Far Cry 2

When I started up Far Cry 2, I expected to get one of these kinda recently popular open world FPSs. And for the most part, that is absolutely true. This is, by all means, a standard shooter; you'll be shooting dudes in the face, and than talking to some dudes. But what Far Cry 2 did with story and characters, no game I have ever played comes close.

At the beginning screen, you get to choose one of 12 playable characters. There are no classes to speak of; these are merely skins. You are then plunged into the world of an unnamed African country, going through a civil war. You are a mercenary, and your job is straight forward: kill The Jackal, an arms-dealer that armed both of the warring factions (the APR and the UFLL). Soon after you arrive at the hotel, your character contracts malaria. You wake up in the hotel, The Jackal himself reading your mission objectives back to you, and leaving, while you fall unconscious again. When you wake up again, the streets are filled with the sound of gunshots; your only option is to escape.

You progress through the game doing the 32 main story missions for both factions. These are the missions that have an impact on the world; you can opt to do other missions, such as the gun dealer missions, which will unlock guns early (eventually I began to notice I was just being handed guns). The game has a lot of collectible stuff, which is quite surprising, considering I've never seen an FPS do this. There are diamond cases around the 50 km² of explorable land, over 200 of them. You can also find tape recordings of the Jackal and the Predecessor, the person who was sent to kill The Jackal before you. They are really just short anecdotes; I didn't collect any that held real back story value.

For an open world game to succeed, it needs a really great map and fast travel system to work. In Far Cry 2, you bring up a map, and a GPS unit. The map shows you where you are in the current section of the map. The game is split up into 5 sections; one for each corner, and the hub in the middle. The map displays the standard map information: you get the roads, the guard posts, the place where your mission objective is, and a lot of other stuff. Each of these sections has a bus stop, which will take you to any of the other sections instantly, instead of you having to drive there. Depending on your situation, the bus stop will be on the other side of the section, and driving there can take a while. The vehicles were well done; sometimes I feel like vehicles in games are much too fast for their own good. In Far Cry 2, each vehicle is balanced, and it never feels like you can't stop.

The world of Far Cry 2 is modelled in the extremely impressive Dunia engine. The lush foliage is affected by many real life conditions: wind, moving through them, bullets, and fire. Speaking of fire, the game takes great pride in it's fire physics, and just overall destruction. Throwing a Molotov Cocktail (or using a flamethrower) on the grass makes it spread to surrounding bushes and trees; even whole buildings burn to the ground, leaving an ashy frame. Fences fall to grenades, and so does pretty much every object that isn't bolted down. A neat thing is when ammo crates are in an explosion, and all the bullets start going off.

There are problems with the shooting. The enemies soak up way too many bullets, the only way to kill them quickly is with a headshot. The guns you get don't really feel much different from each other, so the best way to go around providing a fun gunfight is to have them during different times of the day. In day time, visibility is much greater, so the enemies spread themselves apart and patrol the area. This leads to large firefights. I preferred sleeping at the safe houses till it was night; enemies stuck together more as a group, and stealth became a much more viable option.

This game does a very good job in making you feel like this is your job. Missions are very simple: go blow up/kill something/someone from the opposing faction. This is where Buddies come into play. Buddies are the people who you did not choose to play as, when beginning the game. They populate the world and serve as friends. After accepting a mission, one of your buddies will call you up and say, “Hey, I'm here, come meet me,” and they provide a much more fun, and longer, alternative to the original mission you were given. The best example of this is when you are asked to blow up a missile (or something along those lines, I don't remember). Your buddy calls you up, and tells you to steal the truck with the missile, get the fuse for it, and you'll blow up a whole goddamn bridge with it.

And than here is the moment where this game snapped into position as one of my favourite games ever. You grow attached to your buddies, they always seem to be there for you. Around half way, while doing a mission, I had one of my buddies get shot and fall to the ground. No biggie, I thought, as this had happened before and I gave him a syrette and he got back up. I cleared out all the enemies, and gave aide to my buddy. One syrette, he's not back up. Another syrette, he's not back up, and now he's squirming less. A third, and now he stops squirming, and his last breath of air passes through his lips. He's dead. Gone forever. He won't ever show up in my game, ever again. Moments like these (there's a pretty major one half way through, and at the end too), showed a level of character interaction that I've never seen before, and frankly, from that point on I decided that I would finish this game.

Far Cry 2 is one of those few FPSs that I actually enjoyed playing single-player more than the multi-player, and there is good reason for this. The engaging story, the character action, and the exciting, but often frustrating firefights, solidified this as a great FPS, one that I will definitely replay once I get a better rig.