
	Platform Xbox 360 Genre Shooter Publisher Ubisoft Developer Ubisoft Montreal ESRB M (Mature) Released October 21, 2008

- Love the weapon system – very well executed - Interesting fusion of FPS and a Sandbox

- Another checkpoint fight? Really? Dammit. - Who doesn’t enjoy playing a mission every 20 minutes or so? - Remember the time your sibling wanted to play with an unplugged controller? That would have been more helpful than some of the allies

Review: Grand Theft Auto IV (360) Review: Gun (360) Review: Crackdown (360)
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Far Cry 2

Score: 7.5 / 10

From cooking to movies, fusion is a time-honored method of making something new out of pre-existing components. The current generation of games show this in spades, but Far Cry 2 combines two genres that haven’t spent too much time together before. The action-packed First Person Shooter and, the anarchist’s dream, the Sandbox.

Admittedly the two genres tend to have similar ideas – blow stuff up, collect items, explore, and a good time is had by all. To these ends, their execution is quite different: the FPS will reward those able to kill efficiently and use the terrain to your advantage; the Sandbox allows the gamer to tackle missions in any fathomable way. If you can think it, you can probably die trying it. Can contact tactics and ingenuity co-exist? Absolutely and in whatever portion of the two you’d

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like to mix.

Taking place in a conflict area of Africa, you play an unnamed mercenary suffering from malaria. Originally sent into this region for the mission of assassinating “The Jackal”, you spend your time working all sides trying to improve your own situation and gather information on the elusive gun-runner. The two major organizations vying for control have a tenuous

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cease-fire in the capital Pala, but are pretty much in open conflict everywhere else.

You work as a yojimbo, willing to carve a swath of death for your current master; and kill you will. The only thing tying you down is the debilitating malaria, for which only the Underground has the medicine keeping the symptoms at bay. But it’s not all bad. You can meet other like-minded mercenaries out there willing to befriend you and offer their assistance. This may come in as secondary targets during missions or as fire assistance when things get hairy. (Nothing like having a monkey firing a gun infrequently at the worst targets then calling you for help.) Completion of off-script missions and exploring will net you diamonds – the only currency worth anything out here. These diamonds can be spent on better weapons, personal upgrades, or skills training (able to repair equipment faster or cause specific weapons to jam less frequently, and so on).

You can carry four weapons and incendiaries (grenades and Molotov cocktails) on your person – a primary weapon (light machine guns or rifles), a secondary weapon (pistols, submachine guns), a machete, and a “special” weapon (rocket launcher, flame thrower, IED, or a very huggable mongoloid). Any weapon that you acquire, be it through purchasing or off a corpse, will suffer from wear and tear. As it is used, it will degrade and become more likely to jam or misfire. So, the old tactic of using the enemies’ weapons against them can quickly become a poison pill – do you really want to pick up that rusty LMG? Although it has more ammunition, it could jam at a crucial point in the fight (and jam they will). The environment itself is also susceptible to your tactics – grasses, trees and houses are all flammable, so that Molotov cocktail could either throw some chaos into the enemy ranks or just as easily become a out of control fire flushing you from cover.

Far Cry 2 has a set map to work with – it can take about 10 minutes to cross from one side to the other in a vehicle. That’s not a comment on the size of the gaming area but on the amount of small little fights that you’re going to get caught up in while you try and cross. Even as you align with each group, you are not given any sort of free pass – almost everyone is out to kill you on sight. It’s assured that if you see another person, draw your gun. You are going to need to kill them before they kill you. That being said, the fiftieth time you go through that checkpoint there are going to be the same group of guards insistent on opening fire. It gets old a little fast.

A large portion of the time will be wasted travelling on these maps, be it to a hideout to save, to an armory to get new kit, or on a mission. I estimate that a typical mission can be completed from start to finish in about 20 minutes – that the time it will take you get the assignment, meet up with your buddy for the secondary objectives, travel to the mission area and then actually complete the mission. It only gets worse when you have to return to base afterwards. So, out of those 20 minutes completing a mission, only about 3 to 5 of them are you actually completing it; the rest is just commuting.

I was able to complete the game at about 40 hours and while there were some things I didn’t find or collect, at that point it was too tedious to continue. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the missions, but the frequent pointless firefights just dragged too much and served no purpose in either expanding the story or furthering the character. It was enjoyable being given this much freedom to change the rules in an FPS, but the repetitive action quickly pulls the game from a fun activity into a chore.

- Tazman

(December 17, 2008)

NOTE: For the different versions of the game, I found the copy on the Xbox to be more reliable out of the packaging – my PS3 copy desperately needed a patch before it became playable. The unpatched game runs like an old video on Real-Player – 3 steps. BUFFERING!!!! 2 steps. BUFFERRING!!!! And during this awesomeness, the dialogue continues unaffected. Not impressed. Anyways, I might pick up the game again in a few months when I need a different kind of fight, but for now this is going back on my shelf.