Do you remember your first few hours with Elder Scrolls games? Of course you do! Even you, liar! So much well thought out stuff happens at the outset of those games. Tarhiel the wizard falls from the sky just north of Seyda Neen, leaving behind those ridiculous jumping scrolls. Patrick Stewart shows up in a video game and gets shivved. A dragon appears! Excitement! There's also the part where you're finally unshackled from the little introductory sequence the good people at Bethesda have assembled, and you're allowed to wander in any given direction. The world has a simply maddening amount of locations full of different characters, design aesthetics, natural environments, even unique flora and fauna. I still enjoy booting up Skyrim, loading my original character, and walking in a given direction for a while to uncover some new mine or dungeon. Who knows what's in that unexplored forest? Let's find out!

You know what's in the unexplored areas of Far Cry 2? I'll tell you.

1. Impassable terrain which makes a twenty second walk in a straight line take several minutes, where you are vulnerable to attack by;
2. Nameless mooks, who all want to kill you and attempt to do so at range; in an attempt impede your progress to;
3. More nameless mooks, with the same modus operandi.

I hate, hate, HATE getting around in this game for the same reason I wound up dreading Phantasy Star II's dungeon design. There's no straight line! Every goal or objective winds up being in some shitty spot that takes way too long to arrive at, and along the way there's not a fucking thing unique. When you first leave Pala and make your way to the first guard post, you're likely going to be confronted by roving mooks in a truck. When you arrive at the guard post, there will be more mooks. They have no apparent alignment, no defining traits, and no relation to you except their need to put you in the ground. What I have just described is the bulk of Far Cry 2, the game play loop that will be with you until the end. You can try to stealth your way around this loop, or Rambo your way through it, but the loop remains the same. The most exciting thing on offer is, occasionally, you will find a brief case with money that you will likely no longer need by the second half of the game.

Also, at a certain point the secondary objectives on missions stop giving out useful rewards and are no longer worth pursuing. Ditto the side quests, which provide either a) money you no longer need, or b) reputation, a meta-currency of sorts which provides your enemies with better armaments over the course of the game. In other words, the side content potentially makes this slog of a game even more tedious. I'm now dealing with distant, nameless, unaffiliated grunts who can nail me with rockets at considerable distance while I attempt to move from one side of the map to another to complete another samey mission.

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