Far Cry® 2: Fortune's Edition

very repetitive and a lot of driving

It's definitely an improvement on Far Cry 1. I gave up on FC1 after only a few hours, whereas I'm at about 15 hours on FC2, which Galaxy tells me is twice the average playtime, which I find odd because I'm still only halfway through (having played it before way back when, I happen to know I'm right at the halfway point). I do plan to continue playing it. Whilst far less aggravating than its predecessor, it does still have its flaws. For one, stealth remains difficult to impossible. There's two weapons you can use to try to remain hidden, the machete and the silenced pistol. If you sneak up on an enemy with the machete, you can get a stealth kill, but this is not silent (somehow) and worse still, they sometimes still get a shot off at you mid-kill. If you don't manage to sneak up on them, it takes several slashes to kill them. The pistol, meanwhile, is also not silent, and can take multiple shots to kill, even at point blank and aimed at their head. And once again, the enemies will spot you very easily, even if you're sniping from amidst some flora atop a cliff a mile away from them, and once one enemy spots you, they all do, instantly. The sequel also retains the problem of crashing about every hour or so. One step backward the game has is its repetition. I feel like by only a few hours in I'd seen all there was to see. I know a lot of folk dislike its gun degradation system, but I like it. It makes it feel a lot more like you're actually fighting in the deepest, darkest depths of Africa, and created some really tense moments when my guns jammed at the worst possible moments, and I had to switch to my machete to hack them to bits or whatever. I do agree with the malaria complaints, but I didn't find it hugely problematic. However, all that said, it is still a fun + fairly priced game. Unlike its forerunner, I would actually recommend it, but I'd avoid bothering with stealth. Go gung ho, go guns blazing, and it's a fun romp through some beautiful environments.

The title is pretty much all I can say about this game. When I first started playing it, I was going off of "official" reviews from metacritic. It sounded awesome. So I loaded it up, and drove from place to place, killing people intent on killing me. Then I did it again. And again. And again. And it got old. REALLY old. And I've only been playing for about 4 hours total. With only 1-3 missions at a time, the much-vaunted "freedom" is as shallow as the gameplay. There's no freedom. Just because I can go a different direction to get to a point on a map doesn't mean that I have any freedom. It just means I can go a different direction on the map. Guess what -- I could do that in Super Mario Brothers, too. "Ooh, I jumped on TOP of the blocks this time instead of going underneath them. FREEDOM!!!" Add in the annoying spawning, traveling that's a chore to go through, and the repetative repetative repetative missions, and we have a horrible game. What we ended up with was a game that so desperately wanted to be like Fallout 3 that they forgot what made that title great -- the fun. Well, that and actually having something to DO when travelling from place to place.

...you spend literally the entire game dying. Your character has malaria, and unless you do quests to get medicine you die. This forces you to stick to the main quests and pretty much kills the whole open world exploration thing. Stupid. Also enemies respawn almost constantly. You can clear out an outpost and then after spending 2 minutes scrounging for ammo GUYS RESPAWN ON YOU AND KILL YOU. This game had massive potential, but the devs couldn't leave it alone, so it's way too hard to be much fun.

but didn't use it. If you like to fight enemies that can only be killed by headshots (neither a double-barreled shotgun blast at point blank range nor a full magazine from an assault rifle to the chest will do it), can see you through thick foliage as well as darkness, can hear silenced weapons and re-spawn endlessly behind your back, then this game is for you. If you like it even mildly realistic, give this game a wide berth. Don't get me wrong, the game has its points; it lets you explore the world freely, has an interesting setting, and lots of weaponry to try out. But in the end, you will spend (or should I say, waste) most of your time driving around and eliminating the same guard posts over and over again, which quickly becomes boring. The game also has a bunch of logical errors. Some of them could be overlooked, like the question how diamonds are "transferred" to an "account". Others like the fact that everyone is shooting at you, even the people you work for, kind of ruin the game - as soon as something moves, it's an enemy. That is a rather poor design for an "open world" game and turns it into no more than a simple shooting gallery. Too bad since this game could have been much more. At the GOG price and DRM-free, it may be worth a try, but I'm very glad now that I did not spend the money for the retail version back when it came out.