Developer: Ubisoft
Platforms: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Microsoft Windows
Rating: 8.8 out 10
Rated: M (Mature)
The Deal: First person shooters are sort of like the video game version of a hamburger: You can make them as simple or as complicated as you want but they’re usually pretty tasty no matter how you dress them up. Keeping this analogy going, Ubisoft’s Far Cry 2 is like making a burger out of filet mignon and topping it with gold flakes and unicorn sauce—it’s some really sexy stuff.
Players take the role of a mercenary who is sent to an imploding African republic to kill “The Jackal,” an infamous American arms dealer with a penchant for philosophy who has been selling weapons to both factions in the nation’s rapidly escalating civil war. As you try to complete your mission, you are caught between the two sides, running missions for both, and desperately fighting your own battle against malaria. Poverty, corruption and death are all around you, but so is the serene beauty of the African countryside. Can you stay alive long enough to kill “The Jackal”?
Ubisoft boasts readily about the game’s 50 square kilometers of game terrain, its realistic weather system, its open world, and its “do what you want” narrative, but does Far Cry 2 live up to the bragging? Outside of a few minor nitpicks, it sure does.
The Good…
- First off, Far Cry 2 totally delivers on its promises of a vast open world of “sandbox” gameplay. How you proceed with your missions, which ones you get and how much of the country you explore is entirely up to you. You can run into enemy compounds guns blazing or you can choose to stealthily dispose of your foes. You could spend hours just driving your vehicle around the miles of roads that intersect the countryside, especially once you master the easy-to-use controls. There’s so much potential it’s actually intimidating once you get started.
- The game’s physical setting is absolutely stunning. The amount of detail that is put into the environment is staggering and rendered perfectly. Blades of grass rustle in the gentle night breezes. Rain storms blow up suddenly and have real effects on your missions as they wash out certain areas or slow you down. Sunsets and sunrises are beautiful. The countryside is so vital and real that it adds a strange tone to the game, as you often go from the serenity of your surroundings to the intense violence of your missions and out again. Then everything is rounded out with the handy, easy to use and functional in-game map function.
- Without being overly preachy, Far Cry 2 manages to be politically resonant. Often the (scary) joy of FPS games is their moral monochrome. Shooting Nazis or over simplified terrorists or aliens or demons is conscience-free fun. Not so in Far Cry 2. While your overall mission is an essentially noble one, you still get embroiled in the escalating civil war and end up doing a lot of destabilizing acts just to make a buck. All around you is poverty and corruption and—we’re assuming—a pretty accurate depiction of the hardships citizens in many struggling African nations undergo. It’s a hard line to straddle but the developers have done it perfectly, allowing each player to impose their own morality on the situation, elevating the entire game.
- Thanks to its immersive realism, when combat does happen in the game it’s exhilarating. This is made all the better thanks to an absence of real control issues—you do start out with intentional limitations to your equipment that hamper your ability to aim somewhat but you can buy upgrades that improve this. An array of different weapons for all the different scenarios multiplies the awesomeness.
The Bad…
- If we had to complain about something, it’s that a lot of the in-between missions stuff is a repetitive and feels artificial. That’s where Far Cry 2 feels like a video game rather than something more. It’s nowhere near a dealbreaker though.
Final Word: Released alongside the likes of blockbuster sequels like Fable II, Fallout 3 and soon Resistance 2, Gears of War 2 and the new Prince of Persia, Far Cry 2 might get lost in the pre-holiday shuffle. Don’t let it, as its incredible attention to detail and environmental realism, politically charged backdrop and immersive play make it just as solid as any of the other big name offerings vying for your stocking—and console—space.
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