Far cry 2

Here’s the funny thing about Far Cry; it was never all that great a game in all honesty, but that somehow ended up getting forgotten and it was the console expansions that got all the flak. 

Wow, I know – controversial, eh? It’s true though. Far Cry was a visually stunning game and the fact that you could roam the tropical islands where the game took place was very impressive, but in reality it was never as open as people claim. You could run through the trees ‘til your heart was content – but you’d never find anything out there and there were still a whole load of invisible walls and insta-kill helicopters to stop you straying too far. 

By the time people realised that though it didn’t matter; they’d either reach the lacklustre indoor areas of the game or they’d met those invincible TriGen monsters and thrown the game away in frustration. It’s probably for the best that Crytek moved on to make Crysis and left the sequel rights with Ubisoft.

In fact, it’s definitely for the better. This is a Far Cry game which isn’t totally about graphical power and lurid Hawaiian shirts. It’s about freedom, player choice and a complex game-world. It also happens to be a very definite early contender for Game of the Year. 

Far Cry 2 isn’t actually a true sequel to the first game. It doesn’t have mutants, monsters, creepy German doctors, all-American heroes or gameplay that gets utterly broken in the last ten levels of the game. It isn’t set in a tropical paradise and the stories for the two games aren’t linked at all. 

Instead, Ubisoft has focused on what the original game did in gameplay terms and what players said they liked about it. The (pseudo) open world, the different vehicles and ability to tackle objectives on your terms, with your tools – these are the things that made Far Cry great. Oh, and the handglider too. By designing the game around these elements, Ubi has been able to make a game that isn’t constrained by the plot and premise of the first game but which can still tick all the right boxes.

The new game then offers something different to its predecessor. The tropical jungles have been traded in for an African savannah. The linear progression of objectives has been turned into a mission-based structure. The invisible walls which gave the illusion of openness inFar Cry have been removed so that Far Cry 2 now really is as open as you think. 

The story has been reworked too – in fact, abandoned. The mutants and genetic semi-science of the first has been turned into a gritty and harsh tale of mercenary life. You’re now a mercenary operating in a very unstable region of Africa that is being wracked by the fitful throes of civil war. You’re there to kill a man who calls himself The Jackal, an arms dealer and war profiteer who is prolonging the conflict and supplying weapons to both sides in order to keep business up. 

Who hired you? How did you get there? How will you deal with the competing mercenaries operating in the area? All these questions and more start to get answered as the game progresses and it’s really very impressive to see how the story of the game is woven into the gameplay. 

Speaking of the gameplay...

Far Cry 2 – Gameplay

We have a theory that all really good PC games begin with the player confined to some method of transport that they can’t control, forcing them to watch the scenery roll by as the backstory filters through to their subconscious. BioShock, Call of Duty 4, Half-Life – all of them start with the player in a car, plane or train for the opening sequence. 

Far Cry 2 does the same thing and for the first few minutes you’ll be sat in the back of a taxi being taken to your hotel and watching the waxing and waning of the chaos around you. The backstory is woven into the environment and the contexts around you – one moment you’re watching your driver shoo buffalo out of the way, the next he’s bribing local militia with beer to get you past a checkpoint. 

When the game actually does let you take control after this well-made and gentle introduction, the pace rapidly changes. You’re quickly threatened, shot and diagnosed with malaria. In the short term it’s the malaria which is most important – the game draws you in by forcing you to trade favours and complete missions in order to get medicine.

Once your supply of drugs is secured and you’ve got familiar with the two main parties involved in the civil war, the APR and UFLL, the game takes the stabilisers off and lets you really get your teeth in. From thereon you’ll be trading favours, accepting missions and causing all sorts of chaos as you pursue your long-term goal; to kill The Jackal. 

Africa is a complex place though and the 50 square kilometres you have to mess around in makes for a formidable playground. The first thing you’re advised to do is to get a safehouse and start making some friends. 

