Far Cry® 2: Fortune's Edition

This game has amazing gunplay, weapons will start to jam after being used for a while and you have to scavenge weapons from enemies or go to an armoury to get new guns. There's great details like rocket launcher backblast setting grass on fire, and healing animations that are relatively accurate to what kind of damage you were receiving. The biggest issues are the missions being boring, the voice acting being atrocious, and there isn't really any incentive to help your buddies throughout the game. Missions boil down to: Talk to guy, guy gives you money, drive to place and kill dude or blow something to hurt the opposite faction. Missions are really short to complete, I never found myself taking more than 5-10 minutes to actually finish the objective, which is really short compared to the 10 minutes it takes to drive there, and if you want to get some better weapons it will take even longer. You have to either drive to the objective, or drive to a bus station to travel closer and then drive the rest of the way, that is if you don't want to walk the whole way. While it's more realistic than fast travel points, it can get annoying after a while if you spend most of your time driving. There is no reason to side with one faction over another, and everyone you encounter will attack you. It would have been much more interesting to have the faction you help more defend you, while members of the other faction attack you. Voice acting is horribly boring and fast, people talk extremely quickly which results in poorly-paced dialogue. After receiving mission instructions from the UFLL or APR, you get a phone call from a buddy asking for help. You could abandon your current mission and help them, but there is no reason to. The only benefit a buddy might have is reviving you if you 'die', giving you a second chance.

The shooting is good with the twist of adding "reliability" to the guns. As the guns are used, they become worse and unreliable thus leading to jams. It kind of fits the environment as far as I understand. Now, the bad part is the enemies constantly respawning. Did you clear an outpost and moved away? Not 5 minutes passed and there are enemies again. I guess you are expected to be shot at every single moment...? To make matters worse, the enemies are spongy in the vanilla game and the use of mods that tweak the gameplay are required.

There are many elements of this game that I really enjoyed, and an African setting isn't something you often see in video games, so that was interesting. However, I have to give this one a thumbs down overall, as I found the missions to be somewhat repetitive, and the constantly respawning outposts were extremely frustrating and made this game a real slog to get through.

Right, let's get this over with. This game was a good concept ruined by terrible execution. The game world is huge, but a nightmare to navigate due to terrible mapping. You frequently get stuck miles from civilisation without a vehicle, and worst of all - the 'FPS' element is dreadful. Enemies shoot you while facing the other way, your guns are totally unsatisfying and the frustration is assured since enemies respawn behind you incredibly fast. You'll be forced to fight through some checkpoints 100+ times during the course of the game. Oh, and the destructible scenery? Lies. Top this off with weak story without any real motivation, forgettable characters and tedious collection jobs... the best advice I can give is to go play Just Cause 2 instead. That's how sandbox games should be!

This game has one fundamental fatal flaw that removes much of the enjoyment. The enemy respawn time and their incessant hostility. You are expected to traverse the roads between quests but armed checkpoints are frequents, clearing them is a chore, skipping them is leads to vehicle chases, the enemies are persistant and reappear every time you come past. It's enough to make you put the game down when you see this broken mechanic. If there is a mod to fix this out there, it would make this game a great gem of ideas and innovation. With the perfected FPS health system, the use of brushfire and explosions, the open ended engagements, the buddy system (where you can recruit, help, rescue or be rescued by them), the factions with choices and consequences (albeit very light and ultimately make little difference), and the great orienteering map and vehicle traversal. That plus all the great animation like the healing bullet wounds and repairing cars. I saw the game through the frustrating times and putting it down for days at a time and eventually finished it, and despite the looming flaw I see it as much better than many linear shooters with their six hour campaigns, and worth trying, and sticking it out for the rare light freedom you get from it.