HTOTM: FUSION
Original Post
The Good and the Bad: My Review of Far Cry 2


Hey everybody. I bought Far Cry 2 on Sunday last weekend, and I can't wait to complain about it.

Far Cry 2 is a beautiful game, consisting of wonderful scenery, marvelous explosions, and never ending AI. But, there are flaws to this nicely crafted video game. As always, I don't know where to start, so I'll start with the AI.

- The enemies are everywhere. They are the only beings outside the cease-fire zones besides your buddies that you meet, making you on the edge always. This isn't a particularly bad thing, but it's annoying and may lead to becoming anti-social. Also, what? Both factions will always shoot at you outside the cease-fire zones, even if you are currently doing a mission for their faction. This lacking feature makes me miss mercenaries a bit.
- Guard posts are captured by exploring it fully, whether it's a mounted turret range, a med-station, or an ammo dump. But, sadly, you can't keep enemies from re-occupying it as soon as you leave to another area, making car rides always a pleasure.
- Sounds are used repeatedly, whether it's from a rebel soldier crying out in pain, or crying out in anger. Also, animations are basically the same for most enemies, like when you set them on fire, they will scream, pat themselves down, then die three seconds later. Which now brings me to my next topic:
- Enemies are either incredibly easy or incredibly hard to kill. For instance, tapping an enemy with your truck will kill them instantly, where emptying a whole clip into your enemy will still leave them running and shooting like you tickled them. This is like the polar opposite of Call Of Duty 4.
- Also, fires die out too fast, which is not really a bad thing necessarily because it would mean bad news for you, but forest fires usually expand more than 5 yards in my opinion.
- I hate it when you are less than one fraction of health, and being shot at. As you press the (insert whatever key here) you will start the animation to perform grisly surgery on yourself, immediately stopping as soon as you get shot. This makes most situations extremely annoying. This reminds me of another minor annoyance.
- In the PC version of Far Cry 2, you have the ability to save at any time using the menu's save function. In the Xbox 360 version (The version I currently have) you have to find either safe-houses, or buildings to save in using a box on the wall. This causes a lot of grief for me.
- This might be a bug of mine, but my saved games screw up the order (I use the create a new save function, so I have 120 mb worth of saves) every time I save, making it almost impossible to find on my low resolution television. What I mean is that there are no markers of your last save, just the time and percentage which is pretty much screwed up. I have to go hunt every last save until I find my place.
- Lastly, I sometimes have a texture problem, frequently making certain walls or boxes/garbage bags go pink (experience from Gmod and CS:S tells me that it's a texture problem).

Well, there it is. It's a fun game, but not entirely thought through.
Last edited by DejaVu; Mar 26, 2009 at 08:45 PM.
Fonzie be with you.
Far Cry 2 was a pretty good game, but once you've played for an hour you've experienced all there is to see. The game is too repetitive, and you deserve a medal if you can sit through it all. The missions seem to take place all the way across the map from where you accepted them, leading to either a long drive in which you only look at your map, and ignore the road, or a bus ride. One other thing that bothered me is that everyone wanted to kill you, all the time. Enemies respawn, and while it seems fun at the beginning, it gets tedious real fast. There is no point to killing all the guards at a guard post and finding the ammo crate or health, because you will have to kill them all over again next time (also, any health or ammo you gain will only be restoring you to the state you were in before you decided to run into an enemy guard post), which leads me to the next point, the enemies. So far as I know, all the enemies in the game are the same as the first ones you fight. They may have body armor or a bigger gun now and then, but from what I played the enemies are not difficult at all and don't get any more difficult, even on the highest difficulty.

Anyways, that's my rant on the game. It's not bad, just repetitive.

Yeah good point RbLcK, I have basically spent my whole roadside experience staring at my map, or taking the bus.

I find that the map is too small for me to see, so you keep wondering if you missed the damn trail or not.

Also, just want to point out that the vehicle revving that the enemies do scares the crap out of me, but why do the tires screech when the car is perfectly still sometimes? That's another small bug.

Also, I wouldn't mind having some other kinds of interaction outside the cease-fire zones, other than your buddies animals or enemies.
Last edited by DejaVu; Mar 27, 2009 at 05:06 PM.
Fonzie be with you.
I agree with RbLcK in that it is quite repetitive, I had SOME new fun when I got the grenade launcher and the powerful sniper rifle but it lasted but a small while.

I spent quite some time trying to kill everyone in a cease fire zone, it never worked. :<