Friends play an important part in the game and a huge portion of Far Cry 2 is spent trying to keep your allies happy and your foes confused. At the start of the game you get a chance to choose your identity from one of a dozen or so other mercs with the same goal, but whichever guns for hire you don’t choose will still play role in the game and it’s by finding and helping them that you can unlock some of the game's extra-special features. 

One of the first missions you come across in the game, for example, is to try and wipe out a Special Forces squad that is planning to launch an attack on one of the two warring parties. Your mission-giver tells you that you’ll need to destroy all their equipment. It seems simple enough, right? Surely the hard part will just be getting there in one piece since it’s a long way to the Special Forces base (or not, thanks to the busses which act as the fast travel system).

If you’ve managed to make some friends though (and provided they like you enough) then your ally will give you a call and suggest an alternative plan. How about you go to the Special Forces’ informant and force him to feed them some fake data? You could lure your enemy to a more vulnerable position and wipe them out far easier, though you’ll need to do some extra legwork to do it. 

This is one of the easiest things to like about Far Cry 2 and it’s also one of the most accessible and useful. By using friends and informants you quickly attach to other characters and are made to care about them, while at the same time getting more options and extra-paths to try if you find certain missions too hard.

That’s not all your buddies are good for though. Ubisoft has done its best to make them a real and functioning part of the game world. Find yourself getting shot down in battle? You can rely on your best buddy to come to your rescue and give you a second shot at a mission by pulling you to safety and working the assault with you. Not sure where to find the best deals on guns and cars? Your friends can help you out with that too, advising you on tactics and how to progress. 

Hell, they can even accompany you as back-up if you need and Ubisoft has made sure that they don't slow you down with poor path-finding by ensuring they just meet you at the battlefield.

Wow – a massive page on gameplay? That’s something we only usually do for the most complex and best of games! That fact alone says a lot more about how much we like Far Cry 2 than the score itself will. 

You see, Far Cry 2 is a fairly complex game and it definitely does a bit to buck the trends of the usual and somewhat staid FPS genre. Understand though that when we say ‘complex’, we don’t mean it in a bad way. One of the best things we can say about Far Cry 2 is that it takes all these amazing features and it makes them utterly accessible to the player. Soon you’ll be gouging bullets out of yourself with no problems. 

And that leads us neatly onto one of our favourite features of the game – the health system. 

In most FPS games there are only two ways to handle player damage. You either have a straight-up health counter that ticks down and is restored by healthpacks, or you have health as an invisible idea that you’ll only become aware of when you’re almost killed by two bullets and have to hide behind a crate for your screen to stop pulsing red.

Far Cry 2 though has got a little inventive here and actually fused the two together. Player health is therefore represented by a series of coloured bars at the bottom of the screen and these empty when you take damage. 

If you only take minor damage and the segment isn’t completely depleted then it’ll slowly restore as your bruises heal – but whole segments cannot restore themselves if they’ve been totally drained. Instead, you’ll have to give yourself an injection to restore your health completely, which makes styrettes an important commodity to reserve as you can only carry so many at once.

That’s all well and good then – but it all changes if your last health segment becomes damaged. If that happens then it counts as lethaldamage and your health will start draining away quickly as you bleed out. Your vision will blur, your heart will pound and you’ll be unable to move at full speed. 

The only solution: battlefield surgery. By pressing H you’ll automatically address your most severe wounds and restore your last two segments, but the process can take time so it’s important to find a safe spot as fast as you can before you keel over like a duck caught in the path of skimming stone contest.

It’s also pretty gross as you’ll have to watch the surgery be performed based on the damage you’ve taken. If you’ve been shot a lot you’ll have to yank the lead out with pliers or cauterise the hole with matches. If you’ve been hit with splash damage your limbs will need relocating. If you’ve been caught in a fire then you’ll have to stop, drop and roll. All of it is disgusting and we have to keep telling ourselves that it’s just the sound of sizzling bacon or snapping celery, not crisping flesh or broken bones.

