Far Cry 2 Review

9.0

Format PlayStation 3

Developer Ubisoft

Publisher Ubisoft

Genre First Person Shooter

14 Comments

I'm lurking in the long grass of the African savannah, waiting for a convoy to approach. In this place, remaining unseen can be effortless. You're almost engulfed in the endless landscape and any noises you make are easily drowned out by the deafening roar of the jungle.

Surprise is well on my side as I ready the rocket launcher. The oncoming motorcade, led at a crawl by the Popular Resistance's chief of police, won't know what's hit it when I pull the trigger.

Seconds later and all that remains is a series of burning wrecks and an angry mob of survivors stampeding up the hill toward me. In this game, even a couple of enemies can easily get the better of you. It's almost always better to make a quick getaway, or use strategy, rather than taking them head-on. The most obvious escape route here is a thirty-foot leap down into the river below. It's times like these when you feel like you're caught in the middle of an adventure movie.

By today's standards Far Cry 2 is a challenging game. It's also a breath of fresh air to those who feel patronised by recharging energy bars and auto-saves every few minutes. Those things just wouldn't work in this context. This is about survival - pure and simple.

Almost every element of the game's design is driven toward realism. The first realisation to hit you is that your character, one of eight playable mercenaries, is anything but a one-man army. When you take a bullet, you literally have to pluck it out with tweezers to prevent yourself from bleeding to death. Some might argue that this process is 'just another animation', but not when you actually have to think about it and make sure you're in cover before attempting the procedure.

Stocking up on medicine before going into battle is key, because this isn't the kind of shooter where defeated bad guys drop medi kits. Before entering combat, you're encouraged to recon enemy encampments using a telescope. This automatically marks on your map where the medicine and ammo dumps are located. After that, it's at your discretion on how to handle the mission.

Stealthy players will get just as much of a buzz than Rambo-types. The most cerebral of all will wait it out, exploiting the game's 24-hour light cycle to attack under cover of darkness.

Far Cry 2 is undoubtedly one of the first first-person shooters to reward stealth play without incorporating it as a gimmicky mandatory feature. In Far Cry 2 you always have a choice. Choices are often just a step away from agonising dilemmas. It's only possible to carry three weapons at a time, and ammo is in extremely short supply. On the other hand, the game certainly doesn't skimp with the degree of firepower. Within 20 minutes you'll have access to flame throwers, RPGs and sniper rifles. It's almost an incitement to kill everything in sight.

However, a superb element of realism is that you can't always trust the weapons you find on the battlefield. They're worn down and unreliable, and there's visible deterioration the more you use them. It eventually reaches the point where they start jamming. Not something you want in the middle of a gunfight.

Don't panic. This sounds frustrating, but a successful merc will soon be able to purchase brand new guns and as much ammo as he can possibly carry. Payment comes courtesy of two opposing and warring factions, neither of which know or particularly care who you work for.

It's difficult to say what your character stands for in a moral sense. He's very much like Martin Sheen's character in the film Apocalypse Now, hunting down an evil man who seems to be pulling the strings. There isn't any right or wrong - the game deftly sidesteps any misjudged preachiness - merely the difference between efficient and reckless.

You're possibly the only one who wants him dead. War is profit after all. On the plus side, allies will gather around you if there's money to be made. The other mercenary characters (the ones you didn't pick at the start) will eventually become your buddies as your reputation increases. Their most useful function is offering alternative mission strategies. Slightly confusingly, these methods are more difficult than the straightforward route, although your reputation increases faster.

In all honesty, I'd have rather the allies offer strategies to make things simpler, particularly because you have to go out
of your way to recruit them in the first place. This is undeniably a labour-intensive game and some people may find that particularly off-putting. Others will relish in its ferocity.

Far Cry 2 turns laborious acts like repairing a damaged car engine into a feature. This works because even something mundane can become terrifying under a hail of AK-47 fire. Almost every action, from taking a mission dossier from an employer to moving between seats in a jeep is comprehensively animated. The tactile connection between character and game world is remarkably immersive.

The groundwork is laid for a genre-defining adventure, yet the game world doesn't quite live up to its potential. It's easy to argue that 50 square kilometres is a vast environment, but not necessarily one that creates a sense of awe.

Ironically it's during the brilliant create-a-map mode (for making multiplayer levels) that the most expansive environments can be generated. You're presented with a series of terrain templates including desert plains, valleys and savannah regions which automatically generate a beautiful landscape.

From here on, it's entirely up to you to raise and lower the lay of the land, populate it with buildings and vehicles and carefully place weapons and other multiplayer features. Although the system is a little complex at first, the plus side is that it's incredibly versatile. Maps can be tested out on the fly and then shared with your mates for a multiplayer match. It's tempting to spend as much time telling your friends how cool your map is than you will shooting at them.

The graphics are beautiful enough, but the precision with which this world has been designed makes it seem nothing like how you would imagine the real Africa to be. No epic open plains, no elephants or indigenous tribes, just a carefully considered game world, designed to look nice and guide you from A to B with relative ease. It's one of the rare examples of solid game design coming at the expense of a sense of awe.

For a game that's mostly about shooting people it might seem strange to argue that the game is too politically correct, but we're going to do just that. Ubisoft steps tentatively around the fringes of hard-hitting subjects like diamond trading, refugees, disease and genocide, but never delves too deeply. This could have been genuinely thought provoking, but it doesn't quite have the courage of its convictions.

A less significant problem is that, unlike the PC version, there's no quick save feature. Being killed sets you right back
to the last safe house, and when that can be all the way on the opposite side of the map, this soon starts to grate.

But while the real world setting is a compelling one, it just feels like the game could have benefited from some more fantastical elements. The mutants from the original Far Cry on PC seemed a little silly, but they did add an action movie-type quality and the promise of dramatic end-of-mission encounters. By no means is Far Cry 2 short on excitement, but it does feel a little flat once you're past the initial feeling of gobsmacked awe.

Far Cry 2 is still mightily impressive though. What it does best is walking the line between hardcore realism and an experience that's still fun to play. It's nowhere near 'casual' but the game does lean slightly in that direction. The immense action-packed world is easily its greatest achievement, presenting you with a level of freedom and immersion rarely seen before.

Simon Bramble