Far Cry 2 Review

Far Cry 2 Review
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Tall, pale grass shimmers and sways in the welcomed breeze as you traverse across the blistering African savannah. The weapons you carry – your tools for survival – now add to your misery as you drag them along, trying make your way through one of the most unforgiving landscapes on the planet. Rough, uncut diamonds (the only currency of value in this god-forsaken country), rattle in your pocket, reminding you of why you are here in the first place, and giving you the motivation to trudge on.

You have been paid – and paid well – to kill a man. A murderer, tyrant and usurper, your target has more than earned the price on his head. The monetary gain of your mission is nice, as it puts food in your stomach and helps to provide you with more of the instruments of destruction that you depend on so much. On this particular mission, however, money is not your primary motivation. When it comes right down to it, the thing that keeps your legs moving long after they have felt like giving out, and what drives you to brave the desolate plains and scorching temperatures is that you simply want to end this villain’s reign of terror over the people of this country. You want to see the bastard die, and you want to be the one to pull the trigger.

I knew I should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.

After checking your map, you realize that you are approaching the warlord’s encampment. The setting sun casts contrasting red and black shapes over the small, makeshift village as you crest the hill to its northern border. While remaining completely undetected by its inhabitants, you survey the village from a distance with your monocular, noting the patrolling guards, the placement of machinegun turrets, the entrances, exits, and vehicles parked in the road.

Put simply, your plan is to kill the warlord and escape the village without getting a bullet in your head. You intend to sneak into the encampment after dark and eliminate your target silently, making your escape that much easier. As you settle down into the tall grass to wait for darkness, however, you notice a familiar-looking figure exit one of the mud-and-straw huts down in the village. You recognize the figure as the very man you were paid to assassinate, his long, jagged, tell-tale scar running down his face, across his dark flesh. You expect him to immediately enter the shelter of another of the numerous huts, but he lingers in the street, conversing and smoking with one of his bodyguards.

This poor bastard is about to get a lead-induced migraine.

The temptation to forego your plan of stealth and infiltration mounts as the warlord continues to present himself as an easy target. Your patience soon wanes, and you slowly, silently slip your high-powered rifle off your shoulder, steadying it on the ground amongst the dry vegetation. Anxious to end the life of this truly evil man, you raise the scope of your weapon to your eye and affix the crosshairs on the villain’s head. After steadying your breathing and adjusting for the distance, there is no hesitation: you pull hard on the trigger, piercing the African night with the sound of your rifle.
Your target’s head erupts in a cloud of red, as the spinning blot of lead bores its way through flesh and bone. Cries of fear and outrage rise up from the village below as men race to their posts, while others run in vain to the warlord’s aid. Somewhere to your left you hear the roar of an engine as the headlights of a Land Rover punctuate the growing darkness. Dropping the rifle, you unshoulder another of your weapons, loading a rocket-propelled grenade into its muzzle. The dry grass around you is instantly ignited as a bright ball of flame leaves your weapon, heading directly toward the headlights of the oncoming vehicle. The resulting explosion is both blinding and deafening as shattered and torn metal rain down to the ground, and more fires are started by the smoldering remains of the vehicle.

Boom! Headshot!

It is in the ensuing chaos and pandemonium that you make your escape, leaving the mercenaries who survived terrified and bewildered. Your weapons no longer seem to burden you as you tear across the wilderness, your legs soaring over the uneven and treacherous landscape, taking you farther and farther away from danger. After putting a few hundred meters between you and the village, you stop to breathe, and you allow yourself a little smile of satisfaction and a sigh of relief. You’ve rid the country of a terrible tyrant – but your task of liberating this country from such vermin has only begun.

In Far Cry 2, the first-person shooter from Ubisoft, you are a mercenary hired to tip the scales in a war-torn African country, and ultimately kill the Jackal, a notorious arms dealer who has single-handedly fueled the fires of war by arming the rival factions. The scenario described above is a very accurate depiction of some of the possible encounters the player may have in the game, as Far Cry 2 provides hours of immersive and extremely open-ended gameplay.

From the very first scene, players will notice the stunning detail and immense beauty of the game’s graphics. The scenery is just about as realistic as it gets, with tall grass and trees swaying in the breeze, casting dynamic shadows on the ground below. Enormous, craggy mountains line the horizon, which prove to be wonderfully detailed when you observe them up close, and you can almost feel the warmth of the sun as it casts its glow on the earth around you. From the landscapes, to the characters, wildlife, vehicles, and weapons, Far Cry 2’s graphics are simply beautiful to behold.

