It's too...BIG
Far Cry 2 : A supposed open-world first person shooter that lets the player go anywhere and betray anyone, because these are the aspects that appeal to players apparently.
Story : The game makes you choose one of 8-odd playable characters, with no discernable difference between any of them other than appearance…which doesn’t mean anything either considering how you are playing a FIRST PERSON shooter. The goal of your mercenary is to hunt down a fellow known as The Jackal, who’s been giving both sides of some conflict in an unnamed African nation weapons. Either you’re trying to stop this weapons flow as a means to bring in peace or you’re stopping it because the weapons he’s sending to these people are shoddy and tend to jam, that much is never made clear.
In case you were wondering, the other reason I developed an interest in Far Cry 2 is hearing that it has nothing to do with Far Cry 1. None of that nonsense about a generic guy in a nice shirt with feral powers rescuing some lady from some mercenary group who just happen to be harvesting giant monsters. While Far Cry 2 has some presence of a story, your interest in it will depend on how interested you are in hearing monologues from a generic batch of mercenaries and other ethnic evil types.
Far Cry 2 stands tall and proud on two legs of promise: Reality and open-endedness. These seem to be two buzzwords that gamers get all excited about upon hearing. While I personally have nothing against games that are striving to be more unique than the last Mega Man game which I was completely jumping for joy with, sometimes one should be asking what makes these goals so significant, and if such goals make sense in the context of the game in question. In the case of Far Cry 2, these dreams seem to collide with each other a good deal.
In my mind, the challenge of having an open-ended world is to fill it with interesting aspects that the player wants to toy with. Grand Theft Auto made its reputation on giving the player a city filled with innocents to slaughter and cars to jack and smash. All the while, the cities were filled with fake restaurants, hidden weapons, hidden drugs, killing spree missions and so forth. It wasn’t realistic but that was the point; you were rewarded for examining this open space with fun.
The vision behind Far Cry 2 seems to be to recreate a believable rendition of a war-torn African nation. To this I propose the question – why do I want to explore a war-torn African nation? Most of this land is comprised of empty jungle, pathways surrounded by trees in areas with nothing of interest surrounding them. Villages, guard posts and anything of note are spread considering far apart, and trying to get from one area to another takes a long-as-hell time on foot. The game has some cars to drive, but they’re far apart, not very fast, and vulnerable to the occasional random attack from enemy insurgents. Your trip to your desired location will always be halted by an enemy attack, which forces you hop out of your vehicle and fight back, lest your ride be totaled by their gunfire and you find yourself stranded in the middle of nowhere.
I’d otherwise be cool with the attempts at realism, but most of them feel more like the developers showing off than anything else. For example, your character will develop a case of MALARIA. Why? To make the experience feel that much more…African? To force the player into picking up some pills every now and then? To show off the orange-like effect of your player having a malaria attack? Likewise, when you’re character is low on health, he’ll need to find some cover so that he can grab some pliers and pull a bullet out of his leg or one of his appendages. This is viscerally impressive, but it makes me wonder why the thirty other bullets in his head and chest aren’t as threatening to him. The enemies are fairly smart, and the game is realistic in the sense that going in guns blazing will lead to your death. In any other game, that’d be just fantastic, but this goes back to the whole idea of this game being open-ended…and making me wonder why I want to explore this game world when all that’s waiting for me is a painful death.
Alas, where this game shines, or at least where it could’ve shined, is in the realistic gun combat. Your character is by no means a walking tank that can regenerate all of his health by standing behind a rock for five seconds. Attacking an enemy stronghold requires a bit of planning, picking out the best angles of attack, plotting out strategic points like sniper positions and the obligatory exploding barrels before leaping in and making your strike. Because of this, this game operates on more of a trial and error type of mentality…which is completely negated by the absence of a checkpoint or quick save system. Once you lose all your health and die (twice over, as whomever your friend is at the time will come and make an overly-scripted rescue on your first death, which you will be completely sick of soon enough), you’re forced to restart from your last save point, which could be miles away from the mission objective. The open-ended dilemma strikes again! Your character happens to be a bit delicate too; nothing sucks like finally arriving at the mission objective, only to get run over by a car and have to make the journey all over again.
Apparently, the PC version of Far Cry 2 does have the quick-save feature that you’ll so badly need here. So if you opt to play the PC version of Far Cry 2, feel free to add an extra half star to the score, or full star if this concept of a malaria-stricken soldier who makes lengthy trips from one post to another, while praying he doesn’t get ambushed appeals to you. But the game suffers from bad design, being based on some bizarre combination of assorted gamers’ dreams of what advanced technology should do for a game, regardless of whether or not these dreams collide with each other. But ultimately, I feel that Far Cry 2 will occupy the same space as Far Cry 1, FEAR, Crysis, Doom 3, Quake 4 and many, many other first person shooters that existed more for developers to brag about their newest technologies and players to brag about their newest video cards. Impressive for their time, but long forgotten when the next big shooter came out.
Pros : An otherwise conventional online multiplayer mode is made more interesting with the addition of solid map editors that lets players design and easily upload new levels.
Cons : Whether you like it or not, all of the new levels will be set in the same African country setting as the rest of the game.
3 stars
At first, I was concerned that this game was going to be an all-too-late cash-in on the “trend” of being conscious about blood diamonds, and was ready to label this game as “missing the boat” as Kanye West had long since progressed from the days of Late Registration.
