Far Cry® 2: Fortune's Edition

Having spent some time in my youth growing up in Africa (Zambia) I just loved this game, obviously I didn't spend my time growing up in Africa riding about on a quad with a collection of guns killing people, I lived with my dad and experienced the high life frequenting expensive hotels and living the life of an affluent X pat. But! the scenery and sunsets when I first played this game, when my pc struggled to play it, reminded me so much of Zambia and the 'bush' and yeah! it was a good game when I played it, back in the day. : )

just wow

The most important thing to remember is that this is NOT a sequel to Far Cry, and it is NOT even a spiritual successor to Far Cry (that being Crysis). If you enjoyed Crysis, you may enjoy Far Cry and vice versa, but not this game. As a regular of GOG.com, I don't care much about graphics, so I won't mention it here (though Crysis was gorgeous, it also had great gameplay). And Far Cry 2 does NOT have great gameplay. The world is entirely hostile to you - there are two factions for which you can do missions, neither of which particularly matters. To illustrate the main problem with the game - when you are on a faction mission, that faction is still hostile to you "because you're on a secret mission and the others don't know who you are", i.e. because the programmers were lazy. Virtually the ENTIRE world is hostile to you, except the central safe city, which is a universally accepted ceasefire area. Although it is an open world game, there isn't much of a world to speak of, given that it is populated by nothing other than clumps of enemies around buildings with arbitrary mission objective targets, and equally arbitrarily hidden diamond suitcases which you buy more weapons with. Even worse, the enemies will respawn in minutes, so you will have to fight through the same checkpoint OVER and OVER again as you drive past it on the way to the objective, back past it on the way back, and past it AGAIN when you get another mission in the same area. Even the things that normally make an open world interesting - side missions - are completely bland and repetitive (they are randomly generated). To be honest, a lot of the game strikes me as a little lazy. There is this "malaria" mechanic - your character must regularly take malaria pills, and when you begin to run out, you have to do side-missions for an organisation which will give you more. That could almost have been interesting. But NO! You don't run out of pills based on time, or how often you take them - you run out of them according to plot, after you have completed a certain amount of story missions! To give another example - this "realistic fire engine that's a pyromaniac's dream come true" - well ... I thought it was beautiful until the first fire died down. Actually I still do - it is spectacular - you throw an incendiary, and the fire SPREADS through the grass, through the trees. Enemies can be herded out of cover by spreading fire. Then the fire goes out. Why didn't it reach them? Have a look at it. The burnt out area describes a PERFECT CIRCLE around the apparent "ground zero" - where the grenade explodes. There is a simple limit on how far fire can spread, and it will just spread to this extent and then stop. Essentially, this is equivalent to all grenades having an additional effect of area denial for a short time. If none of this criticism seems relevant to you, go ahead an enjoy the game, you may well like it. But if you want an open world game to explore, or a game like Far Cry (which was far more linear, but at least it was INTERESTING), look somewhere else.

looks nice and it's pretty good

Not possible to get past the first room