The game kicks off with a brief sequence that introduces Jack Carver, a former soldier who now spends his days carting tourists around a tropical paradise in his boat. Naturally, things go horribly awry, and within minutes Jack's boat is destroyed, his latest passenger is missing, and he's being ruthlessly hunted by mercenaries. While the first few levels of the game feature some fairly standard first-person shooter action, everything changes once you meet the disturbed doctor who's been performing a variety of experiments on his men. Far Cry Instincts adds some fun new elements to the tried-and-true FPS formula, helping to set it apart from its competition.
One of the coolest elements in the game (aside from the gorgeous visuals) is the abundance of huge, sprawling levels, each of which offers a number of possible paths to the end. While not as open-ended as the PC game (which basically dropped you on the island and let you go virtually anywhere), you've still got to explore your options and devise a strategy. The enemy AI can be unforgiving, so simply running and gunning your way through the levels generally isn't your best course of action. You'll be swarmed once you've been spotted, so it usually pays to take a stealthier approach.
Since the enemies won't see you if you're skulking through the jungle's copious amounts of flora, you can silently get the drop on them. Early in the game, you're taught to use the jungle as a weapon, and you can set branch-whip booby traps to take enemies out after you've lured them in with a tossed rock. If you prefer a more up-close-and-personal method, you can crouch and quietly sneak up behind your foes, dispatching them with a butterfly knife to the back. The only thing that occasionally foils these attempts is your enemies' often unrealistic ability to spot you from afar. Once they sound the alarm, you'll have to fight it out until they're all dead.
While the first few levels of Far Cry Instincts feature a nice mix of stealth and action gameplay, the game goes in a more surreal direction once you've been injected with the mad doctor's experiment serum. It's a mix of elements the native witch doctors believed gave the user animalistic powers, and you'll slowly gain the abilities of the jungle's best predators. Ranging from super speed to the ability to detect your foes' scent through the foliage, the primal powers add a fun new element to the game. You've got to appreciate the beauty of rushing out of the overgrown jungle and eviscerating a shocked enemy.