Far Cry 2 review - PC Gamer issue #193 (UK, November 2008)

By Tim Edwards

The key to Far Cry 2's appeal isn't the vast open landscapes. It isn't the forward-thinking technology that powers the striking, adaptive storyline, nor is it the truly extraordinary visuals. It's not the violent slapstick and chain-splodes of the hysterically volatile camps, filled to the brim with ammo dumps and fuel tanks.

It's not the moments of pure adrenalised catharsis, where, rifle in hand, you power through smoke and machinegun fire, enemies to the left and right. It's not even when you stride through the ruins, calmly putting down survivors by plunging a machete into their chests.

No. Its appeal is in the moments beforehand—when, from some lofty perch, you think of what's to come. You check your ammo. You reload your weapons. You heal up. You anticipate.

It is the calm before the storm. You are the match before the flame. In the most player-centric world yet created, in a game that you know is about to surprise, delight and enthral you, standing still, waiting to strike, is one of the finest pleasures you can experience.

For a genre so firmly rooted in the most base of thrills—blowing stuff up and putting holes through skulls with sharpened metal from long range—Far Cry 2 is weirdly smart. The headline pitch: an open world first-person shooter set in Africa, where you're tasked with tracking down, and eventually killing, an arms dealer named The Jackal. On first glance, you expect it to be simple: a series of gorgeous but carefully walled jungle and desert corridors, filled with angry men. But it's not. It's open, it's freeroaming. You can walk or drive wherever you feel like going. Within an hour, after a very brief series of tutorials and introductions, you're released with a note. Find The Jackal. Kill him. Go.

And what happens next…

The cliché goes "...is up to you." For so many years, so many games have promised that, and failed to deliver. What happens next is never up to you. What happens next is what the game designer wants you to experience.

Far Cry 2 breaks new ground. While there is a script and a story, the details of who does what, who lives, who dies, who's left standing at the end, really do lie in your hands. Far Cry 2 comes closer than any commercial game yet to a truly dynamic narrative.

Given that the action is so freeform, it may seem odd to warn you about spoilers ahead. But: these are situations I found myself in. They may happen to you, too. If you're worried, skip ahead a few pages or something.

When it starts, you wake up in a slaughterhouse. You meet your first buddy, a guy called Warren Clyde, a smart-talking American with a fun smile. He gives you a weapon, and lets you know the UFLL, the United Front for Liberation and Labour, are holding another foreign mercenary hostage to the south. You should go and rescue them.

Let it burn

So you do. The mercenary turns out to be Nasreen Davar, a hottie. She is totally fanciable, and you totally would. She is eternally grateful for her rescue. She promises that if you're in trouble, she'll come and help out.

Except, in your game, it won't turn out like that.

The above was my first experience with Far Cry 2. Then I started a new game. This time around, I woke up in a different place. My saviour and first friend turned out to be Andre, a Haitian. He's a taciturn chap with neat dreads and big guns. I rescue Quarbani Singh from where he's being held by the APR (Alliance for Popular Resistance), an experienced, almost elderly gentleman. He promises that if I'm ever in trouble, he'll come and help out.

What just happened?

This is the basis of Far Cry 2's storytelling: characters and situations are swapped via a software author, itself responding to choices made by the player. It's something that's been on the cards for some time—mostly in research projects—but this is the first high-profile game to use it.

It's nothing less than a revelation. What makes this procedural storytelling cool isn't that you get to play the game lots of times, and see new things happen, or do things in new ways. It's not even that it gives you stories to share: situations to compare with your friends.

It's that the game just works and responds to your successes, failures and fuckups. If you don't like what a guy is asking you to do, then don't do it. If you really like one of your buddies, you stick with him. When the situations force choices on you... By God, it's incredible.

You're down to your last clip. You're surrounded. The bastards are closing in. You're panicking. Bullets are clipping the treeline, folding branches around you. A critical hit. You duck behind a stump to pull the wound out of your leg. Too late. You're down.

But it's not Game Over. The screen flashes red. It's Nasreen. She's an avenging angel with a Desert Eagle. She puts you over her shoulder and drags you to safety. You're up. You're safe. But a grenade lands at Nasreen's feet.

It goes off.

Now it's her turn to need saving. You take out the final stragglers, and rush to her aide.

But you don't have any syrettes left. There's no way to heal her. She's in agony.

