Far Cry 2 Review

Generally speaking, the missions in Far Cry 2 will send you to fairly similar set-pieces in various bases throughout the map. Here you'll have to methodically take out the occupying soldiers before retrieving an item, eliminating a target or blowing up an object. Side missions of this sort are also on offer to bolster your diamond stack and can be accessed from radio antennas across the landscape. This could have become pretty repetitive, but Ubisoft Montreal has done a good job of adding enough variation to stop this from happening. This comes in the form of environments that differ widely in their appearance and challenge, a difficulty level that's dialled up at a well balanced rate, and the odd storyline curveball that's chucked in to keep things fresh (e.g. being sent to a palace to assassinate a king and retrieve his ring, an order that's given to you by his son).   

All of this eventually leads you closer to the Jackal (Far Cry 2's answer to Kurtz), who you actually meet at the start of the game where you discover that your character has malaria. Taking pills for this illness (which apparently makes you dizzy when you run) is part of another grating feature in the game, although more progress will make you realise why Ubisoft Montreal put it in there and, to the developers' credit, they were right to do so. But we digress. Getting back to the Jackal, similarly to how Kurtz emerges in the Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola's referential epic, the Jackal starts out as an amoral arms dealer who uses war, poverty, and famine to line his pockets. Crucially, you meet the Jackal (once again fleetingly) in the dramatic switchover between the first and second map. With the few sentences he utters at this point you begin to see method in his madness and ask yourself whether he's quite the megalomaniacal sociopath he's been depicted as. It's a fitting homage to Kurtz and a sterling job by the game's writer, Susan O'Connor (of Bioshock and Gears of War fame).

There's tons of other cool stuff we just don't have the space to delve deeply into here: the propagating fire dynamics, which allow you to trap enemy soldiers in a corner before chucking a couple of grenades into their confined space, work brilliantly. Similarly, the hang gliders that are hidden in hard to reach parts of the game are also pretty special. Needless to say there's a lot of different ways to enjoy yourself in Far Cry 2 - you really just have to get hold of the game and experience it for yourself (before replaying it to go through all the story-arcs that you missed first time around).

Puzzling Omission

There are a few things that either didn't reach our full expectations or additions that could've been made to improve the gameplay. AI, for example, was pretty shaky at times as enemies would occasionally fail to notice we were right in front of them or were somehow shooting us even though their gun was pointing in the other direction. In fact, their sharpshooting was a little too sharp at times and seemed to rely more on the probability of us being shot depending on our proximity to the enemy, rather than bullets actually being rendered in real time. Generally speaking though, the bad guys tended to be pretty sharp. They could seek us out pretty quickly and would find cover convincingly, making their behaviour stimulating enough for even the most ardent fan of stealth.

Additionally, it would've been good to see a few traditional FPS puzzle solving elements in the game and as it is there are very few. This would undoubtedly have been much more difficult for the developers to integrate into an open world than it is in the scripted structure of other FPS games, but we couldn't help but feel there were a few missed opportunities in Far Cry 2. One of the closing chapters to the first map, for example, leads you to a hidden base at Goka Falls. It turned out that the base actually wasn't that well hidden on the top of a slight incline. On the other hand, if the base was in a cave behind the waterfall or you had to walk across the river over a series of fallen trees to get there, then that would certainly have got our puzzle feelers twitching pleasurably.

Far Cry 2 is absolutely packed full of content even if you don't count the replay value of finding out the different plot-arcs and all of the other buddies in the game. When you count all the side missions, hidden diamond cases, and objectives for unlocking new guns, the amount of gameplay hours is much more in the region of a sandbox game than an FPS. Even the main campaign by itself will offer over 20 hours of gaming for most players. And then there's the multiplayer, which has three different modes for up to 16 players to indulge in. As well as the usual capture the flag and deathmatch modes, there's also a lovechild of control point and VIP gameplay called Uprising that adds something new to the mix, while a simple but effective class system keeps things rolling along well (check out our multiplayer preview for a more in-depth analysis). 

However, by far the biggest star of the show for multiplayer will be the map editor. This system is powerful enough to give you free reign over everything from landscapes, destructable objects, explosive canisters, water tables, and hang gliders, but also accessible enough that my mum could use it (albeit with an afternoon of initiation). User generated content is hitting the web from users across the pond as I write this and no doubt their creations will be ready to wow us when the game is released here on Friday.

If that's the star of the multiplayer show, then the star of the single-player game is the graphics. Far Cry 2's depiction of African jungle and savannah environments borders on high art at times. We often found ourselves forward-winding time at a safe house (using the day/night cycle) to dusk or dawn just so we could watch the sunlight dance over sedate trees, rock faces cutting across the horizon, and tranquil desert planes. It really does have to be seen to be believed. You will come across a few textbook examples of pop-up and glitching at times, but this is understandable in such a vast FPS game world that's constantly streaming high-res visuals. We played a build of the Xbox 360 version for this review, which we suspect might be slightly less visually dazzling than the PC game, but it's still the best graphics you'll find in a console FPS game by a long way.

The sound is another well orchestrated part of the game, with the chatter system and character dialogue being particularly worthy of a mention. As we got further into the game, we began to here enemy NPCs chatter as we approached their position. "I hear he worked in the CIA", we heard one of them say while others nervously debated where we'd disappeared to - it made us feel pretty stealthy. The level of depth in the dialogue between your buddies is also pretty impressive. We had two women as our main buddies at one point and had our egos pumped as one buddy warned us about the other one's "Thrill seeker ways" in a distinctly jealous tone. Put this to the backdrop of a classical score with strong African overtones that reacts to moments of serenity and high-octane action, and you've got a winning combination.