Yeah I know, cheesy pun for a headline but who cares. This review is covering Far Cry 2. In some ways it’s a good game. In other ways it’s just tedious and irritating. I wanted to like this game but I really couldn’t.
The world in the game is an absolutely gorgeous African landscape that changes quite a bit as the civil war that’s going on ravages the land burning it, blowing craters into it or filling it with many corpses whether it is man, woman, child or random animal. The story is great with a weapons dealer only known as The Jackal (kind of based off the real life terrorist Carlos Ilych “The Jackal” Ramirez) starting another war in another random African nation. Your job, regardless of what role you take, is to find and kill the jackal. Regardless of what role you take you also happen to catch malaria so you’re living on borrowed time while you’re not getting meds, which you have to buy, which you either have to find cases of diamonds on the map or complete different missions to make diamonds to buy said meds and other supplies. So to survive you’re dragged into perpetuating the war.
There are some ways this game really works. Graphics as stated earlier are gorgeous. Weapons work and jam realistically. In-game physics are realistic. You’re working off of a 24-hour day. The environment works as it work in real life with dry land burning easily, rainfall puts out fires, you shoot a branch with a high enough caliber weapon you can shoot a branch out of a tree, etc. So the environment is incredible. First aid animations when you get injured enough are beautifully done as well whether you’re ripping bullets or shrapnel from your body, wrapping a burn or setting a broken bone. The controls are intuitive and reactive so that you normally don’t get hung up on things.
The buddy system is useful because you usually have help of some kind. They help you get different supplies. If you are killed or almost killed in battle they occasionally pull you to safety, revive you and then cover you until you heal your injuries. They give you advice on other ways to do missions. They are just some of the things that allow you quite a few options in terms of the gameplay. Since advice on finishing missions was brought up the game also allows you to scope out an area before you proceed to mark any patrols or snipers positions in an area that you’re going if there are enemies there so that alone gives you quite a few ways to go through the game.
Then there’s the problem of the world is just too big. I mean sure it’s beautiful but if you have to be driving 10-15 minutes just to find an enemy to shoot it’s just not fun. I mean when there is action it’s exhilarating but when there isn’t really all you can do in the game is pop pills when you need them, drive and pray you run across, into or over something interesting that you’d have to through at one time or another. Another gameplay mechanic that really doesn’t work is the diamond locator that is built into your GPS unit. It pretty much only tells you which direction a case with diamonds is in. So once the antenna of your GPS has a flashing green light you have to stop and slowly spin your character until you have a solid green light. Then you have to head in that direction until you either find the case or for some reason or another the light started flashing again. Then you have to spin until the light is a solid green light again and head in that direction. It’s tedious, irritating, unnecessary and not fun. If you were that broke you’d just do some job and make money that way. But then you’d have to worry about driving somewhere where you can get a job, driving until you find the location of where you’re supposed to go because occasionally the mapping system doesn’t work and the driving is just as irritating because, unless you willfully drive like a moron there’s nothing happening until you find an enemy to chase you. It’s boring if you have to drive 10-15 minutes minimum to find something to do.
There are also occasionally glitches that end up popping up for no apparent reason. I occasionally found my character running in a field and then running into an invisible wall that shouldn’t exist in a wide open world like that. Did I mention that I was also being chased by one of the warring factions in the game while I was on foot and they were driving. I died because of running into the invisible wall syndrome. Mind you things like that don’t always happen. It’s just occasionally you run into an invisible wall for a few seconds and then the invisible wall remembers it can’t exist and fully disappears. It pissed me off because that meant I had to reload, re-receive the mission, redrive over there, refind any diamonds that I might’ve picked up and risk dying the same way again.
If you want to give the game a shot, it is worth at least a rental. If you want to buy it either get it from newegg.com so that you don’t have to spend over $50 on this game. Hell if you can find it used get it that way if you’re still interested.