The Avid Coder

When I first heard that there was a sequel to Far Cry in the works I was very excited. I liked Far Cry, until the monsters came and the main character suddenly became some ghastly mutated being with feral powers. Then I heard that CryTek was not going to be developing Far Cry 2, but that it would instead be a team from Ubisoft. That caused my interest to wither a bit, but I kept an eye on the game nonetheless. When I saw the first videos of the game my interest was piqued once again. Seeing the game is set in Africa, and seeing how well they managed to recreate the African atmosphere made me very excited for the potential of the game. The combat shown in the videos also gave me the impression that this was going to be a strong shooter. Then the game was finally released, and with great anticipation I started to play it, but alas after a couple of hours I disappointedly quit the game, realising that the faults of the game outweighed its strengths.

Far Cry 2 is a visual masterpiece. The team at Ubisoft did an excellent job at recreating the African environment and atmosphere. The deserts, bush and jungles look amazing. The intro sequence of the game give you more than enough time and opportunity to take a gander at the beautiful environment. It is not only the flora of the African landscape that the team faithfully recreated, but also the fauna. More than once I raced through the bush at night, in one of the hundreds of Jeeps scattered through the world, dodging trees and rocks, only to collide with a grazing zebra. If you let the game grab your imagination you really do feel like you are in Africa (yes I do live in Africa).

The NPCs in the game also make out a large part of its atmosphere. They consist of locals, militia and some mercenaries. These characters speak to each other in English but also in African languages. What an utter joy it was the first time a mercenary taunted me in Afrikaans while I was fighting him. This level of detail, unfortunately, will only truly be appreciated by someone who speaks one of the African languages used in the game. But that is enough of the visual beauty and atmosphere of the game. Let us now move on to the really important aspects of any game: gameplay and story.

In the game you play a mercenary sent to kill a notorious arms dealer known only as the Jackal. Upon your arrival in the country things get a bit out of hand and you are thrown into the middle of a war between two rival factions, the UFLL and the APR. The Jackal supplies both factions with weapons, so in order to try and get close to him you have to do some missions for the factions.

The basic gameplay of Far Cry 2 is gun battles, gun battles and more gun battles with some rockets and grenades thrown into the mix and some exploding vehicles here and there. The weapons in the game (and there are plenty to choose from) are well designed and has faithful sound effects. The gun play itself is fun. One would then be tempted to say that this sounds like a great shooter, but one would be wrong. The game just has too many faults. Until now I have focussed on the good aspects of the game, now I shall start with the bad.

Weapons in Far Cry 2 deteriorate with use. Once you have a fired a couple of clips with a brand new weapon it suddenly starts to rust and becomes dirty (I never dropped it in the water, or dragged it through mud, I promise…). Once that happens the weapon will start to jam at least once per clip until it becomes, pretty much, utterly useless or just explodes. Of course no enemy in the game maintains any of his weapons so any weapon you pick up from a fallen enemy is always in a poor condition and is pretty much useless, but while they are using the weapons it hardly ever jams: this is just silly.

As far as acquiring new weapons go, you have to make use of the arms dealers scattered throughout the game world. At arms dealers you can buy new weapons (you then get an unlimited supply of these weapons at warehouses throughout the game world) with conflict diamonds, the main currency of the game. You earn diamonds by completing missions or by discovering some hidden cases throughout the world. Far Cry 2 has numerous weapon unlocks that you can acquire by completing some missions for the arms dealers. Unfortunately the missions are very unimaginative: it always involves the destroying a convoy, it is basically always exactly the same mission that just takes place somewhere else in the game world.

Another problem Far Cry 2 has is with its damage model with respect to enemies. Often while playing the game I would take my .50 calibre Desert Eagle and shoot a shirtless guy in the chest; he does not even flinch. I shoot him again, still to no avail: he is still going strong. I shoot him a third time, he then falls to the ground … but wait he is not dead, no he crawls around, draws his pistol (that has unlimited ammo) and starts shooting at me. I empty the remainder of my clip into him to make sure that he is dead, since this game does not seem to even try and get close to a logical damage model. I could understand enemies that are able to take some damage if the game had few enemies or sparse battles. But there are always numerous enemies in any battle, plus if you are not in a cease-fire zone you are always only something like twenty seconds from a fight.

Which brings me to another one of the big problems of Far Cry 2: almost everyone is always an enemy. Throughout the roads in the Far Cry 2 world there are guard posts belonging to one of the factions. There are also assault trucks patrolling a lot of the roads. These guards are always your enemy and they shoot you on sight. They can recognise that you are an enemy even if you are driving a vehicle reasonably far from such a post. You have to do a lot of driving in the game to accomplish your missions, so I think you can see where I am going with this: it becomes so irritating, infuriating, nauseating, and just plain boring to have to fight your way through guard post after guard post over and over and over and over again, just to get to your actual mission location, where there is another fifty guys waiting for you. It is not fun, it is just plain boring.

Lastly we come the most disappointing aspect of the game for me, and the one that I hinted to in the title of this post: the game pretty much has no story. Yes, I mentioned earlier that you are sent to kill some arms dealer called the Jackal. As it happens he supplies the in game factions with weapons, and to get close to him you have to do some work for the factions. Unfortunately no effort was made to let the player identify with any of the in game characters. Two thirds through the game I still did not know the names of the faction leaders, nor did I care any more, it was just so boring. The missions you do are completely disjoint with no real story unfolding. There are supposedly about thirty story missions, but only two or three feel like story missions.

Throughout the game you also encounter buddies. These are NPCs that are actually friendly toward you. You can do utterly pointless missions for them with no reward in back-story or character development: you never really learn about or identify with these characters either. They do, however, give you alternate ways of completing the story missions, and sometimes rescue you in tight battles, but the dialogue is all very generic and stiff, making you completely indifferent if anything bad should happen to them…

Far Cry 2 is a game that had mountains of potential, but in the end the only thing the developers seemed to focus on was the graphics and making it look authentic. Everything else, gameplay and story, took a back seat and we were left with an utterly mediocre game. I guess the real question is, is it fun? For the first couple of hours and for some mindless gun battles every now and again, yes. As a solid, complete game with strong gameplay and narrative? A thousand times no.