Too much and not enough.
Open world is the new light bloom: a lot of games have it, few of them need it, and even fewer use it in a way that makes sense. Done right, with a delicate balance between pointless exploration and scripted elements, it can extend the life of a game with its playground-like appeal. Crackdown is a perfect example of this: plenty of wandering, but well-done story encounters. The biggest challenge for any game of this type, and one that Far Cry 2 completely misses the point of, is pacing. There is natural downtime in any open world game, and that’s okay. The player should be allowed to wander around the environment unmolested - especially if the environment is as lush and detailed as what Ubisoft has created here. Instead, Far Cry 2 tries to maintain its first person shooter heritage through nearly constant random encounters and magically re-spawning enemies. It’s tough to enjoy an African sunset when some bastard you killed five minutes ago is back and firing an RPG at you.
There are many individual pieces of Far Cry 2 that work very, very well, but none of them fit together into one cohesive game. For example, simply driving around the environment looking at the scenery is amazing. Far Cry 2 is right up there with Crysis in the looks department; the day/night cycle can take a brightly lit jungle area and transform it into a nightmarish landscape where the plants themselves look ready to attack. This spirit of freedom is completely squashed, however, by the constant flow of enemies. Almost every crossroads is filled to the brim with angry mercenaries wielding high-powered weapons. Cleaning them out is futile, as they will just be back the next time; perhaps soldiers here are grown on trees like bananas. This would explain how quickly they come back, as well as their lack of self preservation. Seeing a soldier run his jeep into a rock at full speed, then get out and forget what he was doing long enough to catch a machete in the back is funny the first time, but does not make for very engaging firefights.
When Far Cry 2 wakes up and remembers what it is, or at least what it should be, the combat suddenly improves. Individual missions provide a guided tour of the savannah, and each is very good on its own. When confined to a smaller area and denied vehicles, the AI’s death wish disappears. For five to ten minutes at a time, it is a very good shooter, until poor pacing once again interferes. There is no quick-travel option to jump from mission to mission. Perhaps I was spoiled by Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, but driving across the map two or three times on one job is just tiresome, especially when the magic enemy checkpoints are brought back into play. There are bus stops scattered around the map, but even those can be painfully far from the end target. The game becomes schizophrenic, open but then not open enough, slowly paced and then too fast. I enjoyed it almost as two different games, but together they are a mess.
Sadly, Far Cry 2 just becomes the opposite of Far Cry, when it could have been so much more. Far Cry is famous for its third act collapse. For two thirds of the game, it was almost perfect: open but not directionless, it required stealth and planning to overcome the eerily intelligent enemies. Then the monsters came out and the game went downhill from there. Far Cry 2 stumbles through the first two acts, until out of nowhere I found myself skulking through the underbrush in a linear final level that was just as good, if not better than anything the prequel had to offer. There is nothing wrong with a shooter being a shooter. Not every game needs a sprawling map to get lost in; by offering more, Far Cry 2 ends up being much less than it could or should have been.
