I was somehow quite excitet for this after finishing the first one. But after quite high expectations while starting, they felt rapidly after the first hour. I didn't like the gameplay at all. And it was only getting worse first.

It really took some time for me to get into this and actually having a good time playing it. I sure had it but there are just so many things that are annoying. Only some points:
Malaria that makes you do the same thing over and over again
Travelling from one spot to another and you actually never can go to a place without being attacked by very aggressive KI. If you die, you have to make the whole way all over again which is mostly very time shredding.
Weapons you have to unlock by doing the same all over and over again but without them you are screwed
Buddy missions that basically just let you do more work but give you nothing in return

It was a exhausting game that had its moments. After having unlocked some weapons, I was able to play it customized. It helps to do the weapon missions very soon until you have your set of weapons that fits your playstyle. After this point, I had some some kind of ambition to finish it. I did not really like it but it still made me want to play it. I guess it was just ambition

Perhaps the most overrated game of all time, whenever I go look for reviews of this game, it's constantly touted as an underrated masterpiece, and is used as an comparison as to why the subsequent game's are worse ...

What are you guys smoking?

First off the gameplay is mediocre incarnate, no leaning, no slides, no take downs or anything to spice it up, just bland.
Graphics are muddy and environments are barren, and I know it's purposely barren but that just makes it borning to play.

The only good or "interesting" things is the malaria pills you must take, the map and the weapon jamming, But 2 problems occur. First is the fact that the pills are easy to aquire so no tension, and the weapons jamming is more of a nuisance and weapons are always scattered on the ground so if it breaks there's a another at your disposal.

Although the map is a actually a unique and cool element along with the diamond detector and the jackal tapes are cool to listen to.

But in the end FC2 is an below average experience that is hailed as a masterpiece because of cool fire effects and "attention to detail", but that bring into question, do the little details matter when The big details like gameplay and graphics and story are subpar or just bad?

This game did not age well, and everyone who said I should've started my Far Cry adventure with 3 were right. I still don't regret giving it a chance.

I'd love to see another game in the series go to Africa, there's still a lot of potential here. I liked driving dune buggies, wielding an explosive crossbow, infiltrating houses and bases. I enjoyed how you took on missions for both sides of a conflict, essentially making you an opportunist. The bad guy of the game being the main character of Far Cry 1 is a great idea too, helps provide a connection between games and keeps you wondering where things went sour. The interface of the weapon shop was cool, ordering weapons and upgrades through a black market old computer using diamonds. Finding more diamonds in the overworld was kind of cool.

Too many smaller things just kept piling up. Even when you take over a checkpoint, enemies will respawn whenever you go back, killing animals provides no reward. Enemies don't even drop items, only weapons. Stealth is practically impossible, at least without that one expensive upgrade.

Fast travel is needlessly cumbersome, as is the map system and the binocular system. You have to physically go to bus stops to SET spawn locations across the map, which means not only are you tediously driving to these bus stops, but you still often end up having to tediously drive to the goal. The items you discover in the enemy territory only show up on the map, and are not highlighted in the game, and because you can only access the map in real-time (which is kind of cool because your character physically pulls out a map) it discourages you from marking objects. You also are constantly switching between 2-3 maps as opposed to just having one big overworld map you can zoom in on, and on top of that there's more than 1 overworld map that is completely separate.

It's kind of cool that you pick a character to play as, and then the ones you don't pick are your companions, but companion mechanics are overly punishing. You can only revive them a few times and then they die permanently. It takes WAY too fucking long for them to save you after you die. And when they do save you you lose weapons outside of what they give you when you respawn. And when you ARE reviving them, you can still get attacked out of the animation.

I did not finish it, I was bored and kind of frustrated. I wouldn't mind seeing the end one day but I just could not continue. Thank god Far Cry 3 fixed everything this game did wrong.

