Far Cry 2 (PC) Review

I finished this game on Friday, August 20, 2010, 8:48:00 PM. This review was first published on GameSpot on November 13, 2010.

I can't remember being this mad at a game. Far Cry 2 showed me new levels of boredom and rage that I am yet to experience. The reason I get so angry is because the game had great fantastic potential. It easily could have been one of the best games ever made. It had all the right elements. However, the stupid decisions the developers made turned this game from a fantastic shooter to a mind-numbingly boring game that tries everything and fails rather miserably.

The story is quite good, believe it or not. The fighting between different factions in an untamed land, greed, deception, a journalist writing a book about the situation of the country and the plight of its people, and an enemy with a political and philosophical agenda. The game even incorporates a choice system a few times, its quite simple and shallow, but its still there.

Far Cry 2 game play. Played on 1920x1200, GeForce 260GTX and Intel Q9400 & 4GB RAM

Its really hard to appreciate any of the redeemable qualities when the rest of the game is so monotonous! The constant driving around between towns would not have been so bad, if the enemies weren't re-spawning endlessly! I've heard people on some message boards say this adds realism to the game. I've never accused message board trolls of having a brain, but this is a bit much. How is that enemies who got killed not 5 minutes ago appear magically in that exact same location translate into "realism"?! This makes the game seem longer than it is, because the actual "game" part of it is rather small. I even bothered to time the game play. If I played the game exactly as the developers intended the player to, in a 30 minute session, I spent 18 minutes travel (driving, walking, swimming), approximately 90 seconds in conversations, and the rest of the time shooting. So you can see, nineteen and a half minutes in doing something that absolutely adds NO value to the game, because you keep doing it ALL the time. Over and over again.

There is a fast travel system, but its not like Fallout 3. It involves driving to a bus station, select a bus station nearest to the mission location. Get off at the bus station, take a nearby car and drive the reminder of the way to the actual location.

Now, on the way to the destination up to two guard posts maybe encountered. So once that business is taken care of, continue to the actual mission location, take care of the mission, and then begin driving back to the bus station. The guard posts destroyed are magically resurrected. So fight the same guards and again take the bus, get off the bus, drive the car back to pick up more missions. I fail to see the realism or any semblance of fun.

The game somehow got rave reviews, not just from suspect publications, but from a lot of other publications I hold in high regard. PC Gamer handed out a 94! I can't imagine what they might been smoking. These are the guys know their stuff. Its really inexplicable. Its as if they played a different game from the one I played.

Don't even get me started on the weapons. No, they are not bad. The handle very well, until they decide to fall apart right in the middle of a firefight. I see the logic behind this, but then, if you have re-spawning guard posts and degrading weapons, tense and frantic game play soon turns into utterly boring arbitrary gimmick.

The other aspects of the game are extremely well done. Visuals are brilliant. This game stands up to Crysis in terms of graphics. Sounds are fantastic. The environment is absolutely brilliant. But what is the point? I am not going to recommend this game. Why bother talking about it about all those when the actual game is a total waste of time?

Even if the game is really dead cheap, I wouldn't recommend it, reason being it has no entertainment value. If the point of purchasing a game is to have fun, and that is not a far fetched assumption, then it is pointless to buy this game. There is no fun to be had.

- Boring, absolutely utterly boring

Verdict – Do not play