Farcry 2 Review

Scouting the edge of the target area, crawling on my belly trying to get a good angle to take the suit I’ve been tasked with killing, I find myself presented with a number of opportunities. Do I crawl through the trenches either side of the air strip to get behind the settlement, maybe risking death by patrolling jeep, or just go in guns blazing? Maybe I could commandeer the jeep and just run the bastard over? I’ve balanced my gear our: I’ve got some improvised explosives made of old bombs, bits of wire and tape. I’ve got a machine gun and an ageing sniper rifle.

I decide to sneak my way through the settlement while the comatosed drug dealer sleeps, and place a charge by him. Oh, and the giant tank of fuel next to him. I crawl out again. Reaching a nearby watchtower I pull out the detonator. I’m expecting a flash and an objective completed message. Then the I.E.Ds go off. A second later, the fuel tank erupts into a second explosion, the bass shaking my room. Ammunition boxes fling tracers into the night sky while the confused survivors scatter trying to track me down. They won’t find me. I’m already a cloud of dust over the horizon. All the game needs right now is a cigar. Dubya would be proud.

Dunia renders some utterly beautiful savannah.

Farcry 2 basically gives you are the tools to tackle its numerous foes using whatever tactics you can muster with its vast arsenal of weapons and hugely open game world It utilises a brilliantly innovative, if roughly hewn semi-procedural set of missions set in a grim sub-Saharan civil war. As the game starts, you enter a country in flames. Refugees flee for their lives while militias roam the streets. You’re here to kill “The Jackal”; A weapons dealer who turned a local dispute into a CNN worthy blood bath. Things soon take a turn for the worst, and among other things, your character seems to have contracted malaria while the gangs exchange gun fire in the streets. You’re soon picked up by one of the faction’s lieutenants, a gun put in your hand and pointed in the direction of the first of many encampments you’re to infiltrate or demolish, whichever takes your fancy.

I’m sure this guy was twitching. I felt genuinely bad.

Not everywhere sees bullets flying at you. Just not most places.

One variety of side mission sees you recieving assassination missions from a mysterious employer.

And this is where the genius of the game truly begins. Approaching the motley assortment of shacks and sandbags, you’re pointed to a spot to recon the area. Bring up your map allows you to mark heavy weapons, vehicles or snipers on your map, but that’s not important. What’s important is that you’re given time to plan your route in advance. You really can just waltz in guns blazing, should you choose to, and sometimes that’s the best way to do it, particularly when the weapons are so excellent and the combat so viscerally entertaining. But more fun is working out the best way to attack a situation without taking a hit. When a plan comes together… there’s very little more satisfying. Equally fun though are when your plans don’t work. Because when you get found out, or there’s just a few more enemies than you anticipated, the world erupts into a frenzy of bullets and explosions unlike anything else. The minimalist UI, the brilliant physics and excellent weapons come together to create cinematic masterpieces that no such scripting light game has any right to.

Fear this ramp’s ability to screw up your driving.

The locations for this madness vary in quality. Some are a little generic, but others are really quite special. The scrap yard for example, is a sprawling maze of battered, gutted buses and trucks. The petroleum depot as another gem: The combination of dry, grassy savannah and tanks of flammable liquid lends itself to explosive expose’ on a grand scale. Some might call the amount of things that explode overkill. I consider them deliciously tempting. And Far Cry 2 truly goes out of its way to satisfy the pyromaniac in all of us. When you let off a bomb, or fire rounds into a tank of petrol, you can pretty much expect anything around it to go up with it. The sheer amount of physically active objects means things fly everywhere. When someone gets caught up in the blast, they go flying, thudding into things as they go. And the best bit? When you make one thing explode, you can bet there will be something else to go with it. Sometimes you’ll be wandering off, mission completed, only to find that the fire has spread and there’s more going off in the background. Where’s that cigar?

‘Splosions!

All of this is supported by the fine Dunia engine. It’s clearly not as technologically great as the likes of Crysis, but it’s far superior in application. Firstly, it’s got far more reasonable system specs, and will run on lesser systems quite well so long as you turn some of the settings down. Secondly, its use of lighting is far more cinematic and dramatic, fitting the environments beautifully. The developers have also made some brilliant strides in cinematically immersing the player into the action. The technique of retaining first person perspective; championed by Half-Life; is taken further by Farcry 2, with most actions animated and illustrated through the eyes of your character, not the HUD. It’s a genuine step forwards.

There are however, issues. A lot of issues. The biggest are probably the much maligned checkpoints that dominate the arteries of travel throughout the game world. Quite simply, you’re funnelled into fighting people every minute or two while trying to conserve ammo for your next mission. This could have been excellent and immersive. But it’s not. This leads onto Farcry 2’s next major issue: In making every effort to totally immerse the player in the world it succeeds: Except when it doesn’t. The glaring “gamey” elements that would stand in any other first person shooter break its excellent moves towards true first person immersion: The total lack of HUD is shattered by health bars and ammo counts while the map as a physical object is ruined by icons which further exasperates the nature of checkpoints. They really are just a predetermined spots where enemies are spawned – at ridiculously high rates no less.

Another glaring omission in the game is the lack of sense of the civil war occurring in game. In the opening of the game, a street battle erupts, and there’s the occasional scripted occurences later in the game that assert some sense of the conflict. But the real meat of the game – the free form, almost procedurally generated bulk lacks any sense of the war. The cab driver’s attempts to explain the lack of civilians at the start saying they’ve “fled the country” comes off as a weak attempt to explain why the developers didn’t bother putting them in. Anyone who sees about these civil wars on the news knows that the civilian populace suffers greatly in them. We get no real sense of what the war is about, or anything about the nature of the country. All we really know is that there are two vaguely communist factions are tearing a country apart, yet they never attack each other throughout the vast majority of the game. Attempts at really exposing the nature of the conflict are minimal. While the game makes an admirable attempt to highlight some aspects of southern African internal unrest, it fails on others. It could have been an utterly unique exploration of a setting as of yet untouched, but really, it falls short here.

Hints of Farcry 2’s backstory exist – such as characters like this slimy British twat influencing the war, but there’s not enough characterisation.

Issues aside though, I can’t help but say I really, really love this game. The freedom is electrifying, the combat intense and honestly, the value for money nigh on unheard of in modern first person shooters. I find myself consistently wowed by it on so many levels, that the faults are rendered forgiveable.

Far Cry 2 has created its very own genre niche: The sandbox of destruction.