...if anything, it's not punishing enough? currently struggling to make it much further in this game - wonderful environment and aesthetics, the gold standard for map usage in video games, tightly balanced player-defiant mechanics and intriguing metanarrative elements intertwine into anathema for the modern open world experience, and yet for every stroke of genius and for every emergent design decision there is there exists something equally repellent. learning that malaria is an obfuscated level up mechanic was the breaking point for me and the artifice only piled up from there. a genuine shame - during that brief illusory period where i felt every inconvenience to be true and every threat to be hazardous, the game shone like a diamond

Reviewed on Dec 21, 2020


4 Comments


3 years ago

I had a similar experience, for what I suspect is the same reason (or at least part of it) as you: I played on PC, which allows you to save anywhere. In the original console game, you could only save at save points. This change kind of ruined the game for me, since I fell into my old habits of save-scumming.

3 years ago

this was indeed part of it - even when you attempt to ignore a feature like that like I tried to, just knowing it was there devalued safehouses and immediately evaporated tension

8 months ago

I don't understand how Malaria is a level-up mechanic. What does that mean?

8 months ago

@HurtingOtherPPl the central mythology of far cry 2 is that malaria exists as this hardcore debilitating mechanic when playing the game reveals that this isn’t actually the case. pills aren’t tedious to acquire or consume and malaria symptoms are often scheduled to affect players at intervals of low intensity versus high intensity. the reason i say it’s a level up mechanic, though, is because your resistance to malaria builds over time as you play the game which makes any negative effects a far less pressing concern and simultaneously raises your health and stamina pools since you are effectively combatting the disease more efficiently. playing the game over time makes your player character stronger, not weaker. add to that minimal consequences for failing to treat malaria effectively and it becomes clear that the mechanic as a whole is not really in sync with what the game purports to be about