Far Cry 2 (2008)

As much as I’ve been looking forward to finishing this game off The 26, I was also dreading the write-up. Far Cry 2 is an incredibly mixed bag of features, annoyances, disappointments, satisfaction, and fun. In contrast to the island landscape of its predecessor though, the most obvious thing about Far Cry 2 is its African setting. With environmental backdrops running the gamut from jungles to savannahs, ramshackle camps and established villages, a desert oasis, rocky cliffs, and everything set against a beautiful day/night cycle with varied weather, the world of Far Cry 2 still looks amazing nearly ten years later.

But right off the bat, getting fully immersed into that world brings its own challenges. Long story short, here’s a Steam Community guide. This adds what should be free content through a registry edit (because Ubisoft’s servers rarely, if ever, work anymore, even with legitimate codes), fixes some potential bugs, and (optionally) makes the game look “better” (I opted not to use any “SweetFX” – I prefer playing games as the creators envisioned). Also, take the guide-writer’s machete-advocate stance with a grain of salt – it’s fun, but for a first run on Infamous difficulty, guns are often better. Apart from a few jeep-driving physics and death bugs, and the un-fixable Jackal tapes (after you keep getting the boots message, just listen to all the others online – they’re good, and don’t really spoil much of anything), that’s it for my in-game technical issues. Outside of the game though, the save files can eat up your hard drive space ridiculously and unnecessarily fast. Every so often, I had to take the save files and zip them up into a tiny fraction of the size to save space – it would have been really nice to have FC2 compress them on its own.

With that out of the way, finally… I can talk about the game! The game is amazing. Playing on Infamous difficulty, it’s also fairly tough, but this just seems to emphasize the realism the creators were going for – a few bullets and you’re dead. Granted, repairing vehicles on fire with a torque wrench and healing nearly all wounds with an injection is blatantly unrealistic, but so are quick-saves – it’s still a game, not a simulator. A lot of what I liked about the game is, strangely, what I liked about Jagged Alliance 2 (an old 2D isometric turn-based tactical squad game, not unlike X-COM, but in a third-world dictatorship setting). The realistic gun options presented real choices about tactics, whether I wanted to go in guns-blazing with extra explosives, in stealthy silence as a saboteur, as a total pyromaniac wielding a flamethrower and molotovs (the fire effects in the game are, as many a review has said, amazing), or with a basic all-around soldier load-out. And there’s just enough ammo to make conserving it a consideration without ever feeling like I was getting screwed by the game instead of my own planning. Enemy-dropped weapons and mounted guns help with that too, and resorting to the enemy’s crappy weapons adds a little more excitement to the firefights. The driving and boating mechanics all work quite well, and although the map is large, it’s not so large that you feel too inconvenienced if you have to resort to moving on foot or swimming. The bus stations offer an occasional quick-travel option for covering the larger distances quickly. I was a little disappointed that I never got to fly any planes though.

And on the negative side of things… those respawning enemies. After a short time, after you clear out a camp, everyone comes back. I think, going in knowing about them, and having tried to play this game before years ago (got decently far… maybe a quarter of the way through), they didn’t bother me as much this time around until the late game where I was just tired of it. And I really didn’t have much of a problem with vehicles chasing me either (I’m wondering if that was toned down in a patch). Weapons wearing out was perfectly fine – I kinda liked that aspect, actually. Every single enemy having insane Predator-sight and telepathic radar however, was extremely annoying and broke immersion. Other aspects of the AI somewhat made up for it (general searching around, trying to help injured friends, and good, if repetitive, mid-combat dialog, etc.). The main thing I wish there was more of was wildlife. There’s zebras, water buffalo, gazelles, and a few farm animals and flocks of birds, but this is Africa! Where are the lions? The rhinos? The elephants, giraffes, hyenas, hippos, leopards, flamingos, monkeys, and more? And every time you do encounter the few animals that are out there, they seem to intentionally attempt suicide in front of your vehicles. And the malaria effect was… just… annoying.

So with all this… world… around you, what are you actually doing? That’s… a good question. Ostensibly, you’re here in the middle of an African civil war to take out the arms supplier – The Jackal – to put an end to the fighting. But every mission you take in an attempt to get closer to him just leads to more violence and arms deals. You aren’t really much of a “good guy” in this game. But neither are you necessarily a “bad guy”, and I think this is where the story both falls flat and resonates. It falls flat in that you, as a player, don’t have much choice in the matter. But it resonates because it’s fairly realistic… you can imagine the same shit going down in real life, with similar consequences. On the plus side, I do feel like the game had a satisfying ending, without being either cliche or stupid. On the minus side, my emotional investment in the whole thing was nearly moot. What I was really doing, what I was really here for, was to explore the world, collect diamonds to buy weapons, and shoot stuff. And there’s plenty of that.

Some stats: played as Marty, found 770 of 1000 diamonds, only 19/40 side missions done, 12/12 buddy missions done, only eight buddies met, all manuals and equipment purchased, all weapons unlocked, but only bought seventeen of them, 210 wounds healed, 20,625 shots fired (17% accuracy), 179 km traveled on foot, 201 km driven, and 4 km swam over just 15 in-game days and 45.5 gameplay hours over the course of two real-life months. Cost me $7.49, along with the original Far Cry, on Steam in 2011.

• Far Cry 2
  #10 of 26 (2017)

  66 hours playtime

  no achievements