Nasreen, you think, is the best character in the game. She's funny, smart and has saved you again and again. You've helped her out. And she's helped you out. But now she's going to die.

You have two options. You can leave her to die in pain. Or you can euthanize her. You put a gun to her mouth. She's in so much pain she practically swallows it whole. She wants you to kill her.

So you do. And Far Cry 2's world continues without her.

Now, the story isn't perfect. You might find the cast of characters—particularly the motley assortment of generals, lieutenants and hangers-on that offer missions and define your and the country's path slightly too bland. There are no truly outstanding personalities. Bland, too, are the two factions that provide you with missions, and eventually come to dominate the game. The AFFP seem slightly communisty, the AFP have a taste for zebra-skin rugs. I went with the AFFP. No one likes a poacher.

The after-effects of what happens in your play-through seem trivial to begin with. It's only as the game reaches its climax that the true nature of the choices you're making becomes clear. For you, that might well be 40 hours in—this is a big, big game. If you work on all the side paths, it could be double that.

Ethics in games is rarely done well; prescribed moral choices rarely feel natural. Far Cry 2 follows in the lineage of Deus Ex and BioShock, where you make choices based on your own judgements. But in this world, everyone is corrupt, and everyone has an interest in continuing the war, and almost everyone wants to maintain the balance of power.

Far Cry 2 practically removes ethical considerations, by promoting near perfect self-interest. The two factions vie for power. The mercenaries make the cash. You build up your own abilities. The Jackal plays them all off against each other. Who you choose to help comes down to who you like and medical needs.

And you thought you were just going to hear about guns and rocket launchers and stuff?

The good news: Far Cry 2 isn't all theorising on the fringes of narrative technology. There are really, really big explosions, backed up by some of the most visceral gunplay in gaming. It is easily the match of, and clearly influenced by, Halo's 30 seconds of fun. The AI enemies can be intelligent, attempting some tactical thought—they'll get in close, and try to flank—but they're also dumb enough for you to manipulate. They can be coaxed out into the open. Revealing yourself, then hotfooting it to a sniper point, pays dividends. So does causing a ruckus, maybe by sniping the top off a petrol pump, letting all the goons gather, and taking them out with a single bazooka round.

Best of all, fights are as varied as you want them to be. In one mission, I was asked to kill a radio censor, and then to intimidate the local DJ into reading prepared statements, before taking his station permanently off the air. The censor was holed up in a safari resort. I swam in, taking a silenced pistol and dart-rifle. I avoided all the guards, sneaking underneath raised wooden platforms, doing the hit, and then sneaking back out. No-one spotted me.

En route to the DJ's village, I picked up a grenade launcher, shell launcher, and mortar. I levelled the place, leaving nothing but wreckage, setting fires beforehand. Both attacks were exhilarating. Both went as planned. Both felt right.

It's also uniquely absorbing—it's a game you'll find very, very hard to stop playing. Once you're in, you'll not leave until forced, for a number of reasons.

The first: it is extraordinarily beautiful. Let's not kid about here; given the right hardware, this is an astonishingly good looking game. Remember that bit at the start of Oblivion, when you escape the sewers, and the view just blows you away? Far Cry 2 does that every 15 minutes or so. In quiet moments, when you're tootling along in a jeep, gazelles running alongside, driving into the sunset, the sheer sensation of place is palpable.

Second: Far Cry 2's commitment to first-person is total. Once you're playing, the game simply refuses to break your viewpoint. There's nothing to disturb your absorption. No barrier to concentration. No flipping to a map screen to see where you are—here the map is a physical item held like a gun. If you want to work out where you are or where you're going, you'll have to pull it out while driving—glancing down at your lap like a lost tourist.

To heal, you don't magically gain more health—your view shifts to watch yourself tear shrapnel from your muscles, jab yourself with a syrette, relocate your wrist or cauterise wounds with a bunch of lit matches.

When you order new weapons from the arms dealer you don't flip onto his computer—you sit, and the view zooms in, the edges of the screen still visible. When you enter a faction's safehouse, you're patted down and searched by a lackey, their faces right up to yours. And you only see a loading screen when you fast travel from one side of the map to the other. Compare that to other 'complete first-person' games like BioShock, and Half-Life 2, both punctuated by pauses as you pass from one level to another.

Far Cry 2 rarely reminds you that you're playing a game.

