PC Game Fun Time

Unlike Grokmoo, I somehow didn’t end up giving up Far Cry 2 for Fallout 3. Having just beaten it earlier today, I’m ready to give my final impressions, as I won’t be playing it again.

My Far Cry 2 experience was a bit uneven. I wouldn’t say that I genuinely loved the game, but I felt a strange compulsion to keep playing it. I would feel this compulsion even after the game succeeded in frustrating me immensely (like never failing to put objectives on the diametrically opposite side of the map, on the opposite side of many manned guard posts), so it was not uncommon that I’d play the game for a half hour, take a short break, and then end up playing it again in another half hour after the frustration faded. These repeating cycles of frustration and compulsion occurred several times in some days.

It finally hit me what the Far Cry 2 experience feels like: an MMORPG. I wrestled with World of Warcraft around the time that it came out (and haven’t played another MMORPG since finally quitting it). Far Cry 2 shares a lot of the same game mechanics that make an MMORPG so addictive: the free-form roaming, the slow grind of achievement (earning scarce diamonds to purchase/upgrade weapons), and the side missions. I kept playing through Far Cry 2 even when I wasn’t enjoying the experience very much simply because I wanted to keep getting to that next “level”.

But thankfully, unlike World of Warcraft, Far Cry 2 does indeed have an end, an ending left me really dissatisfied because — spoiler alert — like much of the rest of the game, you are given a false choice between two “alternatives” that result in the same outcome. The final outcome of the game? Your suicide (and in one of the options, your completely unnecessary suicide). It’s like, after an entire game full of wanton mercenary killing, the developers want to jam a moral lesson into your head and force you to atone for your sins by paying the ultimate sacrifice. Except it’s not really atonement if you aren’t given a say in the matter.

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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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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.

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