PC Game Fun Time

I fear that all the buzz over Far Cry 2 in recent days has crowded out other PC games that are no less worthy of mention, so allow me to take a step back and cover some of the PC games that I enjoyed immensely over the past two years or so. If you’re looking for a game to play that’s just as fun as what’s coming out now, but won’t run you the full $50 price tag, look no further than these games.

Team Fortress 2. Yeah, we’re still playing the ol’ Teef regularly in this household. Grokmoo wrote quite extensively about the parts of the game we enjoy, so I’ll just give the bottom line here: the game has been out for a little while yet still enjoys a thriving community. The nine classes seem deceptively simple (only three weapons each, one of which is a melee weapon), but each require completely different strategies, so that mastering even one takes awhile and mastering them all is quite the feat. Add to that the number of different gameplay modes and all the custom maps that are available, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that you can easily get hundreds of hours of playtime out of Team Fortress 2.

Crysis (and its expansion pack Warhead) offers one of the best single player FPS experiences in recent memory. The graphics are simply amazing and will definitely put your high-end video card through its paces. Frustrated by the slowness and general aimlessness of the story missions in Far Cry 2? Then Crysis is the cure. And despite it being over a year older, its engine is definitely better (probably because it wasn’t compromised by having to work on consoles). All it takes to realize the superiority of the engine is to level a copse of trees — full of enemies attempting to hide — with a mounted machine gun. There’s nothing else quite so satisfying as to take out not just all of your enemies, but also all of the trees.

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Far Cry 2 has now been out for a few days and I have had a chance to put in a few hours with it.  There is as yet no indication that I have yet made any significant progress with regards to the main storyline (and it seems that this game will be a long one).  However, I believe I have gotten a bit of a feel for some elements of the game.

From a players perspective, Far Cry 2 is related to its predecessor in name only.  The game is set in a war torn country in Sub-Saharan Africa, and features open ended style gameplay reminiscent of Oblivion or Assassin’s Creed.  So far this seems to be working fairly well, but I must confess that even in my few hours I am starting to see something of a repetitive formula emerge.  Hopefully, the developers keep mixing it up as the game continues.

Far Cry 2 was developed by Ubisoft, in contrast to the orginal Far Cry and Crysis, which were developed by Crytek.  Perhaps as a result, the game feels very different than Far Cry or Crysis.  Unfortunately, many of these changes are not for the better, at least from a PC gamer’s perspective.

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