Community Blog (totalcaligula) - Far Cry 2 Review

We have a new reviews subsection in the video games part of the forum now. We already have several reviews submitted by the community, and I hope that the everyone keeps producing quality content like this. Here is one of those reviews from now.

totalcaligula

"Far Cry 2 was amazing, but it wasn’t for me.

A few months ago by now, I picked up a copy of Far Cry 2 and began to play. Then a few hours later I stopped as I had run out of malaria pills. In the few hours that I first played it I was blown away by many things. Far Cry 2 is without doubt a groundbreaking game. The level of detail is amazing, quite simply one of the nicest looking gaming environments I have ever seen. The gunplay elements are as well, top-notch. The voice acting and the characters are decent enough and the ‘buddy’ system excitedly me greatly. But sadly, at the end of my gaming session I was unable to enjoy any of these amazing qualities as they were drowned within a sea of shoddy game play features and mechanics. It saddens me that a game can do so much, so well and yet not allow me to fully enjoy them.

I am all for expansive game worlds. And believe me when I say that this world is enormous. 50km2 according to the gamebox and I am inclined to believe that statement. But to me the whole point of having a world of that size is to enjoy traveling through it. I however did not. Being an “open world” game I am almost expected, as a gamer to travel to every corner of the map in a quest to see everything the game has to offer; however I could think of nothing I would rather do less. Here is why. If you have played the vehicle sequences in Half-Life 2 then you have played the same type of vehicular control as is in this game. You have played the same unchangeable view from the characters eyes within the vehicle and the same shoddy car handling and physics. I know that this is all supposed to further the immersion factor within the game but I just don’t think it works well.

I found myself dreading accepting missions because I knew that it would mean having to travel all the way to the other side of the map, and there is none a more frustrating activity than this. This is made frustrating not by just the sheer distance that needs to be traversed to start the mission, but by the fact that you are stopped at least once a minute by either a patrolling jeep or an enemy checkpoint. In each of these situations you are forced to kill all the attacking enemies, unfortunately not having the option to realistically escape from these maniac drivers. After you have shot up said bad guys, you will likely have to repair your vehicle by getting out of your car, going to the bonnet and holding a button until your character decides he has tightened the same screw enough. This has the effect of bringing your car to apparently factory perfect condition again. Now some of you may say that sounds cool, and to be honest, the first time it happened I thought that way too. But when this happens every minute or so it starts to get mighty annoying.

Can I also say, despite the map being huge you will only ever use about 20% of it in your adventure. Namely the settlements and the roads connecting them. And try as you might to go off-road, the terrain is too uneven and the vehicles too uncouth to stray off the path.

The step away from the current trend of “lose health then go suck your thumb in a corner until you feel better” is a welcome change. Instead you have a limited amount of syrettes, which restore your health when used. If your health drops too low you enter a bleed out situation in which you have to stabilise your injuries before using a syrette, which is shown with a random animation of your character removing a bullet with a knife or suchlike. If you lose all your health then that is when the buddy system kicks in. On missions you can have one of your buddies ready to save you should you need it. This takes the form of your buddy arriving to take you to safety whenever you succumb to your wounds. You then proceed to win the battle with the help of your buddy (who by the way, once dies is gone for good).

In contrast to the finely done health and buddy system, there is the dreaded malaria aspect of the game. Early in the game you contract malaria and are forced to keep this under control for the rest of the game. When you have a malaria attack your vision is obscured and your movements impaired. To combat this effect and to prevent your character from collapsing you are forced to take a malaria pill every 30-40 minutes of real time. My gripe is that the people who supply you with these malaria pills will send on an annoying and long mission to the other side of the map. Your reward, if you’re lucky maybe 2 pills. Having to worry about my malaria pill situation and enjoying the game was too much for me and as such when I ran out of pills I stopped playing.

It saddens me to find so much wrong with a game, but this is the type of game that you will either love or hate. If you can get past the annoyances that are apparent, this will be one of the greatest games you have played your entire life."


Keep up the good work.

Brad