And the third reason it will hook you from start to finish: it has a hypnotic pace, oscillating between high violence and relaxing exploration. Between fights you'll collect diamonds, which are spent on new weapons. Or you'll travel to a new safe house location, taking down goons. Or you'll just drive—rumbling along into the landscape because you can. As you tire of travel, you're interrupted by shouty men with guns in the back of a pick-up, and the cycle begins again.

And lastly: the unfolding of the day, and imperceptible changes in weather and lighting lull you into an almost complete acceptance of Far Cry 2 as a place. Games have simulated the weather in the past, but none better than this. Bright sunlight is glorious. Dawn is astonishing. Sunsets add drama to an already dramatic landscape. Storms send chills. The moon fills the sky.

But the changes don't rush at you. The transition is so, so slow, that it registers first as a shift in your mood, a change in tension, rather than "ooh, look, pretty clouds." It's only when the transition is complete that you realise just how dramatic the weather systems can be.

Meet the Buddies

This isn't a perfect game. I have criticisms. I think the buddies are underused. You can't, for instance, invite them to help you on tough tasks, nor do they appear outside of their carefully choreographed cameos at the end of a mission. It takes a special kind of sadist to equip the vehicles in a game with a machine gun, but not give you a friend to use it. Instead you have to swap between the driver's and the back seat. Worse: I wish I could fire a pistol or drop grenades out of the windows of my car. Combat between vehicles is probably the weakest point. More often than not, you'll just have to stop, get out and fight on foot, and risk being run over.

The story-heavy sections of the game—very early on, at the mid-point, and towards the end—are weak. The missions and situations they put you in often dissolve into quick-save attrition. The defence of a barge proves to be just a mounted cannon mission. An escape from a town under fire comes down to simply tearing through an army of men. There are issues with Far Cry 2's dramatic development: as the game appears to be drawing to a close, it opens up again, asking you to repeat the same style of missions and tasks over a similar sized area. Essentially, you play two games of Far Cry 2, doing the same tasks on a different continent. Great value for money. But draining.

I think, too, that the developers haven't done enough to flesh out the backstory. It was only on reading my journal that I discovered the name of the country I was in, for instance. Think of Liberty City, or Vice City, or Cyrodiil, and you think of a place with a rich history and vibrant culture. In Far Cry 2, there are a few radio broadcasts exhorting you to stay in the country and fight, or to join one of the factions. But little else. I think that's a missed opportunity. I love the look and feel of Far Cry 2, and want to absorb myself in its culture. But it just doesn't seem to have one.

Some will simply reject this game because it's hooked up to Massive's in-game ads system, where roadside billboards advertise real-world products. As I was playing before release, that tech wasn't hooked up. I worry that ads insensitive to the setting will break the spell.

Some will avoid the game out of worry that their PC won't run it at sufficient detail levels. Don't. Before the game is out, the developers will release a benchmarking tool that will let you see how the game will look, and what framerate you'll get.

And some will feel frustrated that the AI baddies respawn after you've taken them down. Checkpoints are refilled with men perhaps a little too quickly. It frustrated me, too, but I stopped caring after the first couple of hours. Some will feel frustrated at the repetition: every mission boils down to killing a lot of men in a single area. Again, that frustrated me to begin with. But again, I stopped caring after the first couple of hours.

Because, make no mistake, this is an absolutely superb game. At its core is combat that just works. It is consistently surprising. Consistently hilarious.

"We're on the road... to hell"

Time for a metaphor, then. After one assault had ended, I was clearing house: picking up ammo, searching the ruins for health syrettes. Without warning, I was fired upon—a red line cutting across my vision. It scared the life out of me.

I turned to discover one last soldier. He was dying, but with his last gasps, he'd dragged himself to a tin shack and was sitting, propped up against a wall. He had just enough energy to raise his pistol and take a few final pot-shots at me.

As I approached, he continued to fire. The rounds went wild, to the left and right. I could hear them zipping by my ears.

In this metaphor, I am Far Cry 2. And the soldier counts for all other FPS games.

I pulled out my own silenced pistol, stood right next to him, and shot him right between the eyes. Calm, deliberate, badass.

After playing Far Cry 2, I'm simply unable to go back to straight and simple first-person shooters. This game has executed my expectations. Would you, could you, go back to games with similar gunfights as this, but along a more rigid axis? I think your own expectations are going to rise dramatically.

And I think you really should play this game.