Do you remember your first few hours with Elder Scrolls games? Of course you do! Even you, liar! So much well thought out stuff happens at the outset of those games. Tarhiel the wizard falls from the sky just north of Seyda Neen, leaving behind those ridiculous jumping scrolls. Patrick Stewart shows up in a video game and gets shivved. A dragon appears! Excitement! There's also the part where you're finally unshackled from the little introductory sequence the good people at Bethesda have assembled, and you're allowed to wander in any given direction. The world has a simply maddening amount of locations full of different characters, design aesthetics, natural environments, even unique flora and fauna. I still enjoy booting up Skyrim, loading my original character, and walking in a given direction for a while to uncover some new mine or dungeon. Who knows what's in that unexplored forest? Let's find out!

You know what's in the unexplored areas of Far Cry 2? I'll tell you.

1. Impassable terrain which makes a twenty second walk in a straight line take several minutes, where you are vulnerable to attack by;
2. Nameless mooks, who all want to kill you and attempt to do so at range; in an attempt impede your progress to;
3. More nameless mooks, with the same modus operandi.

I hate, hate, HATE getting around in this game for the same reason I wound up dreading Phantasy Star II's dungeon design. There's no straight line! Every goal or objective winds up being in some shitty spot that takes way too long to arrive at, and along the way there's not a fucking thing unique. When you first leave Pala and make your way to the first guard post, you're likely going to be confronted by roving mooks in a truck. When you arrive at the guard post, there will be more mooks. They have no apparent alignment, no defining traits, and no relation to you except their need to put you in the ground. What I have just described is the bulk of Far Cry 2, the game play loop that will be with you until the end. You can try to stealth your way around this loop, or Rambo your way through it, but the loop remains the same. The most exciting thing on offer is, occasionally, you will find a brief case with money that you will likely no longer need by the second half of the game.

Also, at a certain point the secondary objectives on missions stop giving out useful rewards and are no longer worth pursuing. Ditto the side quests, which provide either a) money you no longer need, or b) reputation, a meta-currency of sorts which provides your enemies with better armaments over the course of the game. In other words, the side content potentially makes this slog of a game even more tedious. I'm now dealing with distant, nameless, unaffiliated grunts who can nail me with rockets at considerable distance while I attempt to move from one side of the map to another to complete another samey mission.

People liked this? Somebody liked this.

I actually just fired this game up again and started fresh for the umpteenth time. I've never made it to the fabled "second half" that you speak of. Every time I go back to it, I think, "This is a relatively unique environment, and there are some neat ideas here. This time, I'm going to stick with it." And every time - inevitably, it seems - I give up in large part due to the dull back-and-forth between missions.

I WANT to like this game, I really do. Previously, I'd played on the Xbox - playing on the PC means I now have quick saves, and those help considerably. I still can't shake the feeling that after another hour in, I'll have had my fill of shooting dudes and move on to something else.

I'm one of those people who love this game, but I'm willing to own up to its flaws.

The concrete mental image of Far Cry 2 I have in my head isn't that of causing wildfires, being infected with malaria or my guns jamming, it's that of a damn jeep coming out of nowhere and running me over.

FC2 is not a good game, despite certain good aspects. That's pretty conclusive. However, you can mod the shit out of it to make it a really fan-fucking-tastic game.

I love Far Cry 2.

I gave up after a few hours.

The malaria wasn't so bad, but the fact that checkpoints would be cleared out from me and then 3 minutes later, they would respawn and I would have to do it all over if I want to proceed back through.

The guns jamming didn't help, either. When an enemy used his gun, it was fine, but when I took his gun, it somehow jammed.

There was a brief period when I felt bad for not appreciating FC2 since I spent so little with it and wanted to see it through, but no, fuck that game.

I enjoyed my time with Far Cry 2 quite a bit. I think a lot of players, rightfully so, didn't adjust to what that game had going on.

This game was the worst thing to ever happen to me, though I did play it on consoles.

I managed to finish it once. It took forever. The music that plays during load screens actively makes me angry when I hear it.

@bacongames: I think that's a good way to put it. I seem to be attracted to games that force me to adapt to their way of doing things.

@oraknabo: I tried so hard to do just that. Hell, I got into stealthing around in missions for a while, and taking on optional objectives from my buddies to up the stakes a bit. There's a mission where you need to make your way up a hill into a well guarded fort and assassinate a target. I managed that in complete silence without alerting a soul. Probably used five rounds for the whole thing. It was great. Everthing around that mission, however, was the same old shit. Kamikaze truck drivers, respawning guard posts, all the same as it had been for the previous six or seven hours. It's just the same note carried too damn long.

I'm nearing the end of the game now and I'm still carrying around the same weapons I used at the start for the most part, but I've switched to an assault rifle and am just following the main objectives because the rewards for side content are not compelling enough anymore. I was hoping this new, brutalist approach would breath some new life into the game for me, but that's not really been my experience. Instead, it makes me wonder if this game is actually brief as hell, and all of the bullshit you deal with between missions is padding. Even the map design seems to aid this stretching of what seems like fairly thin content.

Hopefully the two sequels resemble Blood Dragon more than this, because Blood Dragon was rad and respected my time.

I finished it earlier this year and actually prefer it to Far Cry 4. Naturally, the weapon degradation and malaria are nuisances but they can be circumvented. I think having a routine around that stuff helped me power through it and it didn't feel overly long. Its definitely a world you have to come to terms with but the actual missions were spot on.

I don't have a problem with the malaria system being used to create borders to the game, better than being caged in by impassable mountains or invisible walls. Also I'm ok with the degrading weapons as it forced you to unlock the ones you wanted & you'd have to plan out your assaults a bit.

The game would have been great if they had a system were guard camps were repopulated once a day, maybe guards get dropped off by a truck daily or something & the two factions actually fought each other outside of a couple of scripted fights in the towns. That & change the terrible plot line.

I still love Farcry 2. The way they combined videogame's simpliest of tasks "find this man", and combined it with the real world difficulty of "find this man" gave me a feeling of reality that few mechanics, or narrative has ever achieved.

Most of the things that people hated the most are the things that made this game great for me. You picked up a shitty gun out of desperation, surprise! it's a piece of junk, you just killed 15 people, guess what, they're sending people there NOW to deal with you, you have malaria, sorry, you're not allowed to ignore it regardless of where you are or what you had planned.

Still my favorite Far Cry game, yeah it requires patience but to me that's actually an endearing quality in a game these days

It's my favourite Far Cry as well and I don't remember having the same problems with malaria or getting about. Although I played it in early 2009 I seem to remember that getting a mortar made guard posts trivial towards the end and was fun to aim at them too.

I went back to it earlier this year after getting it for like 2 bucks on Steam. It still looks pretty damn good graphically, but the campaign is just such a drag to play. I don't know how anyone thought having to manage malaria in a first person shooter was a good idea. That and the missions are spread way too apart from each other.

I did have some fun with the multiplayer, though. Unfortunately the map browser seems to have died at some point.

Stop traveling on roads and start using boats.

They need to bring back gun jams.

Best game ever.

I've recently come to the realisation that Far Cry 2's main appeal is a lot like Spelunky's. It's the interactions between numerous systems that make the gameplay result in many chaotic and funny moments (that tend to end with me dying/almost dying). And I can only ever play the two games a couple hours once in a while and it's always fun. It's not really about the exploration of (virtual) physical space like Bethesda RPG's are. Once I accepted that the malaria is basically the Spelunky ghost, I enjoy it a little better.

One of the few games to actually make me nod off while playing. So incredibly boring I cannot possibly comprehend what actually makes it entertaining to some.