The landscape in Far Cry 2 is simply beautiful.

The physics of the game compliment the graphics nicely. The earth erupts into columns of dirt from the impact of a bullet; trees and other foliage rock and sway convincingly from explosive shock waves; buildings and vegetation shift, crack and crumble from the onslaught of your weapons, and the explosions are just plain awesome. Also, like most FPS games today, Far Cry 2 uses fairly realistic gravity effects and collision detection, further immersing you in an already immersive game world.

While not the Crown Jewel of Far Cry 2, the sound is still quite good. The ambient sounds of the African wilderness (such as birdsong, monkey chatter, and the braying of zebras) accompanied by African-esque tribal music, aptly set the mood for the game. The voice acting is done well enough, featuring many different characters and a variety of accents. Perhaps the biggest letdown with the voice acting, though, is that the dialogue seems incredibly rushed, as if every pause that the voice actors took between words was edited out - the reason for which one can only speculate. The voice-overs are a rarity found mostly between missions, and the game’s other sound effects more than make up for their shortcomings. The weapons, vehicles, and combat sounds are all excellent and very believable.

Fact: The explosions in Far Cry 2 are extremely frickin' cool.

Far Cry 2’s gameplay is, in a way, both its strongest and its weakest points. For the most part players are given an incredible amount of freedom with which to accomplish their missions. Gun shops provide you with a wide variety of weapons: from rocket and grenade launchers, to submachine guns, light machineguns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, pistols, and a flamethrower. You are able to carry one primary weapon (an assault rifle, sniper rifle, flamethrower or some types of submachine guns), a secondary weapon (pistols, submachine guns, or a particular type of grenade launcher), and a special weapon (rocket or grenade launchers, light machineguns, or the tranquilizer rifle). Your arsenal is supplemented by hand grenades, Molotov cocktails, and a machete for close quarters. Such a layout with so many options and combinations make you quite the formidable foe.

The storyline is carried out through a series of missions that seem repetitive in their premise, but prove to be potentially diverse in their execution. You are usually given the job to assassinate or blow up a specific target, which you can perform in a few different ways. Depending on the gear available, you could hammer your enemies from a distance with explosives, and then leisurely rummage through their remains for useful items; snipe the soldiers from afar, then go in for the main kill; silently sneak into the encampment with silenced weapons; or you could do it the old fashioned way and run right in, guns blazing, hoping the bad guys drop dead before you do (or any combination of the above). The many different methods of accomplishing your goals are incredibly entertaining, and almost never get old.

Guess he won't be needing that Jeep anymore... dibs!

There are a few minor downsides to the gameplay, however. In an apparent attempt to create a more realistic shooter experience, the game’s developers threw some curveballs into the combat mechanics. For instance, during a firefight your gun might randomly jam, forcing you to withdraw from the fight to un-jam your weapon. This might seem like a cool and unique feature at first, but after a while it simply becomes an irritating distraction. Likewise, your character’s constant need to find and consume medicine to combat bouts of malaria can be a major downer when the action heats up. Perhaps the most irritating of all, however, is the all-but-broken stealth mechanics.

In similar games (such as Crysis or even the original Far Cry), players are rewarded for stealthily killing their enemies from thick brush, and are able to sneak up on a foe undetected, dispatch them, then move on to the next without alerting their enemies (if done correctly). In Far Cry 2, however, your cover is blown with the first guy you kill. Even using the more stealthy weapons (such as the silenced pistol, silenced MP5, or machete) will alert every single enemy in the area as soon as you kill them, giving the player no real incentive to use stealth at all. Furthermore, it seems as if the enemies are more efficient at using cover than you are, as they tend to pick you off from behind trees, bushes, grass, and even solid walls, whilst remaining completely hidden from your eyes.

Dark, murky swamps like this one should provide an ideal place for stealth combat. Unfortunately, it just doesn't work that way in Far Cry 2.

One of the most alluring aspects of playing video games is the fact that most give you a super-human feeling, allowing you to get the best of your enemy using your skills of stealth and hand-eye coordination, and it is in this very aspect that Far Cry 2 is fairly disappointing. It is a letdown, no doubt, but the other excellent qualities of the game more than make up for this. FPS fans will walk away with several memorable moments that are truly unique to this game, and if given the chance, Far Cry 2 should prove to be a wildly engrossing, entertaining game that is well worth the price.