Sun 09 Oct 2011
Playstation
Far Cry 2 Review
Oddly enough despite the fact the Farcry is supposed to be the first proper sequel to the first Farcry game, complete with the appropriate name, theme and mechanics, the game actually doesn’t continue the story of the original Farcray game, it doesn’t take place on the island, it doesn’t even follow the same character that was featured in Farcry. So what can you expect from Farcry 2?
Farcry focuses entirely on gunplay in an open African world that’s absolutely colossal in scale, it’s a huge open world environment in which you can go anywhere and do anything. You are ultimately square in the center of a struggle between two opposing factions and are ultimately taxed with eliminating an arms dealer who goes by the name of the Jackel.
The story isn’t particularly compelling early on, but it gets more interesting as you progress further in the game. Your actions will begin to have a noticeable impact on your environments and how you proceed throughout the rest of the game, especially when the decisions you make are concerning life and death situations. You’ll be put in situations where you can decide to let an individual live or kill him. The game does take a while to get going but once it does, the game is a very immersive and stimulating experience.
There are also side missions, which you’ll be granted the opportunity to accept for NPC’s, which add to the overall experience and grant you alternatives to completing missions. If you embark on these side missions you’ll be able to upgrade your safe houses, which is where you store your weapons, health items and other useful resources that can be of use. An interesting moral dilemma arises where you can decide to risk your life in order to heal a wounded NPC or leave the NPC to die and continue in order to save your own skin and continue on without him, there is quite a bit of moral ambiguity, and certainly plenty of dilemmas as well.
The enemy AI is also very well done. If you hide well the enemy may actually loose you, or continue to look for you but not know where you are, if the enemy knows your general location the enemy will randomly fire shots in that direction. In other words the AI feels very human which ultimately makes the gameplay more enjoyable. However the AI is not without its problems, sometimes you can shoot one of your enemies right in the head, while that enemy is situated right beside his allied soldier and the enemy won’t even react. In other instances I noticed Soldiers won’t run for cover, rather they’ll just stand out in the open while your firing shots at them. This isn’t exactly uncommon in FPS games, but these problems protrude that much more in Farcry 2 because of the fact that the AI is otherwise phenomenal.
The graphics in this game look great, the environments, vehicles, the character animations are all fluid and everything looks very polished. One of the other problems with this game however is there’s not a lot of diversity in the kinds of enemies you’ll face throughout the game, and there’s almost no feeling of progression because throughout the game you are constantly combating the same enemies, from the beginning to the end you’ll encounter much of the same, so it can become a bit boring, however this hardly infringes upon the overall immersive feel of the game.........guns jam up, you’ll be required to remove bullets from yourself when you get shot in order to recover health. It’s a highly immersive and realistic experience.
What you will notice in this game is since the world is so big there’s a lot of time that you’ll spend walking or driving around. Now I have to say the vehicles don’t have a lot feel to them and don’t feel very realistic. It’s not like Grand Theft Auto when you get into your car or more often someone else’s and the driving mechanics are as good if not better than every other aspect of the game.
Instead Farcry comes and short in the driving department, which was disappointing and irritating consider you spend a lot of time driving around. Also aside from the fact that the driving aspect of the game doesn’t feel particularly fun or realistic, there are also a number of quirks I discovered while driving. First off, it’s very easy to get caught up on rocks, I found myself get stuck on rocks which I could see more than few times, because (and this leads into my second point)it’s difficult to see what’s going on behind you and to the sides of you, it feels like your overall view is intruded upon. So the driving mechanic could have used a lot more work considering the amount of time you spend driving. You can however also take a bus which will immediately transport you to your desired location.
All in all Farcry 2 is a pretty solid game and there’s also a ton of gameplay here, around 25 hours of single player gaming, so it’s pretty jam packed. Farcry also has a multi player mode, complete with a very powerful map editor which may help to foster a solid multipayer community. Overall this is a great game aside from the driving mechanic which is unfortunately mediocre at best.
