PC Game Fun Time

I have now completed the vast majority of the missions in Far Cry 2, and given that Fallout 3 is out today, I am unlikely to come back to Far Cry 2 for quite a while.  So, now is a good time for a full review!

The bulk of this review is going to be pretty negative, so let me just start out by saying this:  Far Cry 2 is a pretty decent game.  Not fantastically great, as many of the professional reviews would have you believe, but decent.  Indeed, the last time I checked, metacritic had the various review sites giving it an average of 88 out of 100, while the user score was a slightly less impressive 6.5 out of 10.

Ultimately, Far Cry 2 suffers from its own scope.  It is just too large.  The game world is to big, and getting through all the main quests takes too long.  While there are some genuinely fun moments, much of the game is just a drag, and there just isn’t enough interesting stuff to do to merit the 30 or 40 hours of gameplay.  I feel like they could have taken out a lot of the “filler” and been left with maybe 10 hours of actual decently fun gameplay.  Unfortunately, even these parts can be very formulaic.  Virtually all the missions boil down to “go there, kill that guy or blow that thing up”.  The Buddy missions are presumably supposed to add some variety, but they instead feel even more run of the mill (not to mention pointless).  At first, the Buddy missions tend to have something to do with the main mission that they are branching off of.  Later on, however, it feels like the developers just got lazy.  One mission in particular I remember involved going to a village and blowing up some medicine production.  For some bizarre reason, the Buddy “sidebar” to the mission was to go to a completely different village and kill everybody so my Buddy could get some drugs!

While the “kill that guy” part of the missions is usually fun, the “go there” part is almost always boring.  Driving is not very engaging, and you will do a lot of it.  Also, a lot of the time you spend just trying to get somewhere will actually be taken up by traveling through guardposts.  These little annoyances never take more than a minute or two to clear, but you can’t just drive through them, because enemies inevitably come after you and they will take out your vehicle quickly if you ignore them.

So, the fun parts are usually the battles at the various mission locations throughout the world.  However, even these sequences generally only take a few minutes to complete.  The ones that are longer are the most fun, but these are unfortunately very rare.  What this game really needs are some nice “dungeons”: longer, more linear combat sequences, where the developers can lead you through the action.  The open ended combat sequences are just not enough.

Speaking of combat, for an FPS, the weapons in this game just don’t feel all that great.  Most of the guns are underpowered, with the notable exception of sniper rifles, which turn you into a killing machine given that essentially all the combat takes place outdoors.  Other than that, rifles take several shots to kill anything, and they are not particularly accurate, making headshots mostly a matter of luck.  SMGs feel a bit more like they should - reasonably accurate and with decent power - but this unfortunately means that they are pretty much strictly better than any of the assault rifles in most situations.  I ended up spending most of my time using a combination of a sniper rifle and an SMG.  This was just much more effective than making use of the rifles or shotguns.

While gameplay is obviously the most important aspect, there are a few other topics to cover.  Graphically, the game looks good, but not outstanding.  While it is true that the game does not compare in the graphics department to some other titles (*ahem* Crysis), this is a two sided coin.  I had no problems running the game at 1680×1050 using maximum settings on my now fairly modest 8800 GTS.  It would be nice, though, if there were some higher settings for people with better video cards.

Music was pretty good, I suppose, but not overall very memorable.  The sound effects in the game are quite good.  Gunfire sounds satisfying (it is a shame the power of the weapons doesn’t match this) and explosions are suitably epic.  They overdid the muffling of sounds you experience when you are indoors and hearing someone is shooting right outside though.  Sorry Ubisoft, but a tiny mud hut with multiple windows and doors will not give you that level of sound reduction.

Ultimately it is kind of a let down that Far Cry 2 turned out the way it did.  The game has great potential, but it was never fully realized.  The mindless driving and boring two minute combat sequences end up overshadowing the exciting aspects of the game.  It is really a shame, because most people will probably become bored and give up before they get through even a fraction of this very lengthy game.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 9:41 am by Grokmoo and is filed under Far Cry 2, Reviews. Keywords: Tags: Far Cry 2, FPS, Reviews, Ubisoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.