Far Cry 2

Overview

Rating: Superior: The cream of the crop.
Lifetime: 40+ hours
Short summary: An important evolution in subtle game design.
Reviewed on: Xbox 360

Review

As I steer my boat down the river, I realise two things: I should have packed a sniper rifle instead of the assault rifle; and I should have waited until nightfall. My target was up in a shack on the top of a cliff overlooking a waterfall. In between me and the plateau is a guard shack at the base of the cliff, and countless guards patrolling. If I play it right though, I may just be able to pick them all off one by one and avoid being overwhelmed by superior numbers.

I swim to shore about fifty metres from the shack, hiding the boat behind a rock slightly further downstream. Creeping my way up along a hillside and using foliage and shadows to my advantage, I get myself in to a position where I can see one of the guards. I pull out my assault rifle and start to line him up in my sights.

Something spooked him. Did he see me? Hear me? Either way, he's looking directly at me. I'm disguised well enough though, as he hasn't started firing or calling out. Two seconds later, he's dead on the ground and I'm dashing back to the river. I jump in, duck underwater, and swim beneath the guard shack. Surfacing slightly, I sit beneath two guards talking. It seems they've lost me, but are convinced I'm out there somewhere and should be on the alert. Good.

Swimming to the other side of the river, I start to make my way up a path leading to a foot bridge connecting this side of the river to my target. There's only one guard visible on the bridge itself. I figure I should get closer to the bridge before taking him out. Again using the shade and the foliage to my advantage, I creep towards the bridge and freeze when I get up there and find the guard off the bridge and on this side of the river. He didn't detect me. This was obvious, as he casually strolled and sat down on the ground right in front of me.

Moving ever so slowly, I get behind him and kill him with my machete. He managed to scream out though. I dash back down the cliff side and take a spot where I can see the bridge. Sure enough, someone has come running across it. The assault rifle proves it's worth again, as I take a careful shot to stop him in his tracks before finishing him off. Someone else made it across before I saw the bridge and is taking wild shots with a shotgun at me. I turn around. He can't quite see me over a rock I'm next to. I toss a grenade and disappear again.

The next time I get up to the bridge, I overhear more guards talking. They're convinced there's a ghost out there taking them out, and are giving each other pep talks. I've demoralised the remaining guards. This will make the rest of my mission easier.

This is just one of the many experiences Far Cry 2 has to offer. It is also an experience the game doesn't tell you about. The only thing you are forced to do is talk to people to get missions. The rest is entirely up to you.

The setting is a small country in Africa. You assume the role of a mercenary who was hired to kill an arms dealer, The Jackal, who sells to both sides of a civil war. Unfortunately, you contract a nasty case of malaria and are left for dead by The Jackal. A fight breaks out around you, and you get your wits about you enough to escape the bullets. Seeing an opportunity, you are rescued by a member of a warring faction who gives you some malaria medication and sets you on your way to do missions for money. This all works towards your ultimate goal - you're still being paid to kill The Jackal.

With the introduction out of the way, you're left to your own devices. You are free to do missions for the faction who found you, or to switch sides and do missions for the other factions. You make allies along the way who ask you to do favours for them, and who in return will offer to help you out if you get in a jam. You can hack in to mobile phone towers to find targets to assassinate. If you want to keep your malaria in check, you're going to have to deliver passports to the local underground in exchange for medication.

How you approach each of those things is entirely up to you. You are given free reign of the country (excepting the southern half, which gets unlocked around halfway in to the game). Cars and boats can be regularly found to transport you around in - which is definitely needed, given there's roughly 50 square kilometres of terrain to traverse.

There is lots of stuff that you could consider unnecessary in the game. If you pared it down to the bare minimum needed to see the ending, you'll only need to do the missions offered by the factions and use weapons found on the corpses of your enemies. This, however, would be missing the point.

Far Cry 2 is ultimately about getting in to the mind of a mercenary, and the questions it raises as a result. If you played it as a "go from A to B" action game, something that the game doesn't stop you from doing at all, you will miss the incredible depth that the game has to offer. The introduction to this review should give you some idea of the choice you have available to you. There are at least four other ways up the cliff. My playthrough of that mission ended with an in-person assassination, a gunfight to escape the shack, and flying away on a hang glider stashed closer to the falls. I could have stood back and lobbed a grenade in to the shack and stealthed away just as I had stealthed in. Whatever it takes to get the job done.

Much of the game plays out as what I like to refer to as "The Dance of Death" - anyone familiar with Sergio Leone's western movies should immediately understand what I mean. Most of your time is spent planning out your next move, moving in to place, and then waiting for just the right moment to engage in short bursts of violence and destruction that are over before you've realised. It can be a spectacular sequence. If you're not using the environment to your advantage by hiding, you can use it to your advantage by destroying it. An impressive amount of your surroundings are destructable, from entire buildings down to trees and even grass. The fire is the most believeable in a game yet, and will spread realistically.

