Far Cry 2

"Somewhere out there is an arms dealer known only as the Jackal," the game tells you, by way of a send-off. "He has been selling guns to both the UFLL and the APR. Every gun, every bullet, and every corpse you have seen can be traced back to him." The dynamic paragraph breaks, and then - "Find him and kill him." This is how you start your journey of FarCry 2 in the middle of Africa. You get the gist of the current political situations by the taxi driver who picks you up after landing in Africa for a ride to your hotel.

The game begins with a surprise. Once you reach the hotel, you suddenly fall sick from the African air. Malaria; you if you familiar with this disease. And, then when you open your eye; the so called ‘Jackal’ is standing right in front of you pointing a gun at your face. Well, obviously he won’t kill you and he doesn’t. While the Jackal was about to leave after his small speech, malaria strikes again and when you wake up; you are in the middle of a warfare. Thus the game starts, you trying to rescue yourself and find shelter. But the malaria doesn’t let you do that either. You faint again and find yourself in the custody of UN officer. This is where the game finally starts.

Far Cry 2 encompasses 33 main and 50 side missions throughout a half-dozen key locations scattered across its 50 square kilometer map. Longevity certainly is a problem, as each mission will take you around half an hour to complete depending on the distance you'll have to travel in the process. The longevity can even be higher if you intend to find the hidden diamonds; which seems to be the currency of this game. You can purchase varieties of weapons, ammo and armor or upgrade them using those diamonds. These diamonds can be tracked by your handy GPS detector which comes along with the map you carry or any car/boat you ride.

Once you are out for the first time, the graphics will obviously blow your mind.  Just like its previous version; you can observe every single edge of the game has excellent detail including the character you pick for yourself. The player character and the environment itself have been fleshed out to such wonderful effect. Ubisoft jams your nose as deeply as possible into the trials and tribulations of your virtual body. Every single detail has been covered when it comes to gameplay. Your vision goes blur when you sprint for too long and a yellowish vision when malaria strikes and even when you take medicine or heal yourself from any deep wound. A dynamic weather system and lit from every angle by the day-night cycle. And the sounds are also not bad. Sometime during the night when you’re completely along in the jungle driving or running to reach a destination, the sounds can be very creepy. You can hear the air blow and effect of sounds coming from a distant location is also very cool. Footsteps or thugs talking to each other will sometime give you a general idea of their locations before you plan any attack.

The gameplay is rather very simple. You move from A to B location and finish the assigned job. These jobs can be found from various sources. Anyone will love playing the game for first few hours but then the game gets very much repetitive.  The only thing will keep you into the game is its story line. There are always alternative jobs offered by your buddies whenever you take any main job. But then again, those jobs are almost same no matter wherever the story goes. Most of the missions won’t need any pre planning. You go in and kill. And, the sheer distance you're required to travel between objectives gives you plenty of opportunities to pick a fight. 12 AI "buddies" have been squirreled away in the guts of the world: do them a favor and they'll repay you in kind, dropping into the fight like heavily-armed fairy godmothers whenever the odds turn against you.

Rather being repetitive, the game has few irritating issues which will surely make you pissed. One of them is that you can’t jump vertically over five feet. And, sometime when you’re fighting during the night specially in a jungle; it’s very difficult to track where the bullets are coming from. During the gameplay while you out in the open world; you’ll definitely feel the absence of an indigenous population. Each static encampment is surrounded and pervaded by familiar but aptly-chosen props like exploding barrels, mounted machine guns and sniper nests. You can unlock these camps by killing the guards but that not the end of the story. Suppose you are going to location A to C and there is one check post at location B and you unlock it by killing the guards. And, after finishing the mission at location C when you are coming back to location A though B, those guards are all back. And, this goes on and on and on.  And, trust me that there's always at least one thug you didn't see coming. You’ll also miss a regular combat binocular. The one you get to use in the get for the whole time can be very annoying time to time and you may use the sniper rifle instead of the binocular you have.

I had mixed reaction after finishing Far Cry 2 but I still recommend you to play this game even though there are few missteps which Ubisoft can take under the consideration for improvements. They succeeded in making Far Cry relevant again, a few nagging design flaws notwithstanding. Repetitious mission design, painful traveling and oddly depopulated environment threaten to swamp the experience can be compromised for its combat invention and a counter-tide of organic magnificence.