Farcry 2 developed by Ubisoft is a FPS that has you destabilize small African nations, and as a rule, there is nothing I love more than destabilizing small African nations. So I picked it up despite all of the terrible reviews that I?d read for it. I quickly found not all of the hate was well deserved.
Many reviews complain about the missions being too repetitive: go here, kill this guy; or go here, steal/blow up this shit. On a very basic level this is true; the missions can be repetitive. However, the missions only really play the same if you choose to play them the same. Sure you can go into every mission with three automatic weapons and a dozen or so grenades bouncing across your chest as you drive straight to the center of whatever mud-encrusted shantytown you are about to utterly annihilate, but that?s your choice. You can play every mission as a superhuman Rambo if you want, but what I enjoyed was the fact that each mission is open enough to allow you take whatever approach you want. You can find a nice grassy knoll to pick off every living thing in town with your high-powered sniper rifle before setting foot within a mile of the town; or you can sneak in from the back alleyways in the dead of night armed only with a silenced pistol and some incredible balls. Long story short, the array of weapons and the open environment give you enough room to choose your approach, and change that approach every mission, so even if the missions are repetitive the game play doesn?t have to be.
Other things I enjoyed:
Cars ? useful, even in combat, at least until later in the game where every enemy camp is armed with at least one explosive weapon.
Visuals- looked great even if my video card(s) started coughing up blood
Fire ? Yes it?s a gimmick, but it was pretty fun to watch fire spread through a town as the militia ran in every direction, into the scope of my sniper rifle.
Minor complaints:
Buildings ? why did they take out the destructible buildings from crisis? (Yes I know, different developers, but still).
Respawning outposts ? This would be okay, I could see the game getting really boring without it, but it became a nuisance because A) they?re at every crossroads B) The respawn time/distance is ridiculously short.
Impressively stupid AI ? I played this game on the hardest difficulty and I still found myself taking on platoons of militia/mercenaries, with fully automatic weapons, armed only with my pistol. If you?ve ever played an FPS before and know how to aim you won?t really need to worry about dieing until the second half of the game, and even then its pretty hard to do. Maybe these difficulties are geared more towards console FPS where aiming is more difficult? BTW did I mention I played this on PC?
So up to this point you?re probably thinking ?well, this sounds like a pretty sweet game? WRONG. While much of the criticism this game receives isn?t really deserved in my opinion, It really is not worth buying for one reason; the glitches. They started off small at first, memory holes where my FPS would drop and my CPU would start crying while looking at a (apparently) particularly intense corner of a room. Then issues with enemies being rendered inside of world geometry. It was less of an annoyance when they were only partially in, and I could still see parts of their bodies to shoot at. But all too often they were fully inside of hills or cliffs perfectly capable of shooting at me, but leaving me unable to hurt them even if I could find out exactly where I was being shot at; ever seen a cliff shoot a rocket at you? It?s quite remarkable. Then after spending hours of my life and 30 of my hard earned dollars, the game stubbornly refused to let me finish it. My mission was to rescue some hostage from some mud hut village, no big deal. Funny story though. When I had successfully, and mercilessly cut the last breath out of everything in the village I went to reuse the hostage only to find she was in another castle? no actually my super-indestructible-badass- tough-as-nails-eats mercenary just forgot how to open doors. I stood there dumbfounded as my character stubbornly refused to unbolt the single lock that kept me from the hostage. I saved, reloaded my game; left-came back; jumped up and down, killed my self in fire and grenades; loaded a save farther back, but nothing worked. With no option to abandon the mission, and no way to accept other missions while working on this one, my game was stuck at 67%. Online research revealed this to be a large, known problem with the game (though usually at a very specific spot at 88% of the way trough the game). Ubisoft has yet to release any sort of patch for this problem, so until then, don?t touch this game.
Many reviews complain about the missions being too repetitive: go here, kill this guy; or go here, steal/blow up this shit. On a very basic level this is true; the missions can be repetitive. However, the missions only really play the same if you choose to play them the same. Sure you can go into every mission with three automatic weapons and a dozen or so grenades bouncing across your chest as you drive straight to the center of whatever mud-encrusted shantytown you are about to utterly annihilate, but that?s your choice. You can play every mission as a superhuman Rambo if you want, but what I enjoyed was the fact that each mission is open enough to allow you take whatever approach you want. You can find a nice grassy knoll to pick off every living thing in town with your high-powered sniper rifle before setting foot within a mile of the town; or you can sneak in from the back alleyways in the dead of night armed only with a silenced pistol and some incredible balls. Long story short, the array of weapons and the open environment give you enough room to choose your approach, and change that approach every mission, so even if the missions are repetitive the game play doesn?t have to be.
Other things I enjoyed:
Cars ? useful, even in combat, at least until later in the game where every enemy camp is armed with at least one explosive weapon.
Visuals- looked great even if my video card(s) started coughing up blood
Fire ? Yes it?s a gimmick, but it was pretty fun to watch fire spread through a town as the militia ran in every direction, into the scope of my sniper rifle.
Minor complaints:
Buildings ? why did they take out the destructible buildings from crisis? (Yes I know, different developers, but still).
Respawning outposts ? This would be okay, I could see the game getting really boring without it, but it became a nuisance because A) they?re at every crossroads B) The respawn time/distance is ridiculously short.
Impressively stupid AI ? I played this game on the hardest difficulty and I still found myself taking on platoons of militia/mercenaries, with fully automatic weapons, armed only with my pistol. If you?ve ever played an FPS before and know how to aim you won?t really need to worry about dieing until the second half of the game, and even then its pretty hard to do. Maybe these difficulties are geared more towards console FPS where aiming is more difficult? BTW did I mention I played this on PC?
So up to this point you?re probably thinking ?well, this sounds like a pretty sweet game? WRONG. While much of the criticism this game receives isn?t really deserved in my opinion, It really is not worth buying for one reason; the glitches. They started off small at first, memory holes where my FPS would drop and my CPU would start crying while looking at a (apparently) particularly intense corner of a room. Then issues with enemies being rendered inside of world geometry. It was less of an annoyance when they were only partially in, and I could still see parts of their bodies to shoot at. But all too often they were fully inside of hills or cliffs perfectly capable of shooting at me, but leaving me unable to hurt them even if I could find out exactly where I was being shot at; ever seen a cliff shoot a rocket at you? It?s quite remarkable. Then after spending hours of my life and 30 of my hard earned dollars, the game stubbornly refused to let me finish it. My mission was to rescue some hostage from some mud hut village, no big deal. Funny story though. When I had successfully, and mercilessly cut the last breath out of everything in the village I went to reuse the hostage only to find she was in another castle? no actually my super-indestructible-badass- tough-as-nails-eats mercenary just forgot how to open doors. I stood there dumbfounded as my character stubbornly refused to unbolt the single lock that kept me from the hostage. I saved, reloaded my game; left-came back; jumped up and down, killed my self in fire and grenades; loaded a save farther back, but nothing worked. With no option to abandon the mission, and no way to accept other missions while working on this one, my game was stuck at 67%. Online research revealed this to be a large, known problem with the game (though usually at a very specific spot at 88% of the way trough the game). Ubisoft has yet to release any sort of patch for this problem, so until then, don?t touch this game.