Rating: 87%
Pros:
Excellent graphics
Gorgeously rendered open world environment
Highly immersive and enthralling gameplay
Cons:
Driving Sucks
Some AI quirks
Farcry focuses entirely on gunplay in an open African world that’s absolutely colossal in scale, it’s a huge open world environment in which you can go anywhere and do anything. You are ultimately square in the center of a struggle between two opposing factions and are ultimately taxed with eliminating an arms dealer who goes by the name of the Jackel.
The story isn’t particularly compelling early on, but it gets more interesting as you progress further in the game. Your actions will begin to have a noticeable impact on your environments and how you proceed throughout the rest of the game, especially when the decisions you make are concerning life and death situations. You’ll be put in situations where you can decide to let an individual live or kill him. The game does take a while to get going but once it does, the game is a very immersive and stimulating experience.
There are also side missions, which you’ll be granted the opportunity to accept for NPC’s, which add to the overall experience and grant you alternatives to completing missions. If you embark on these side missions you’ll be able to upgrade your safe houses, which is where you store your weapons, health items and other useful resources that can be of use. An interesting moral dilemma arises where you can decide to risk your life in order to heal a wounded NPC or leave the NPC to die and continue in order to save your own skin and continue on without him, there is quite a bit of moral ambiguity, and certainly plenty of dilemmas as well.
The enemy AI is also very well done. If you hide well the enemy may actually loose you, or continue to look for you but not know where you are, if the enemy knows your general location the enemy will randomly fire shots in that direction. In other words the AI feels very human which ultimately makes the gameplay more enjoyable. However the AI is not without its problems, sometimes you can shoot one of your enemies right in the head, while that enemy is situated right beside his allied soldier and the enemy won’t even react. In other instances I noticed Soldiers won’t run for cover, rather they’ll just stand out in the open while your firing shots at them. This isn’t exactly uncommon in FPS games, but these problems protrude that much more in Farcry 2 because of the fact that the AI is otherwise phenomenal.
The graphics in this game look great, the environments, vehicles, the character animations are all fluid and everything looks very polished. One of the other problems with this game however is there’s not a lot of diversity in the kinds of enemies you’ll face throughout the game, and there’s almost no feeling of progression because throughout the game you are constantly combating the same enemies, from the beginning to the end you’ll encounter much of the same, so it can become a bit boring, however this hardly infringes upon the overall immersive feel of the game.........guns jam up, you’ll be required to remove bullets from yourself when you get shot in order to recover health. It’s a highly immersive and realistic experience.
What you will notice in this game is since the world is so big there’s a lot of time that you’ll spend walking or driving around. Now I have to say the vehicles don’t have a lot feel to them and don’t feel very realistic. It’s not like Grand Theft Auto when you get into your car or more often someone else’s and the driving mechanics are as good if not better than every other aspect of the game.
Instead Farcry comes and short in the driving department, which was disappointing and irritating consider you spend a lot of time driving around. Also aside from the fact that the driving aspect of the game doesn’t feel particularly fun or realistic, there are also a number of quirks I discovered while driving. First off, it’s very easy to get caught up on rocks, I found myself get stuck on rocks which I could see more than few times, because (and this leads into my second point)it’s difficult to see what’s going on behind you and to the sides of you, it feels like your overall view is intruded upon. So the driving mechanic could have used a lot more work considering the amount of time you spend driving. You can however also take a bus which will immediately transport you to your desired location.
All in all Farcry 2 is a pretty solid game and there’s also a ton of gameplay here, around 25 hours of single player gaming, so it’s pretty jam packed. Farcry also has a multi player mode, complete with a very powerful map editor which may help to foster a solid multipayer community. Overall this is a great game aside from the driving mechanic which is unfortunately mediocre at best.
Rating: 87%
Pros:
Excellent graphics
Gorgeously rendered open world environment
Highly immersive and enthralling gameplay
Cons:
Driving Sucks
Some AI quirks
