FarCry 2

Farcry 2’s world is one of decay, degradation, entropy. Guns cake with dirt and jam. Machines rust and break. Your player vehicle is no unshakable tank; bullets pierce your corporeal form where they remain until removed, while Malaria threatens to drop you mid-firefight in a dazed fug.

Even the societal structures of the fictional African setting break down, and your presence is far from a stabilising one. Regardless of the choice you make from a lineup of 12 mercenaries, players will find themselves tumbling along a morally repugnant tale of playing both sides of a warring conflict against one another, while the limited range of missions will see you assassinating leaders of the opposing side or even destroying shipments of medicine. The game gives the illusion of choice at times, but ultimately your route is that of Bastard Choice A or Bastard Choice B.

Disappointingly, your choice of character means next to nothing, other than that the un-picked buddies will populate the world to offer you missions, or back you up in a firefight.

Ah, the buddies. A great gameplay addition for sure, allowing for alternate mission approaches as well as moments of near-death drama. The cheap shot that saps your last chink of health no longer hurls you to the game over screen. Instead, you find yourself being dragged out of the firefight by your best bud as bullets whizz overhead. Handing you a pistol, your buddy covers you to aid recovery or retreat, and you both live to fight another day.

Or not. Excitingly, your buddies can be downed too. A glancing wound might see you patch them up with your limited supply of health syrettes. But a major injury means repercussions. How much did you like your now-lame friend? Will you euthanise them with an overdose of pain-relieving injections? Keep your syrettes and use a bullet to say goodnight? Or simply leave them to bleed out in the savannah?

In a triumph for irreversibility in games, dead buddies stay dead, which can affect available options in your playthrough (obviously you can still reload your game; curse you ‘Load Game’). Another buddy will come along, but they are still a limited resource. The only real flaw in this system was that I found Farcry 2’s NPCs to be near-uniformly robotic and unlikable.

Microsoft Sam seems to be the target for the voice acting, with emotionless staccato speech being the order of the day. Coupled with their amoral standings leaves most of the buddies trailing somewhere behind Tron’s MCP in the personality stakes. Apart from Frank, of course.

Frank Bilders is a dirty, foul-mouthed chancer, open about his nefarious deeds, and he wasn’t just a buddy, he was my buddy. I respected his honesty in admitting he was trying to do over other people and his language made me chuckle a lot. Which is why a post-assassination scramble from a town left me gutted, gutted to see the only NPC I had any connection to bleeding out by the railway siding, I never saw him downed, I guess sprinting wasn't his strong point. I never even got the option to send him off with an overdose of health-giving syrettes. I put Frank down and the game had a melancholy taint from that point forward, with me resenting all other NPCs for their life-filled bodies and their un-Frank-ness. The next 10 hours of gameplay were more solitary, but no less exciting.

Unfortunately, almost all of Farcry 2’s drama stems from the minute to minute car chase\gun fight\stealth infiltration action, each aspect of which I am pleased to report, performs admirably, but yet the narrative itself is never particularly engaging, except maybe in the closing couple of hours. Accepting missions from identical factions and ‘chasing’ arms dealer ‘The Jackal’ fail to give the player narrative thrust. In my notes I have commented on how 17 hours passed before the story noticed I was there and progressed slightly. In the game’s defence, I had been mainly chasing side quests, or exploring for the hundreds of discarded(!) diamond filled suitcases which boost your war funds, but really, the game sets its stall out in the first half-hour, only returning to play with the story in the final act.

Thank God then that the core loop of its mechanics are filled with bombast. The controls never felt as buttery as say, a Valve FPS, but dynamic systems such as fire propagation, weather systems and weapon misfires ensure skirmishes are exciting and unpredictable. One fracas involved me launching an RPG at a guard post from a covered hill and picking off anyone who came running out after me. Suddenly I’m taking damage from behind me. I whirl round to see my once vegetation shrouded hill ablaze. The backfire from rocket I fired had set alight to the dry grass around me, which was in turn setting me alight. I sped off, scorched but grinning.

Travel too, is a success, aided by a diverse range of vehicles including Jeep mounted turrets, dune buggies, trucks, and my personal favourite, the world of watercraft. Boats were my best friend through the hostile lands of Fakeswana due to one of the game’s biggest flaws, the dilemma of checkpoints staffed by infinitely respawning eagle-eyed psychopaths. If, while travelling to your mission you stumble across a guard checkpoint, they will go hell for leather in tracking and killing you either by vehicle or on foot, the game seemingly gifting their machines with nitro, because at times they are impossible to shake. You can scout out each checkpoint and clear it of enemies, but doing so is near-pointless as all the guards will respawn next time you trundle past. Indeed scouting itself is almost redundant, its benefit in the original Farcry being to identify enemy positions and have them marked on your map. In its bigger brother though, only weapon caches or gun emplacements can be marked on a map which is only shown through a button press and that obscures the whole screen, making it a liability in a firefight. It’s only real purpose is to navigate you between the sorties.

Regarding those Rejuvenation Chamber-a-like guard posts, I can see the dilemma. One of Farcry 2’s strengths is in its pacing; it has a great balance of peaks and troughs, a feat made more impressive by its open world nature where the player is less easily corralled. Maybe a few more patrols, and a few less checkpoint respawns would strike a fairer balance.

The main sticking points are simply the repetitious missions, of which a good 70% are roughly similar, a seemingly pointless ‘reputation’ stat, since this never had any bearing on my entire playthrough, and the endless waves of cloned guards.

Farcry 2’s main strength though is that none of this criticism is enough to prevent it from being a great title, recommended for fans of open-world shooting, or even just someone who would enjoy lapping up the scenery. Its sense of environment is stunning; many of my best experiences playing came from just putting around jungle rivers in my swamp boat. It’s simply a pity that it’s world wasn’t just a bit more human.

Robbie McKnight

Shit joke we didn’t use:

Ubisoft, your engine’s Dunia proud.

Best NPC Quote that didn’t end up in the article:

‘Watch out mate, the girls aren’t clean’.