The benefit of the health system then is that it helps bring a small slice of realism to the game, while also making the tactics of a gunfight more involved and interesting. You can still charge in all guns blazing if you want – but you’ll have to have a good hiding place in mind. 

Oh, and you also better hope that your gun doesn’t jam either – a feature which seems to have divided fans right down the middle ever since it was first announced. In reality though, gun-jamming can be as much or as little of an issue as you want in the game. It isn’t something to worry about unless your RPG misfires and plants the rocket at your feet.

Pick-up some rubbish gun off the ground that looks all dirty, battered and cracked? Fine, do it – but expect it to jam more than the band at The Black Cotton Club in London on a Saturday night. Just as in real life, randomly grabbing guns off the floor is a tactic you can’t always rely on. A far better option is to buy the guns you want in advance and ensure you have enough ammo. Guns don’t degrade over time, so as long as you have a quality product then reliability is assured.

Graphics Analysis

For once, we’re going to kind of gloss over the graphics – not because they aren’t impressive, but because Tim and Harry will be looking at them more closely later. Soon we’ll have an indepth set of performance benchmarks and graphics analysis for Far Cry 2. 

If you find yourself asking; will my computer or graphics card run Far Cry 2? Then you’ll soon have an answer. 

For now, we’re just going to look at the three standard presets for the game to check out what it looks like on the various different settings. Below you can see what the game looks like on Ultra High, High and Low presets, but we’ve skipped out on Very High and Medium. 

Far Cry 2 is an impressive game graphically and it has all sorts of effects and tricks. The fire in the game is especially good-looking, more so because it can spread out across the land in a believable way if you use it right. A well placed Molotov cocktail can make a wall of flames than can effectively fence in an enemy and destroy or cut them off from their vehicles.

Far Cry 2 graphics on Ultra-high with DirectX 10.1 enabled, click to enlarge

The game also has a full day and night cycle which passes as you play, meaning that you can watch the stars and moon rise if you like and then use the cover of darkness to hide your stealthy, backstabbing game tactics. Though time passes quite slowly in game, you can also find beds to rest on and fast forward to your desired point in the timeline. 

On top of all that the game is also the first to use DirectX 10.1, which is used to give better anti-aliasing performance. Yes, we know thatAssassin’s Creed PC also used DX 10.1, but that was removed in a subsequent patch. Far Cry 2 is the first game to retain the use of DX10.1, though you’ll have to pump up the settings and be running Vista Service Pack 1 to make use of it. The enhancements even work onNvidia graphics cards through a DirectX 10 extension.

Far Cry 2 graphics on High with DirectX 9 enabled, click to enlarge

If you’re worried about how the game might run on your system too, then there’s no real need to be. The game doesn’t require massively powerful specs and the minimums list only 1GB of RAM and a Shader Model 3.0 graphics card with 256MB. The recommended specs are just a bit higher – 2GB of RAM and a card with 512MB. You can check out the full set of minimum and recommended system specs for Far Cry 2 here if you need more info. 

For our part, we ran the game on Ultra-high settings at 1,920 x 1,200 with 2.93GHz CPU, 3.50GB of accessible RAM (thanks to 32-bit Vista) and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 and the performance never dropped below thirty frames a second. Not once. That’s impressive when you bear in mind that there are no load screens in the game as you roam through the 50 square kilometres. 

Far Cry 2 graphics on Low with DirectX 9 enabled, click to enlarge

To be honest though, even if you’re running the game on the High settings and not the Ultra-high then the game is still going to look great. You might be sacrificing some slightly tweaked AA performance that you wouldn’t notice anyway, but ho-hum. As you can see in the screenshots on this page, the game still looks great on the High setting and that’s a setting which most systems nowadays should be able to hit.

In fact, from the screenshots it’s hard to tell the difference between High and Ultra-high. In motion the difference is a little easier to spot thanks to the motion blur, depth of field and so on, but those settings are all pretty extraneous anyway. Good if you can get them, but not worth fretting over.