Far Cry 2 is only marginally better than the first game. Within the first 3-4 hours you'll realize most of the mission structure is just going from Point A to Point B. AI behaviour is overzealous where you'll be getting into firefights a lot outside of missions, where it becomes a total distraction from the main story and they always respawn at captured outposts. In regards to content for an open world game, there's not much going on - barren, boring and repetitive. A few of the notable, more interesting mechanics would be that of the malaria issue where you have to pop pills every now and then, and also weapon conditioning/ jamming where if you use enemy weapons they're more likely to be damaged or in a rough state, which encourages the player to buy new weapons to equip that are fully functional. The save game system requires you to visit specific save points throughout the world (although you can manual save), however due to no autosave feature which most of us are used to by now, if you forget to save you'll find your progress being wiped back to your last save point.

Loved this game on PS3. Love it even more on pc blasting the settings to 4k ultra 60 fps. This is the poster child of a true definitive FPS title. Does not get much better than this. It also has a solid sandbox vibe considering they let you do fuck around provided you have malaria pills to keep your attacks in check. This is peak ubisoft here in terms of Far cry (3 is still awesome but it is where ubi begins to create that formula they have overused to death in this day and age of ridiculous amounts of collectables/grind and adding rpg mechanics to games that arent suppose to be rpgs). Story is amazing and is similar to spec ops the line in that it shows the horrors of man, war, and why things are never BnW just shades of gray. It does not get much better than this bois. This is also one of the few games to really get me truly anxious as shit especially with the guard patrols.

While I can see why many people see this as a great game, I can't bring myself to say it's a good game. I like certain aspects of the game, like the graphics which are fantastic for the time. This game seems dedicated to immersion, but that immersion was constantly shattered by the utterly stupid enemy AI. The AI in this game has no sense of self-preservation and just charge at you all while being able to shoot you with pinpoint accuracy through a jungle where I can't see them at all, they can even hit me through walls like there is no wall there at all, dealing with them is almost always a huge chore and nothing about it feels remotely immersive. Another thing that breaks immersion is the guns, which are mirrored so that the shell casings are ejected to the left instead of the right, I personally find this extremely distracting and confusingly stupid. The last thing that breaks the game for me is the repetition, I never beat this game for a reason, that reason being that the game never introduced anything new or interesting to me after playing for over 13 hours, it just became dull with no plot or anything to keep me interested in the game.

Apesar desse game ser muito mais digno do título "Far Cry" do que seu antecessor por basicamente ter quase todos os elementos que definem essa franquia até hoje, para mim a trama principal ainda não convence nem um pouco e é certamente uma das mais fracas e sem graça de toda a história dos Far Cry, joguei a maior parte do tempo entediado com o rumo que a história ia indo com personagens totalmente esquecíveis e mal elaborados, além disso quase todas as missões parecem ser secundárias para "encher linguiça" do jogo e momentos que o jogo basicamente te obriga a fazer a mesma missão para conseguir os tais remédios da malária que o protagonista precisa para não morrer da doença. Tudo isso faz com que a vontade do jogador de continuar a tentar zera-lo diminua em quase zero, mas como eu tento ser persistente e acreditei que poderia melhorar conforme os momentos finais fossem se aproximando fui ate o fim e como era de se esperar sou agraciado com um final à altura de todo o jogo, ou seja, uma merda, por isso, nem a gameplay de um bom Far Cry salva a decepção que é toda a história principal de Far Cry 2!

I honestly don't get why people make this to be the best Far Cry game out there...

Not only is it:

1) Incredibly tedious without fast traveling to go from A to B hundreds of times.

2) Enemies respawning in the same locations all the time from 50 meters away make it going from A to B even more tiresome. So, you very often you have to clear same areas 9 - 12 times.

3) Color scheme is dull, boring and make it hard for you to spot out enemies while the enemy AI knows perfectly where you are, sometimes even through bushes.

4) Malaria is annoying.

5) Characters besides The Jackal weren't that memorable to me.

6) Even though guns jamming adds realism after a short while it became an annoyance as well.

Now I'm a masochist but the last 7th reason which I'm not going to label but got to me is the game being a buggy mess.

I've experienced a game-breaking one during a story mission where I had to clear an area and save a person that wasn't spawning no matter what I do which got me permanently stuck and around 20 hours of my time wasted.