Far Cry 2

No one really knows what happened to Jack Carver, the macho oozing Hawaiian shirt wearing tit of a protagonist that graced our screens in the original Far Cry. A man who after having 400 mercenary's shoot at him and him still surviving in the understatement of the century says, this isn't my day. However it's probably safe to say that no one really cared what happened to him either. However Ubisoft just couldn't completely let go to JC, even if it was only subcounciously, two of their characters look exactly like Jack Carver, and the others are either starkly out of place or forgettable to say the least. (an IRA Squeler and the token black guy come to mind) Thankfully your character is silent throughout the game *sigh* meaning you can insert quick witted quips after shooting someone with a shotgun in the head and muttering something about unleashing your load on their face...

The game starts off with a very annoying talkative cab driver, just like the ones you'd find here in London, he doesn't seem to notice that you don't really fancy talking, so instead he makes up for your silence by talking about pretty much everything he sees, which may be informative for some but the less retarded of us would probably find annoying. Why thank you Mr Cab Driver, I did indeed NOT know that the weird metal object floating in the sky was a plane... In other words, Far Cry 2 does not get off to a great start. However the setting of the game initially shows a lot of promise, although Far Cry has jumped on the africa setting Band Wagon that hollywood and other games have created (Resident Evil 5, Blood Diamond, Last King of Scotland (confusing title i know, but you're going to have to trust me on this one, it's about Uganda i think...)

That said it doesn't exactly get much better from then on, towards the end of your cab ride, you fall sick with malaria, (the mosquitos probably thought they ought to put you out of your misery instead of letting you suffer for much longer) and you end up on a hotel bed drowsy and weak, taunted by the man you actually came into this country to kill. An elusive arms dealer named the jackal, now the story gets slightly better here but then it seems to disappear for most the game. I could never quite understand why in order to kill The Jackal, you had to do some completely unrelated missions before going after him, personally I'd rather grab my shotgun and go Dick Cheney on his arse instead of getting some faction guy's shopping, blowing up a van then getting a weaker gun than the one I originally had to finally kill the bastard. But I guess that's just so we don't feel ripped off by this game. However I really would have liked to see in the first five minutes you actually come into a country and achieve what you set you out to do. Seeing as you meet The Jackal in the first five minutes of the game (in which he gives you a gun) wouldn't it have been great for your character to just turn round and blow his brains out and then the game complete screen to come up?

Far Cry's Graphics are great, the lighting is particularly impressive, however the real star of the show is the fire, the fire in the game, although ugly at times, spreads extremely realistically, and being a dry season, it spreads gloriously. The character models can be good, on some of the enemies they are shoddy however, but overall it does the job of keeping you immersed. One thing that frustrated me was the lack of ability to see anything underwater, meaning you didn't have a clue what was going on when you were holding your breath. The screen would also sometimes go fuzzy when you ran for long periods, now I don't know about you relatively obese people out there, but when I run, even if it's for a ridiculously long time, my heart beat raises, I sweat, I sometimes shake, but I NEVER GET FUZZY EYESIGHT. What was the need Ubisoft? Honestly...

The game play in Far cry two is ok, it really doesn't compare to the original, there is some latency on the controller meaning that often you will swing a few cm's off your target even if you stop aiming physically, however thankfully FC2 has 'borrowed' ideas from other games such as when aiming down the iron sights, your automatically snap on to a nearby enemy. The game has a few cool features, like the sliding into cover, and switching from driving to a turret with the touch of a button using some really slick animations. However the reason the game takes so long to complete is that the maps are huge, too big in fact, you spend more time driving around than you do anything else, which for an FPS is not a good thing... The truth is that Far Cry 2 cannot decide on what it wants to be, ending up exactly where its predecessor left off, a schizophrenic experience. On one hand it aims to be realistic, even eliminating the much needed reticule by default, *although the reticule is awful even when on so you aren't really missing much. To navigate you have an awful map that is hard to look at and move, every now and then you have to take malaria pills, which again is frustrating and when you are seriously hurt you do a cool animation to fix things back into place, like removing bullet wounds etc. But on the other hand, there is a great whopping health bar, one injection cures you back to full life, there is an ammo counter, and enemies take five or six shots to down(even though they are unarmoured, and that's not just my bad aiming, that's how many hits they take to kill. If this game intends to be realistic, than why doesn't Africa create a united army and take over the world, they don't even need body armour! The amount of hits these guys can take...

The main problem in Far Cry 2 is that the AI is awful There is also a noticible lack of friendly ai, everyone attacks you except your buddies. And your buddies although useful at times, often die on you in a missions, and I was particularly attached to one Algerian buddy only to have him get mortally wounded three times, I saved him each time but on the 4th time I shot his brains out myself. Cruel? Probably, needed? Definitely. I personally imagined that the guy I was putting out of its misery was one of the lead AI designers at Ubisoft. Sometimes your buddy seems to get shot out of nowhere, even though you haven't been shot at, leading you to question if your so called friend accidentally shot himself in the chest when holding his rifle backwards...

Which leads me onto yet another problem, aside from the controller latency issues, the gunplay in Far Cry 2 is mediocre at best, crappy if I'm being honest. Enemies are hard to see during the day, even harder to see at night. And most of them wield a shotgun that can hit you from a mile away, they all seem to have welded binoculars onto their eyes as they'll see and hit me ages before I even know where they are. (For reference I played this on normal difficulty.) The guns all feel as though they are lacking power, and some guns make you think that you are probably better off just using your blunt machete, you'd probably get them killed quicker...

Overall Far Cry 2 isn't a bad game, but it isn't a good game either, instead fading into the grey line of mediocrity, like Cher, or my homework. Its gunplay mechanics are average at best, and although it is a really good looking game, nothing really justifies the price tag. It feels like a half developed game, it's got a few good features, but the rest needs polish and some of it needs a lot of work (AI Team I'm looking at you here.) I couldn't recommend it to anyone as a good shoot em up, not even a deaf dumb and blind kid, as I get the feeling that even they would sense somehow that the game they are playing is crud.