On the Low setting, things are a bit different. The game is still OK looking to anyone who doesn’t demand the best of graphics, but it’s definitely a few steps lower than you might hope. The textures are less detailed, more flat and not as interesting. There’s a lot more pop-up too as you roam the game world and the lack of shadows massively impacts on how the game looks. While the Low setting may be tolerable, you certainly aren’t making the most of what the game has to offer.

Conclusions

So far, we focused on what the good parts of Far Cry 2 are, like how cool the health system is and how we like the buddy system which lets you use allies as you need them. Now it’s time to talk about the bad points of the game.

Um…and we’re drawing a blank, to be honest. 

That isn’t to say that Far Cry 2 doesn’t have its flaws, because it does. The voice acting, for example, isn’t delivered very well and the actors seem to rush their lines too quickly – but when you’re dealing with a game of this size and quality, is that a legitimate criticism?

The writing is surprisingly well done too. Going in to Far Cry 2 you’d have the suspicion that the game was gearing up to be a plain and simple shooter, easy on plot and sub-text. That isn’t so. Instead, the game has a surprisingly deep selection of characters and motives. 

There’s Reuben, the journalist working to expose the massacres to the world. There are the leaders of the different parties each of whom believe they have the interests of the community at heart. Then there’s The Jackal – cold, calculating but shockingly philosophical and not just out-and-out anarchistic; he comes across as a cool antihero in the interview tapes which you can collect throughout the game.

The main flaw with Far Cry 2 is perhaps that it’s a bit samey in places, especially when it comes to getting from A to B. The savannah is verybrown after all, so driving cross-country can be a bit of a monotony. Then again, it’s clear that Ubi has tried its best to alleviate this and provide distractions on the way. There are plenty of diamonds to search for and collect and regular guard posts and safe houses to liberate from insurgents. 

The combat is as smooth and strategic as you could hope it to be too, so there’s no fault on that side. You can take a silenced pistol and sniper rifle approach if you want or use rocket launchers and molotovs to flush the enemy out. The fire in this game spreads beautifully and can really be used as a weapon to funnel and direct enemies – plus it looks gorgeous.

The enemy AI showcases some basic quirks though – like closing the distance to reach you and then waiting to pull out a sniper rifle to shoot you with instead of a pistol. It’s not a huge issue, but it is noticable and occasionally holds back the game from reaching the brilliance it is capable of. That's the case with some of the filler missions too, which can get repetitive. Completing missions for the Gun Seller for example is pretty much always the same - find the enemy truck, drop a well-timed grenade in its path and reap the rewards.

For the most part though, that brilliance manages to stay intact and Far Cry 2 secures its place as one of the gaming highlights of the year. Really; it is a very, very good game. It feels like a blend of all the things we like about games. It has the upgradeable weapons and tactical options of Deus Ex, the open world and vehicles of Grand Theft Auto and the solid FPS mechanics of Half-Life 2 – and each element manages to be both distinct and at one with the overall game design.

It’s the little things that give Far Cry 2 the edge though; the clever additions that make it stand out and force you to question why nobody has ever done this before.

Take navigation for example; rather than cluttering the HUD with a minimap you instead have a map you can refer to and update when on foot. When you’re in the car though you have a SatNav that fills the role of a minimap – but if you need a larger view then you can pop your map in your lap and refer to that as you drive.

Far Cry 2 isn’t perfect; there’s something missing here which we’re struggling to put our fingers on. It’s something emotional. Games have an enormous power to move players and that’s the one thing that Far Cry 2 doesn’t do that games like Episode Two and BioShock do manage. Far Cry 2 can make you excited and happy, but it won’t ever leave you scared or crying. It just lacks that last inch of emotional impact or philosophical pretension to take it from a truly fantastic game to an inspiring piece of craftsmanship. 

If we marked out of 100 then Far Cry 2 would definitely be a 95/100 score, but we don’t. We mark out of ten, and ten is a score reserved for games that go that extra mile and do something to move the genre as whole forward. Far Cry 2 just misses that target, but it should still definitely be on your Must Buy list.