Far Cry 2: flawed, but fun (for a while)
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008I 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.
