Far Cry® 2: Fortune's Edition

The grittiest, most realistic Far Cry. Where this game really shines for me is the atmosphere; an definite sense of being dropped into a foreign land and having to survive. You have no special abilities and there are no conga lines of enemies waiting to be stealthily taken down one by one, like other FC's. The negatives (there definitely are some): Enemy variety is poor and AI is very average. Stealth take-downs are not animated and can be a bit hit and miss. The biggest missing piece is where are the animals? Especially in a land where there are few people, I'd expect animals to move in to take their place. Maybe to do with technical limitations of the time. I've played through this game twice and really enjoyed it. The graphics hold up to this day, but the game play is now a bit dated.

...but I have to agree with several other reviewers that the game gets repetetive and boring. As others said before, there are some cool features. However I didn't like the diamond hunt. It takes focus from the story imho. And all this driving drove me crazy. The real game breaker for me was the colour scheme. We're in Africa for god's sake! Where are the colours? There's a blue sky at times but the rest of the colours where pale brownish-greenish even in full sunshine. I expected the same vivid colours as in the first installement of FarCry that I played just a few days earlier. Yes, there's a war going on but even during a war there's still a lot of colours. The explosions where nice though. Storywise I liked it but it could have been so much more interesting and immersing if they put more effort in the story and less in diamond and safe house hunting and let dead enemies stay dead. If I won a stronghold, that should belong to me and my buddies. One of the things I really hated was the maps. It just didn't make sense to me to have three different maps that obscured your vision. Other games have done it so much better. Most of them rely on pushing "M" on the keyboard, which pauses the game and lets you have a look. I don't know how many times I was attacked while looking at the map in FC2. Weapons. There are almost too many to chose from so don't get carried away. I managed to get through the game with a pistol, a sniper rifle and a crossbow. But it sure wasn't easy...

This game is hard to rate and hard to recommend. I bought it out of nostalgia and to finally finish it after all these years. Was it worth it? I would say it was, for me at least. This game has awful lot of friction from modern viewpoint. Everything breaks. Your guns jam. On harder difficulty the enemy chases you relentlessly and late game shoots you with mortar shells from afar in a way that feels unfair. You have malaria and constantly run out of medicine. The mission structure is pretty simplistic. All of these are valid reasons to quit before the credits. But if you can push past them, there is some gems to be found. The physics are impressive and a time capsule from time when gimmicks like it were a selling point. The story is pretty lean, but the way the theme emerges from (repetetive) gameplay loop is pretty interesting. Spec Ops: the Line is more well known retelling of Heart of Darkness and its linear nature leads to more compact and better paced experience, but there is value in this open world version as well. Even though I'm still not sure how much the feeling of unreliable narrator I get from this game is intended.

The graphics are beautiful, the game runs perfectly, but it's all just so dull. It seems more like a driving game than an FPS, because you'll spend more time in a car than on foot. Oh, and why does everyone in Africa instantly try and kill you the moment they meet you? Sometimes even the people who've sent you on a mission will later try and kill you! Oh and it has nothing what so ever to do with Far Cry.

Far Cry 2 could have almost been my favorite game. The gunplay is great, the open-world design is fantastic, and missions are very fun and open to all different kinds of tactics. Unfortunately, there are some glaring flaws that distract so much from these great features and hurt the game overall. You get to play as a mercenary hunting an arms dealer in a fictional African country. The game starts with a great opening sequence where you ride a jeep through one of the first areas. The game takes this opportunity to set up the background of the game, and what's happening in its world. The dialogue is well-written, but the voice acting is weird. Even though people say their lines with conviction and effort, everybody seems to read their dialogue at a really fast clip. It's like the Micro Machines guy threw on a goofy South African accent, but this is just a nitpick. Everything seems fine until you are introduced to the first gimmick. Right at the start, you are stricken with malaria. Instead of dying, or abandoning your mission to receive proper medical care, you just get a tiny bit of medicine. Over time, you'll get malaria attacks, and if you don't want to pass out where you stand, you have to pop one of your pills. The only problem is that you get these pills in limited quantities (around 2 or 3 per refill), so if you run out, you need to get more pills. These refills are granted whenever you complete specially designated quests. While not a horrible design decision in itself, it hurts the game in ways I'll eventually get to. While malaria is the game's biggest gimmick, it's the gunplay that takes the forefront. This game's combat is fun, and open. You're given a massive arsenal of guns, rockets, mortars, explosives/mines, dart guns, and a flamethrower. The weapons look great, sound great, and are fun to use. There's even a minor upgrade system worth your time. Mission design is dynamic and open to choices made by the player. While the expected base assault/assassination/delivery quests are all there, it's how you complete them that make up the meat. You can silently dispatch enemies with a dart gun, perform a midnight hang-glide into the center of a base, lay booby traps for convoys, or just plain old burn s*** down. The game has great AI. You can distract them by firing and moving to a different position, or by starting fires/setting explosives. The fire physics are a nice touch. Use molotov cocktails, flamethowers, and explosives on the right flora, and you can start a fire that will spread. This can kill enemies, corral them into one area, or distract them so you can do what you want to get by. Unfortunately, while the quests are fun and the gunplay is even more fun, there's just one major nitpick that really, really hurt the game for me: Enemy respawns while on open maps. Basically everybody in the open-world maps is hostile to you, and there are lots of bases spread all over the world, complete with roaming gangs of enemies on the road. The bases are almost unavoidable, and the roamers are all well-armed and seem to spawn right on top of you. You can't shoot while driving, and you can't outrun them, because they'll eventually disable your vehicle. This leads to a tiring grind of "encounter enemies, exit vehicle/switch to turret kill all enemies, get out of car, fix car, get into car, then proceed to the next ambush." It's tedious, boring, flow-breaking, and repetitive. Then, when you throw the malaria gimmick in, you add even more steps. I had one occasion where I got my malaria meds, got ambushed a bunch of times to initiate a quest, then had to drive over to the other side of the map, meanwhile getting ambushed and having to pop more pills. I ran out of pills by the time I reached the mission section and passed out about halfway through my objective. Crytek usually has high gameplay standards, and it's a wonder if anyone tested this game in a whole playthrough instead of just segments or something. There's a game worth playing here if you're willing to put up with grind, but I'd recommend easy mode. Not because I'm a whimp, just because it's easier on the nerves , and you get to appreciate all of the things that the developers did right. It's just a shame that you have to put up with some really terrible decisions to get there.