Far Cry® 2: Fortune's Edition

For the first hour you'll be required to speedrun before an invisible timer counts down and you die of malaria... or your game crashes. Far Cry 2 makes an awful first impression. Something tells me Ubisoft spent all their time on the destructible environment. The game has some cool aspects: blood diamonds as currency, the buddy system, different ways to resolve a assigned task, and a weapon degradation system. The atmosphere is admittedly incredible. But it's let down by boring missions, bad mission scripting, and an obnoxiously large map that you need to criss cross constantly, each checkpoint filled with respawning guards. Something as simple as running is unpleasant, as the sprinting animation makes the screen blur and shake like you are suffering a seizure. For the last hour I played I had a screen prompt alerting me that I had left a hostile area. That prompt would not disappear even after I reinstalled the game, my save files evidently corrupted. The jank and inane busywork reminds me of STALKER. However, the gunfighting actually works in FC 2, so maybe a better comparison would be to call this game a shabbier version of Rage.

What I like the most about Far Cry 2 is its setting. It really manages to create an amazing atmosphere of a war-torn African country and allows you to become a gun for hire working for various factions of the conflict. You will be setting up ambushes, destroying various targets, assassinating people, and getting paid in diamonds. Furthermore, you will have access to a quite a nice selection of various weapons from pistols to rocket launchers, which will help you to achieve your mission objectives. The story is not the greatest, but the graphics and the action make up for it. On the other hand, the game suffers from quite a few flaws. The missions might feel a bit repetitive after a while, you’ll find getting through the various guard camps a bit tedious, as they respawn almost instantly after you clear them, the quick traveling is not implemented all that well, and the driving around might get boring, as the difference between different cars is minimal. Overall, it is a good game and if you get it on sale, you will not regret it. It has a solid gunplay and the enemy AI is quite alright.

Far Cry 2 has a major issue that will be a deal-breaker for many players: its open-world formula quickly gets tiresome – boring, even. The game map is huge but empty, every single mission consists in going somewhere to kill some guys, and way too much time is spent inside vehicles. You often need to take the same roads and the enemy camps along them get repopulated constantly, forcing you to relive the same fights over and over again. It takes about twenty hours to beat this game, but only one or two to see most of what it has to offer! Yet, despite its faults, I kept coming back to FC2. Gameplay-wise, there frankly isn’t much that it doesn’t get right: the vehicles are fun to drive and the gunplay is more than serviceable. The enemies are bullet-spongy, but the weapons are many and varied, allowing you to assault settlements in multiple ways depending on your loadout. You can snipe from afar, sneak in with a suppressed pistol, rush in with a machine gun… Or throw explosives in and let fire do the job. I experimented with new guns all throughout the campaign and enjoyed almost all of them. What’s more, FC2 does a remarkable job when it comes to immersion, thanks to its wide open spaces, top-notch visuals (although as was the fashion in 2008, they overuse gray/brown colors), minimalist user interface, and good implementation of unbroken first-person perspective. And if you can accept the slow pacing of the game, it actually ends up making it all the more real and credible. The plot is basic and lacks memorable characters... but it’s suitably bleak, has its moments, and is overall good enough for a game with such a focus on combat and exploration. In the end, FC2 is a product of its time, and I would probably not recommend it over its more modern counterparts... but there is definitely something in it that sets it apart from other shooters. It’s worth a shot if you want to feel like a hired gun rampaging his way through lush and gorgeous African environments.

Game still offers some fine features like great looking African landscape (especially with mods) than can be also burned down in spectacular way, freedom in approaching tasks (use silenced weapons, sniper rifles, automatic weapons of various types, mines, flamethrower or even goddamit mortar), companion system that add (some) depth into gameplay and story, that will question your point of view over your actions. Now lets talk about problems this game has and if they are really that problematic: - Outposts - yes, outposts fully repopulate themself when you move like 50 meters away. Even modders cant fix this. Also, you get so much resources, that raiding them is pointless apart from personal satisfaction of another 100%. But since its open world game you can simply evade them. - Lifeless scenery - yea, you'll see some wildlife, but you would expect much more after this setting. Lack of roaming civilians seems to be devs decitions to avoid unnecessary controverses. - Malaria - it is annoying, but also shows you, that even most feared mercenary is mortal human, prone to some commom disease - Boring side activities - perhaps only attacing weapon conwoys is worth doing but it mostly depends on you - its quite a sandbox game and some initiative is welcome. - Simplistic mission design - most of time you'll tasked to destroy another piece of already scarce infrastructure, furher pushing country into oblivion and optionally, to silence anyone who oppose. Those missions arent the most creative, but again, it up to your apporach. - Poorly made fights - enemies can be spoongy, especially in second part of game and weapons sometimes seems underpowered but I dont find this as issue. To sums up - if you're looking for more sandbox-like game, where you're creating some immersive background for yourself, then you find the right spot. If you want closely narrated story with interesting characters, you might look something else (like FC4), as this one might be disappointing

The story really isn't much to go off of, but the gameplay is genuinely a blast! Arguably one of the best Farcry ever. I say it's more fun than Farcry 3