Review: Farcry 2

Farcry 2 is a game possessed with the belief that the player is allowed to freely wander about this undisclosed African nation and perform whatever mercenary actions they feel like making. However, this is not the game that I was presented.

On first loading up Farcry, I was presented with a wide selection of choices for characters that was quickly turned meaningless by the first person perspective of gameplay. Then I enjoyed a wonderful ten minutes of "strapped to a rail" in the back of a jeep watching the only narrative delivery I would receive for the first half of the game: I caught malaria, my enemy knows I'm there, and he decided to spare my life for giggles.

Following this lovely sequence, I'm thrown into this fictional African nation and given so little direction on what I'm doing and how I'm going to do it that I am left holding the controller stating, "I'm so confused." I say this so many times that I think I temporarily lost the rest of my vocabulary over it.

After fighting through difficult to read instructions and a short combat sequence where I lose 3/5 of my health in less than two seconds, I am left to my own sandboxy devices. Now normally I don't mind being left to my own sandboxy devices as long as I can determine where exactly in the sandbox I am, and where I want to go. Here is where Farcry 2 met a significant failing.

The map system provided to the player is exceptionally unique, you have a digital map connected to an actually rendered GPS system. However, at any given time the GPS/map system cannot be seen unless it is specifically called up. Even when it is called up for viewing, it only takes up maybe 1/3 of the screen, making it exceptionally difficult to see and use.

The map swiftly becomes impossible to use efficiently. Ever try driving with a map paper map open in real life? Ever not have a clue where you are and really need to know where you are going, but the map is just not easy to see and drive with at the same time? If not you can experience this in Farcry 2.

Not only can you NOT see where you want to go without taking your eyes off the road, but it is quite likely that the moment you do one of three things will happen. One: you will run yourself off the road and crash your car, likely disabling it; two: you will run into a guard post full of people who want to kill you without hesitation and will do it within a matter of seconds if you are not careful; or three: you'll realize that the pretty landscapes and terrain distracted you sufficiently from your path, and that the road you needed to turn down was actually three guard stations back. Which, I might add, have all respawned their enemy occupants.

Here is where I felt Farcry 2 met another great failing, their combat isn't fair to the player. Not only is the CPU unerringly accurate, but unlike humans, it isn't hurt by the beautiful terrain actually providing cover. Cover doesn't exist for the CPU unless you happen to have bought a very expensive sniper camo suit. Which doesn't make any sense to me as a player because my enemies lack said expensive camo suit and I often could not find them in a stand of trees unless they were actively firing at me and broadcasting their locations with muzzle flashes. I found this highly realistic, but the realism came at a price.

In fact, much of the game is actually too realistic to be fun. Cars fail incredibly quickly when they are being shot at. My character would die within seconds if numerous enemies opened fire on me at once regardless of if I was in a car or not. Traveling anywhere is a long and tedious process because it is simply so hard to navigate the dirt roads of a jungle in this fictional African country. Gun jamming is included in the game, but it happens so frequently in the field because you don't always have the opportunity to return to your storehouse and pick up a fresh gun. Did I mention gun jams also usually happened at the wost possible moment?

And all the while I repeat to myself, "I am so confused." The messages being sent to me by the game kept contradicting itself. The game is about chasing down some gun baron, but not a single mission I performed had anything to do with getting me closer to my target, while being repetitive and boring at the same time.

Combat and travel were so realistic I dreaded crossing the massive map if I was told to do so, but healing and repairing a car were single button fixes. All resources were so limited that I had to ration bullets, healing and even on occasion my magical malaria pills that protected me from menacing and debilitating malaria attacks, but I could pick up a car, a mounted machine gun and one randomly selected resource (usually grenades or Molotov cocktails) at every single checkpoint.

Everywhere I looked I was confronted by a brutally realistic look and feel to the game only to be slapped in the face with something completely simplified, dumbed down and easy. You could spend ten minutes of real time hunting down and slaying 5 'terrorists' at any random checkpoint because it was necessary simply to protect yourself. Then you would drive away and be back less than two minutes later in real time to a completely respawned, renewed, rearmed, and equally annoying checkpoint that you may have left only moments before.

Ultimately, the game attempted to present itself as a gritty and realistic FPS RPG adventure in a fictional African nation, but all it presented was a game that was a frustrating, repetitive, and horrible in its implementation of realistic game qualities. Oh, and did I mention that the writing for the entire game was horrible? Yeah, its bad, I'm not even sure I want to go into how thoroughly they abuse the player with poor dialog and exceptionally poor voice acting.