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

Far Cry 2 stacks the deck against you at every chance it gets, but the sum of these harsher mechanics provides for an incredibly engaging and immersive experience.

Its systems when combined focus on player disempowerment, things are not under your control, you are not a god of death in this world, you are just as susceptible to disease, gun malfunctions, and general misfortune as everyone else.

This brings a level of unpredictability to things. It keeps the game fresh even more than a decade after its release. All while its story presents a more subtle approach to its themes and antagonist. Something that was completely lost in the series.

[ Full review at https://bluedemonarchive.blogspot.com/2021/07/far-cry-2.html ]

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.

Got as far as the second map before dropping. I enjoyed the time I spent with it very much! The gunplay feels great and the world is fun and chaotic. It was getting to feel pretty samey, though. I got tired of driving around everywhere, stopping every few minutes to switch seats in a jeep and gun down a couple of schmucks, repairing my ride, and getting underway again. I wish guardposts didn't repopulate so quickly, and I wish there were a little more variation in the gameplay. Overall a worthwhile play, but not compelled to see it thought, especially if I'm only halfway through 18 hours in.

OK, Far Cry was in the day was a great technical feat and that’s pretty much it. Far Cry had a lot of AI problems with enemies being able to see you miles away, you needed a monster computer to run it, it had almost no story, and was pretty repetitive. Unfortunately, Far Cry 2 follows all these trends again, but with better graphics, a setting in Africa, an even more confusing story, a super confusing level editor, and the same bland boring huge open world. Now I’m not saying Far Cry 2 is bad I’m just saying it needs more filling because there is way too much crust on this one.

The game starts out great with you in the back of a car driving to the guerrilla’s headquarters. Once you get through the tutorial you’re thrown into the beautiful yet empty world trying to find “The Jackal” who is feeding both rival gangs guns and fuel (APR and UFLL). You can work on either side since you need either or to get to The Jackal. For starters, the game has lots and lots of guns and you can upgrade them by using diamonds (finding diamonds cases and/or completing missions) you can buy the weapons for infinite ammo in your safe rooms, you can buy manuals which increase accuracy, reliability, etc. You can also buy equipment that will let you hold more ammo, more health, more stim-paks etc. There are lots here and everything is fairly priced, but you earn diamonds so slowly it takes forever to get enough.


When you’re actually shooting the guns feel great, but another problem carried over from the first one is that these guys never die. You’ll pump a whole clip in these guys and sometimes they’ll still be standing. Sometimes your gun will jam and you have to mash X to get it unstuck and if you’re really unlucky you’re the whole gun will break and then you’re SOL. Getting the reliability upgrades fixes this and swapping out weapons from fallen foes helps this a lot. Far Cry 2 also has a “buddy system” which are acquired by completing missions, and these so-called buddies can save you in battle (if you run out of health…think of it as an extra life), they can help make missions easier by offering alternatives. This is a great system and is probably the only great gameplay idea in Far Cry 2 that isn’t boring or doesn’t piss you off. When you do get low on health you can pry bullets out of yourself, wrap yourself in bandages, and even poke yourself with magic needles. You can refill these at health boxes in random areas or one of your safe houses. You unlock new safe houses by killing all guards in the area and bam there you go.

The next gameplay element that is from the first game and was bizarrely stripped down is the vehicles you drive. There are only maybe five in the whole game and those are a Jeep, a car, an assault truck, and a couple of boats. When your vehicle gets banged up and starts smoking you can hop out and repair it to new which is great, but even if the car starts smoking a little bit it runs very slowly…LAME. Now to get to the most annoying part of the game…the constant backtracking. I understand this is an open world game (I love sandbox games don’t get me wrong), but Far Cry 2 fails at this. First, off the map they give you is horrible since it’s a little piece of paper you hold (next to your GPS) and all the dots look like blobs so the legend is useless. You’ll travel to missions on one side of the map finish it then has to navigate all the way back to town. You can’t really go off the trails since there are so many mountains, rocks, trees blocking your path unless you run on foot.


Then this is where the meat of annoyance comes in; there’s nothing in between all of this driving around! Maybe here and there you’ll see an animal, but all you get are the same thugs coming after you in their vehicles from the guard posts plastered all along the trails. That is really ALL there is between driving from mission to mission. The missions are exactly the same, maybe you’ll have to save a friend (or shoot him/her), but essentially it’s all the same.


The malaria effect was useless and made things even more annoying. Every so often you’ll have to take a malaria pill and if you run out you have to go to the ends of the Earth (ok Africa!) to get more or you die. Essentially this makes the game boring and I got a headache every time I played this. Now if you like sandbox games where there is hardly a story, and you just drive around killing random thugs then go ahead have at it. Now, this brings me to the level editor which is deep, but there’s no tutorial and it is NOT user-friendly. Lastly, the only exciting thing is multiplayer. The best part of Far Cry 2 is the graphics; the game is gorgeous with free-flowing grass, everything burns, trees break when under fire, the lighting is beautiful it just all looks so good, but the gameplay is just not there. Sorry Ubisoft maybe Far Cry 3 will fix all of these issues.

A lot of this game bridged together Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and his daughter, Sofia's Somewhere in my mind.

So much of this game on the surface is Apocalypse Now, the third act blatantly so (trophies are direct references to the movie and Heart of Darkness). It's a violent war game, after all. And yet Apocalypse Now is still more meditative than the average war movie. It's more Thin Red Line than Rambo 2, which is a shame when this game's big third act level is more Rambo and Predator than Apocalypse Now. You gun down a lot of combatants, sure. But none quite so systematically and forcefully as you do at the end. And I think it's a shame because so much of the game between missions is Somewhere - a more quiet, introspection piece on boredom and ennui.

In between taking missions for either side of an armed conflict in a foreign land that resents you and that you too, couldn't care less about personally, you're mostly just roaming a sparse, open environment, trying to starve off malaria and other mercenaries who shoot and practically hunt you on sight. There's nothing to do at any one time other other one of two basic functions: kill or try to stay alive and live. And it's that aimless meandering and sparseness that remind me so much of Somewhere. A movie celebrity and game. Far Cry 2 - a game about mercenaries and death. But both about depression too.

This game reminds me of my day to day life, where I am bored out of my mind, working for the weekend, just getting by, placed in circumstances that I feel I had less control over than I would have liked, doing my best but also doing nothing ultimately constructive or rewarding.

I love how much in general this game hates you as a character but not necessarily as a player. The world resents your presence. Your character has to pop malaria pills that they can run out of, and the guns jam. But it all works wonderfully into the nihilism and theme of decay that permeates through the game. And none of it is too much. It's still mostly a gun-toting romp. It just doesn't feed your power fantasy. It's a very intentionally deigned game, but I think it ultimately is also has an unintended effect of weeding out particular types of gamers. I'm struggling to articulate what I mean by this so I'll be blunt: either you're cool and you like this game or you're not cool and you don't. :p Eleven years later Death Stranding would sort of be the same game all over again.

This slapped, fucked and ripped.