FarCry 2
To begin with, Farcry 1 had good intentions but, decided fall in to the unrealistic cesspit, adding monster and mutants just as one begins to think “ohh this is actually quite goo-“.
Farcry 2 is undoubtedly better than its mutant predecessor, as you follow the journey of a lone wolf through Africa on a search to find ‘the jackal’ a notorious arms dealer. Now I’m not sure about you but I realised there are several underlying racial elements of this game. Not only do you get to pick your violently criminal character out of a long list of every possible minority on the planet, but within the taxi ride to the Hotel you get ****ing Malaria!
At the first glimpse of game play the graphics are good the, environment is immersive and there is civil war. The animations, of taking information, getting in and out of cars and picking guns up have had a lot of time spent on them so much in fact that they forget to spend some time on other aspects as I will explain later. The first mission consists of escaping the town in which your hotel is located. Two options now present themselves. Firstly, you die by getting shot or secondly, you die by having a malaria attack, from here on in the game starts to go downhill. By the third or fourth mission you start to realise that the map is, regardless to the size of your icon, misleadingly big. The missions now consist of a stereotypical African warlord telling you to go to the other side of this misleadingly big map and shoot another stereotypical black warlord in the face.
Your health is a very important and annoying factor throughout the whole game. It would seem that the health bar is split into sections. The first is one which you can lose and get back naturally, the second is one that you a needle for and the third one which you need to use household utensils for. Every time you’re close to death you need to stabilise your health by using pliers or matches or a knife. All very graphic and well animated but ****ing annoying! The moment you have to do this you get shot and have to start again the same goes for using syringes. Not only do you have to do do–it- yourself surgery but you also have to OD on malaria tablets which in some cases are in very short supply meaning that you have to drive to the other side of the map shoot some rebels and deliver some passports to a family.
The long journey, you may think, should be shortened by a quick travel system, which it is supposed to be. The African Bus Service is this ‘quick travel system’ of which you speak but it would seen that the owner of this bus service had failed to realise that busses will be used if the station is surrounded by people and not ****ing dessert. In short you use the quick travel system to shorten a 1 hour and 5 minute journey to a 1 hour journey.
Secondly, the missions you are set are ‘Covert’, so covert in fact that everyone wants to kill you, and in case you didn’t realise there are obviously no civilians in Africa, or, if there are they have assault rifles and want to kill you. Every minute you have a 4 x 4 gunning you down or a single man with a shotgun picking you off from a mile away. No worry though buddies are at hand, rescuing you from the middle of nowhere if needed. However to please your friend they present you with an extra sub mission to complement, WITH MORE ****ING DRIVING, the mission which you have already been given by the stereotypical African warlord. This is what in the end made me quit the game with the intent never to play it again! I had driven miles, doing both parts of the mission only to find when I finally got back to the bus station that I had infact got to travel a mile more just to save a man that had already beaten all the bad guys when I arrived. To this I reacted rather negatively, the next time he was on the floor injured instead of healing him I shot him in the head! J
Overall this game has the potential to be good, but many amazingly annoying factors. The travel is slow with every jeep limited to 2 mph and the missions are tedious. But the fire looks cool.
PRICE, EDDIE
