Far Cry 2

I’m going to review what I think this is my most disappointing game of 2008, Far Cry 2. A friend of mine (you know him as Gurt) told me to buy this game, because the first game was very good. Unlike the first game, the second game was made by Ubisoft Montreal (The first game was created by Crytek Studios). The first time you start the game, you’ll notice the nice graphics. There's also a day-night cycle. The game is a sandbox FPS and has been released on Xbox 360, PC and PS3.

Before you begin with the main story, you are able to select your character. This doesn’t effect the storyline: There is a civil war going on in a fictional African country. In this civil war there are two main factions: The APR and the UFFL. Both sides hire mercenaries to help them accomplish their goals. In the beginning of the game you get a cutscene, where a cabdriver takes you to a little village. In this village you meet 'The Jackal’, an arms dealer who supplies both factions in the civil war. In the rest of the game your mission is to kill ‘The Jackal’. In order to get a little closer to him you have to do missions for the two factions. These missions are all the same, just kill and run. You’re getting paid with diamonds. You have to buy weaponupgrades with diamonds. Concerning the civilians, there aren’t any. Almost all characters you'll come across are mercenaries.

Besides the main missions you can do some side-missions too, like helping your mercenary friends.You can also help a guy with a scrambled voice who phones his mission in when you’re at a telephone tower. You always have to kill ‘the target of opportunity’, a guy with a suit who is always wandering around in a village, guarded by a lot of mercenaries. Or you can help the local arms dealer getting rid of a rival arms dealer. This ‘local’ arms dealer seems to own all gunshops in the country, so where is the competition?

There are also underground side-missions. In these missions you have to save some hostages. This is the only time you'll meet some civilians. When you complete these missions you get medicines against malaria. Ah, yes. Malaria, what a great idea. Every once in a while you have to take in a tablet. They come in bottles of five, so you have to help the people in order to get some more. In the beginning of the game your sickness level is five, so that means your medicine works for a shorter amount of time. When you’re halfway through the game, your sickness level is zero. The farther you get in this game, the sicker you'll become, and that means you have to do more underground missions. What a great concept.

Another thing that annoys me is that if you use a weapon for a couple of minutes, it'll start to jam. If you keep it too long, it can even explode. This happens with all weapons including the AK-47. I always thought that the AK-47 rarely jammed. However, you can find some gold weapons that will take longer to jam, but I've never taken the time to search for them.

But the most annoying part of the game are the enemy guard posts. At first, you'll kill every enemy, but when you’re like 500 meters away, they'll all respawn and start shooting at you again. So next time you'll just drive past them. But, it’s not that easy, because I think they can feel a disturbance in The Force. Sometimes they spot you from 50 meters away, and they know that it’s you (they aren't using binoculars), even when you’re driving the same car as them they’ll recognise you. So they'll wreck your car and you have to kill all the mercenaries who are following you and then repair your car/boat with a wrench and the magic bolt inside the car.

That's it about the singleplayer, the game has multiplayer too. The game has standard gamemodes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Diamond (a variant of Capture the Flag) and Uprising (there are 2 teams, and 1 player from each team is the leader. The rest of the team has to defend the leader while he tries to capture all bases.)You'll get experience by killing other players, reviving teammates or completing mission objectives. The multiplayer has one big problem, and that is the massive lag. It’s almost impossible to play normally in the servers. Another problem is that sometimes your experience isn’t saved. So you're playing for like two hours starting with zero exp, and when you log in the next day you notice that your experience is zero again, so that's just stupid.

But there are some things I like about this game, not everything is bad. For example, I like the healing animations (pulling out a bullet that has penetrated your flesh, removing shrapnel from your belly, and so on). I also like the Map Editor. There are tons of objects you can use. You can use your made maps in multiplayer. If you happen to have this game on PS3, download Dangerous Jungle. It’s a map Gurt and I made a year ago. We had a lot of fun with it, because we knew about the nasty surprises that are in it.

Some people like this game, most people hate this game. Choose your side. If you want to play this game, I recommend you to rent it, because there is an 80% chance that you will be disappointed when you buy it. Just don’t buy it, just because it has nice graphics, like I did.