in the back with a knife! Things like these, the neat parts, just give players another reason to keep playing.

Once you have your neat parts in mind, it's only a matter of building them, using your pallet items, your standard items and your hilling tools. With a large item from the pallet, a temple with a hole in the top, I was able to make a very large hill and place the temple on top of it. This hill was hollow (which took some crafting), so when players go down the hole in the temple, they drop right down the hollow mountain of doom and die. A trap. A homemade trap. It was fun to have knife fights around this hollow mountain - one of us would fall in, guaranteed! It's not all about hills though - the items in your pallet can really be used to your imagination's limit. You can rotate every item (and when I say item, I mean big things, like sniper towers, bunkers, houses and rocks), and you can raise or even bury items, so you could have an abandoned tank half caked in sand on the beach, or you could raise one of the fence posts, to allow players to sneak under.

So what used to be a flat island is now a hilly land, covered in scenery, platforms that you have lowered and raised to allow players to jump to and from them, ladders that lead to bridges, piers that lead to crates, and you should have some cool spots too, spots that are name-worthy, like the Sniper Hill or the Temple of Doom - spots that make your map better than average Joe's. All you have to do now is fill your map with pick-ups, like Predator power-ups (only place one), body armour, health packs, weapons that you can hide in those crates, grenades that you can place in the Temple of Doom. That, my friend, is the easy part. Hiding the items.

The map editor in this game is awesome, absolutely awesome. It has so many customisable options. It doesn't have it all, but for most people, the features on offer are more than enough to deal with and those who have a lust for building maps, who feel like they've run out of cool things to place, can always improvise and make things like homemade traps (the only traps available in this game are the ones that the player can lay, such as proximity mines and tree-traps), so I set out on building and intensively testing that Temple of Doom. Be sure to test your map every step of the way, which couldn't be easier really; you can jump in and out of the editor with the push of a button. The only thing that annoys me is that there isn't a way to publish your map for other people to download when you're not online. The only way to distribute your map is to play the level, while you're the host and anybody wanting to join has to download the map. It's a slow distribution method, so not many people will be able to admire your creation - TimeSplitters had a publishing option, which is without doubt the way to go, especially in this new age of Xbox Live Marketplace where you can download so many different things.

Still, there's nothing quite like playing in your own spider's web. It's great that Far Cry offers such an option. FC Predator might not have the single player that Chris is after, but it certainly has a multiplayer to rival PDZ on the Xbox 360 - loads of jungle shooting action with mapmaking at its finest. Of course, an online co-op would have been really cool, but then playing team matches, driving vehicles together, one controlling the boat, the other controlling the gun and other friends lying down on the deck with the sniper rifles, going against another team of jungle elites online is good enough anyway. Before Chris wraps up this review, I'd like to say that you shouldn't let our overall score put you off, because if you're after a multiplayer experience like no other (until Halo 3 comes along at least - I only hope Halo 3 has a map editor) then pick up Far Cry. The online community seems to have thinned out a little since the game was first released, but there are still a good few people online who are willing to play some good rounds. It's not far away from being an excellent online experience, so good in fact that it makes me want to cry. Erm. Not my best word play there. Over to you, Chris!

There you have it. An expert opinion from an expert mapmaker! He's right about the online players thinning out a bit; long after Dex had finished testing the mapmaker and online portions, I went back to have a blast and couldn't find a single room available in any mode but deathmatch, all on really bad custom maps!

One area of multiplayer that hasn't been covered is the achievements, which a lot of gamers will look to buy the game for. DON'T DO IT. After completing both single player campaigns on the Hunter difficulty (which is normal), getting achievements for so many headshots, feral attacks, stealth kills and trap kills, as well as tediously collecting every single hidden vial in the game (five for each level) you a have a mere 295 points. Where are the rest? Well, beating the game on every difficulty gets you some, plus an extra achievement for doing just that (in all you play both campaigns three times each and get a pathetic 50 points for that achievement.) If you're looking to invest a lot of time in single player, don't expect a big payoff. You'd have to invest even longer to get most of the online achievements, which includes one for playing a total of 80 hours of multiplayer! I don't mind hard achievements, or ones that take awhile to earn like that, but when you invest a lot of time into one single aspect, such as playing the single player over and over, I expect the payoff to be a bit more. Why do I get more points for getting 100 headshots (this was obtained after playing the first level twice and not trying to get it) than I do for completing the game?

The short version of the story is this: you're buying a bundle of two Xbox games, both of which play exactly the same but with a different story and new levels. Not a bad deal, but I did say Xbox games... NOT Xbox 360 games. Spend your money wisely here - the single player modes are probably worth a rental, but the online modes really do add a lot of fun if you have a Gold account and you can actually find people to play with. I had some trouble with this, myself. The bundle is a far cry from a true 360 experience and I anxiously await the Far Cry built from the ground up for the system. Far Cry Instincts: Predator certainly is not it, and when compared to the other shooters available on the 360, it sinks faster than Jack Carver's boat.

Reviewed by Christopher Martin & Dexter Pearson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).