The overall plot draws from the classic novel Heart of Darkness and, perhaps even more so from it's most famous adaptation, Apocalypse Now. As a result, it has a lot to say about violence and how if affects people. You will have to go looking for it though, as the game rightly gives you as little information as possible if you choose to only do the faction missions. As a mercenary, your character has made a life of violence without choosing sides and getting too involved, yet you immediately assume that you're the good guy and the bad guy is The Jackal. However, speaking to your allies makes you realise that there isn't a single good guy in the game - including yourself.

One particular mission has you destroying the irrigation pumps on a farm controlled by the opposing faction. If you choose to follow the plans of one of your allies - each main faction mission has an alternative method of completion through your allies - you end up stealing some herbicide that is then dumped on the farm after you've destroyed the pumps. It's overkill to be sure, but it's a decision you've made as the best way to deal with the opposing faction. The game is full of choices like that, with neither choice being a good one.

To further emphasise your decisions, you can find recordings of interviews conducted with The Jackal that you need to return to a journalist. At times, you find The Jackal's words striking a very resounding chord with decisions you made in the game. The mission and plot progression if you choose to do everything opens up just as the African landscape does as you explore it - the more you see of it, the more you realise the horror and the atrocities that the characters in the world, including yourself, are capable of and have committed. Even if your character actually started to question himself as he saw all this, the simple fact of the matter is that your character was dropped in to the middle of a war zone by choice and the only way out is to shoot your way through.

It is also a reflection on the nature of violence in video games. By using a very violent genre - the first person shooter - and experimenting with it, it becomes very apparent that most other games in the genre glorify violence. There is no glory in this game. Everything is dirty and run down. Both sides will happilly kill civillians. You can kill anything that moves, including the native fauna. There is no glory in giving an ally an overdose on pain killers as they lay dieing on the ground, nor in mercy killing them with a shot to the head from one of your guns.

Despite it's very lean appearance, Far Cry 2 is a very dense game. It can be enjoyed at it's simplest level - a run and gun sandbox shooter - but it is at it's most rewarding when you give it the time of day to truly experience life as a mercenary and the moral ambiguity and patience needed to perform such a job. By using classic literature as a base, Ubisoft Montreal have crafted a game that poses a lot of questions yet leaves you to answer them. This may be glossed over by the masses, but the fact that such a high profile game has taken a risk to say something important gives hope of the improvement of the artform in the face of over-the-top macho celebrations of violence like Gears of War and Halo - games that have their place to be sure, but aren't doing anything for the stigma surrounding games in our culture. I can't recommend this game enough.

Welcome

For a while now, I've been wanting to start up a review site. It occured to me that mainstream gaming press reviews games wrong. Too much focus is placed on the score, and criticism is often brought about if the review doesn't seem to match the score. Further, the reviews themselves seem to focus on the wrong things. They don't try to dissect a game in depth.

My day job is as a programmer at a game development company. Over the past few years, there has been an increasing push to legitimise games as an artform. I have many rants on that subject - the main one in particular being that we shouldn't call them games. This site is not about those rants though.

The purpose of this site is to review games and focus on what I think reviews should focus on. The only way we're going to legitimise games as an artform is if we produce games with artistic merit and review them as such. To that end, you won't find this site constantly updated, nor will you find reviews on release day. My passion is creating games, not reviewing them. I play games and have stuff to say about the games I play though, and thus here we are.

The reviews here will take to a format. Up front is a star rating, the amount of time I consider worth spending on the game, and a quick summary. It literally is an overview, nothing more, and isn't meant to be taken more seriously than that. The star rating isn't also meant to be taken too seriously, and to that end when you see a star rating on this site you can roughly equate it to mean the following:

• 5 stars: Excellent. It ate up my hours without thinking twice.
• 4 stars: Good. Enjoyed it but not the greatest thing ever.
• 3 stars: Alright. Don’t see myself touching it ever again though.
• 2 stars: The wrong side of average. Expect problems that seriously hamper your enjoyment.
• 1 stars: Bad. It really annoyed me but there is worse out there.
• 0 stars: Terrible. Avoid. I’d sell the game if it wasn’t for the fact some other sucker would have to endure it.

Following this overview will be an in-depth discussion of what I got out of the game. I'm not interested in telling you what the graphics are like, or anything else like that. This will purely discuss the experience and the artistic merit of what can be found in its digital world.

I hope you stick around and read my opinions, and come to trust them more than the reviews on mainstream sites.