No one really knows what happened to Jack Carver, the macho oozing
Hawaiian shirt wearing tit of a protagonist that graced our screens in
the original Far Cry. A man who after having 400 mercenary's shoot at
him and him still surviving in the understatement of the century says,
this isn't my day. However it's probably safe to say that no one really cared what happened to him either. However Ubisoft just couldn't completely let go to JC, even if it was only subcounciously, two of their characters look exactly like Jack Carver, and the others are either starkly out of place or forgettable to say the least. (an IRA Squeler and the token black guy come to mind) Thankfully your character is silent throughout the game *sigh*
meaning you can insert quick witted quips after shooting someone with a
shotgun in the head and muttering something about unleashing your load
on their face...
The game starts off with a very annoying talkative cab driver, just
like the ones you'd find here in London, he doesn't seem to notice that
you don't really fancy talking, so instead he makes up for your silence
by talking about pretty much everything he sees, which may be
informative for some but the less retarded of us would probably find
annoying. Why thank you Mr Cab Driver, I did indeed NOT know that the
weird metal object floating in the sky was a plane... In other words,
Far Cry 2 does not get off to a great start. However the setting of the game initially shows a lot of promise, although Far Cry has jumped on the africa setting Band Wagon that hollywood and other games have created (Resident Evil 5, Blood Diamond, Last King of Scotland (confusing title i know, but you're going to have to trust me on this one, it's about Uganda i think...)
That said it doesn't exactly get much better from then on, towards the
end of your cab ride, you fall sick with malaria, (the mosquitos
probably thought they ought to put you out of your misery instead of
letting you suffer for much longer) and you end up on a hotel bed
drowsy and weak, taunted by the man you actually came into this country
to kill. An elusive arms dealer named the jackal, now the story gets
slightly better here but then it seems to disappear for most the game.
I could never quite understand why in order to kill The Jackal, you had
to do some completely unrelated missions before going after him,
personally I'd rather grab my shotgun and go Dick Cheney on his arse
instead of getting some faction guy's shopping, blowing up a van then
getting a weaker gun than the one I originally had to finally kill the
bastard. But I guess that's just so we don't feel ripped off by this
game. However I really would have liked to see in the first five
minutes you actually come into a country and achieve what you set you
out to do. Seeing as you meet The Jackal in the first five minutes of
the game (in which he gives you a gun) wouldn't it have been great for
your character to just turn round and blow his brains out and then the
game complete screen to come up?
Far Cry's Graphics are great, the lighting is particularly impressive,
however the real star of the show is the fire, the fire in the game,
although ugly at times, spreads extremely realistically, and being a
dry season, it spreads gloriously. The character models can be good, on
some of the enemies they are shoddy however, but overall it does the job of
keeping you immersed. One thing that frustrated me was the lack of
ability to see anything underwater, meaning you didn't have a clue what
was going on when you were holding your breath. The screen would also
sometimes go fuzzy when you ran for long periods, now I don't know
about you relatively obese people out there, but when I run, even if
it's for a ridiculously long time, my heart beat raises, I sweat, I
sometimes shake, but I NEVER GET FUZZY EYESIGHT. What was the need
Ubisoft? Honestly...
The game play in Far cry two is ok, it really doesn't compare to the
original, there is some latency on the controller meaning that often
you will swing a few cm's off your target even if you stop aiming
physically, however thankfully FC2 has 'borrowed' ideas from other
games such as when aiming down the iron sights, your automatically snap
on to a nearby enemy. The game has a few cool features, like the
sliding into cover, and switching from driving to a turret with the
touch of a button using some really slick animations. However the
reason the game takes so long to complete is that the maps are huge,
too big in fact, you spend more time driving around than you do
anything else, which for an FPS is not a good thing... The truth is
that Far Cry 2 cannot decide on what it wants to be, ending up exactly
where its predecessor left off, a schizophrenic experience. On one hand
it aims to be realistic, even eliminating the much needed reticule by
default, *although the reticule is awful even when on so you aren't
really missing much. To navigate you have an awful map that is hard to
look at and move, every now and then you have to take malaria pills,
which again is frustrating and when you are seriously hurt you do a
cool animation to fix things back into place, like removing bullet
wounds etc. But on the other hand, there is a great whopping health
bar, one injection cures you back to full life, there is an ammo
counter, and enemies take five or six shots to down(even though they are unarmoured, and that's not
just my bad aiming, that's how many hits they take to kill. If this
game intends to be realistic, than why doesn't Africa create a united
army and take over the world, they don't even need body armour! The
amount of hits these guys can take...
The main problem in Far Cry 2 is that the AI is awful There is also a noticible lack of friendly ai, everyone attacks you except your buddies. And your buddies
although useful at times, often die on you in a missions, and I was
particularly attached to one Algerian buddy only to have him get
mortally wounded three times, I saved him each time but on the 4th time
I shot his brains out myself. Cruel? Probably, needed? Definitely. I
personally imagined that the guy I was putting out of its misery was
one of the lead AI designers at Ubisoft. Sometimes your buddy seems to
get shot out of nowhere, even though you haven't been shot at, leading
you to question if your so called friend accidentally shot himself in
the chest when holding his rifle backwards...
Which leads me onto yet another problem, aside from the controller
latency issues, the gunplay in Far Cry 2 is mediocre at best, crappy if
I'm being honest. Enemies are hard to see during the day, even harder
to see at night. And most of them wield a shotgun that can hit you from
a mile away, they all seem to have welded binoculars onto their eyes as
they'll see and hit me ages before I even know where they are. (For
reference I played this on normal difficulty.) The guns all feel as
though they are lacking power, and some guns make you think that you
are probably better off just using your blunt machete, you'd probably
get them killed quicker...
Overall Far Cry 2 isn't a bad game, but it isn't a good game either,
instead fading into the grey line of mediocrity, like Cher, or my
homework. Its gunplay mechanics are average at best, and although it is
a really good looking game, nothing really justifies the price tag. It
feels like a half developed game, it's got a few good features, but the
rest needs polish and some of it needs a lot of work (AI Team I'm
looking at you here.) I couldn't recommend it to anyone as a good shoot
em up, not even a deaf dumb and blind kid, as I get the feeling that
even they would sense somehow that the game they are playing is crud.
