From the perspective of someone who just finished Far Cry 2 for the first time this week...I don't think it's very good.
I really enjoyed the original Far Cry and Crysis so remembering how ground breaking i felt those games were while playing FC2, the game felt flat and tedious more than anything else.
The weapon degradation and malaria wasn't an issue at all for me as it turns out. If i ever needed to restock my ammo, i'd just refresh all my guns in the weapon storage. It was real obvious when you needed more malaria pills as the underground side missions would exclaim that a mission was available on the map, so you stopped what you were doing (which was never having fun, so what's the differences) to do your video game chores enabling you to continue playing the video game. Regardless of what you chose to do in the world they built, it was all the same thing and this was exacerbated by the respawning checkpoints that had you shooting more people in between the missions where all you did was shoot more people.
..and the shooting wasn't great. I started playing the game on the highest difficulty and the suspense of it all was a great thing. i managed to stealthily breach a base and rescue my first buddy without killing anyone, and it was actually fun. That didn't last long, as later missions i couldn't even machete a dude out of site without the base going on high alert, so the stealth aspect was a wash. I was forced into the gunplay and quickly learned machine guns seem to fire in a perfectly humanoid shaped silhouette around the person you're pointing at, while having gone loud, the enemy are showing up in droves to destroy me...so the sniper rifle is the only reliable weapon to use on this difficulty...and the sniper rifle is terrible. It lacks any type of dynamic that makes you feel like that long distance shot really meant anything. You lined up the crosshairs and pulled the trigger, point and click. Not since opening executables in Windows have i experience such a challenge.
The driving is bad as well, again lacking in any dynamic that excited you while half of the game is just driving from point A to B. Except driving on the highest difficulty. On the highest difficulty, driving is a death sentence. If the guards at the check points don't kill you, the random technicals you meet on the road will. So if you think the game is tedious with all the driving, try playing on the highest difficulty where you have to walk wherever you go. Also, why the hell don't you hear those technicals until you hear them rev their engines? They're like the cougars in Red Dead, you hear them roar and if you dont quickly find out where it came from, you're just fucked. Audio in that game was just generally bad. It didn't even seem to have stereo and it was difficult to gauge enemy distance by the volume of their voice. Seemed inconsistent.
So there i was, in this open world game where the world of options are open to you as long as those options are, snipe people from a long distance and walk from mission to mission where you're literally doing the same thing over and over again.
At a point i decided to drop the difficulty down to Hardcore. Driving around became more reliable, mitigating some of the tedium, but the suspense is lost and the shooting is still boring. So the game is still tedious but now also boring.
The overall design of the game feel like pointless implementations to justify the landmarks in the game. Use malaria to force people into these side missions. Use weapon degradation so people get some use out of these weapon stores. every other design decision seems like it was designed by me when i was a kid thinking, "games would be cooler if they were more realistic" without any consideration as to whether it would add up to decent game play. The innovations here just feel like novelties.
As for the nice things i have to say about it, the color coded signs that lead you to your mission is good when it works and i mostly like the AI. i think they're reactionary and in a lot of cases they seem to reasonably try to stay alive. The part i dislike about them however, is the fact that, when alert, they can see, and shoot you from behind soft cover. They don't seem to have a realistic set of eyes on them...in fact, it feels like the designers took away the enemy markers from Far Cry just so they could give them to the enemy instead.
Speaking of the first Far Cry, I remember how amazing recon was in the game. For the first time i was playing a game where the binoculars were a useful tactical tool. In FC2, it's a joke. you just spot the resource available at a checkpoint. One of the four resources that you can just get elsewhere and "unlocking" these checkpoints do nothing.
Playing FC2's open world is a practice of eliminating the options available to you just to get it over with faster. No longer do i care about diamonds, "unlocking" check points/safe houses, doing your buddy's side missions, working for the weapon's shop. I just wanted the tedium to end so i B-lined it to the end and it still seemed like it took forever.
FC2 in the end struck me as a casual shooter that painted itself to look like a tactical shooter with it's minimalistic UI. You could say it was innovative for the time, but seeing as Crysis came out a year earlier, and i found the more linear original game far better, i doubt i would have felt much different if i played it in it's day.
Log in to comment