I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: Far Cry 2

So last week I was going to attempt to write one of these about Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, only I (one) already beat that game with a bootleg copy on my PC back in college and (two) spent the majority of the past two weeks in a Dragon Age shaped hole from where there can be no escape, save to delve as deeply as possible and hope to find the exit up – that’s a Legacy deep cut for you. So instead, I didn’t write anything, vowing to do my best to make up for it this week. I’m a dude who takes his made-up responsibilities seriously.

This week, I decided to take a different approach and try to actually play a game that I hadn’t beaten, and one that I had been meaning to get back to (and one, by chance, that is sort of relevant to the previous week’s releases). So I picked Far Cry 2, because that’s a game that I remember enjoying, even though that I also remember that game being one that actively hates me. Far Cry 2 is the game that starts off by giving you malaria and a jammed gun, then kicking you out the door into a warzone. It’s the game where your car will break down with frightening regularity, but you can fix it by ratcheting one bolt under the hood. So far as I know, it started the whole “healing yourself ain’t look pretty” trend in the series, which means that at a certain point you’re snapping your arm back in place and going about your business. Don’t sprint too long, because you’ll probably have another malaria attack, and pills are hard to come by. Don’t have any pills? Guess you’re fucked!

For an older game, I have to say that the visuals really hold up well on my PC. No dropped frames on ultra settings, 1080p (the ideal number of p to have) resolution, and very few loading screens. Did I say very few? I meant one, when you load the game, but nothing after that. And the vast majority of your screen is just the world around you. HUDs are apparently for suckers, as are maps. Instead, there are road signs and any vehicle you get into will have a tiny GPS screen that will help you navigate your way around. This leads to you trying to stay in your vehicle as long as possible when you’re near an objective, because as soon as you get out of that car, you no longer have any indication as to where your objective is. I thought this would be super annoying, but it turns out to just heighten the sparse feeling that the game is trying to push. You are constantly on the precipice of failure, and Far Cry 2 is just waiting for you to lower your guard so it can give you a big ol’ push. It is less a game about shooting dudes and more a game about surviving the war-torn world you find yourself in.

By far my favorite moment so far came immediately after finishing the tutorial that I didn’t realize I was still doing. A message appears telling you that you can more or less do whatever you want now, mentions a few different people you can track down to get jobs from, and ends with a reminder that somewhere in this vast wilderness is a man named the Jackal, and you need to kill him. Now, I do not know if that means that it is possible to just randomly come across the Jackal by accident and kill him less than an hour into the main game or something, but the way that the game presents it certainly seems to point that way. I am all for antagonists that aren’t any more super-powered than you are, and can be found at any point in the story. Now, maybe this leads to a Morrowind style fail state, with a little note telling you that the threads of Fate had been severed and now you are playing in a doomed timeline or whatever, but honestly that’s one of the things that I missed in Oblivion and Skyrim. If I can stumble across the Jackal and shoot him in the face, regardless of whatever else I have accomplished in the game, Far Cry 2 might become one of my favorite games. Hell, I might even pick up Far Cry 4 if it lets me do that.