The game starts off a little rough. The tutorial has given you a safehouse and enough diamonds to unlock your first weapon, but it doesn't necessarily tell you to do so and to the standard FPS player it might not seem important to bother; it might seem a better idea to just live off your fallen enemies' guns, but that quickly leads to frustration and death. Sure, when you go down one of your buddy characters will come in, pull you out to safety and get you back on your feet, but then you've got some time and must meet him at a safehouse again for him to be able to save you next time. The game has no real checkpoint system at all, so while the multi-step missions that may take up to 30+ minutes to complete will let you save your game after completing a major step (and you can save mid-mission at any safehouse you roll past), a death can still mean having to re-play 10-15 minute sections of the game. During that time, you'll have traveled halfway across the game's area, snagged a couple of tough-to-find diamonds, and eventually made it to the mission area and promptly got killed.
Did he just stuff lit matches into his arm?
Getting low on health in this game is interesting, too. There's a partial regenerating health system here (like Resistance on the PS3) where your health bar is split up into five sections and if you drop down to the next lower section then you can only regenerate to the end of that piece. Going under 1/5 of your health throws you into a bleeding state where you're not actually taking damage from enemies anymore but are definitely going to die if you don't get some cover and hit the LB button to heal yourself. Healing in this game starts off with some rather interesting amateur medicine, from using a knife and pliers to pull a bullet out of your leg to taking a bunch of matches and lighting them to shove into a wound to cauterize it. Arm broken? Just hit LB to snap it back into place (with a nice little scream to accompany it), then hit LB again to use a health-giving syrette. It's an interesting system, but I do have to say that getting cover long enough to yank a bullet out of your hand uninterrupted can be tough to do, and death in this game can be very frustrating. Every time I died I just wanted to turn off the 360 and go take a walk or something.
That being said, getting over Far Cry 2's difficulty "hump" can be very rewarding and once you've learned the game's rather eccentric ammo/weapon reliability system and have some good guns unlocked. The open-ended structure for choosing both what missions to do and how to do them is very charming. The landscape is absolutely wonderful, too; the brand new Dunia engine used in this game shows large, complex terrain with a great light and shadow system. Sure, the 360 version's shadows aren't quite as sharp as what can be seen on the graphically superior PC version, but you'll also need to spend hundreds more to get a PC to play the game better than what you can get on the 360. Overall, these are some of the best graphics I've seen yet on Microsoft's console and really make the environments look and feel natural, especially with the complex day/night and rain systems in place.
Fire is also interesting here, as the wind affects it and you can set the dry grasslands on fire to corral your enemies in a direction you want or even kill them outright if you use it correctly. This was hailed as one of the game's best new features, but I found myself struggling to use it to its fullest and usually just shot enemies instead - maybe other gamers can find better ways to use it to their advantage.
Getting on Live
Online play in Far Cry 2 includes a good selection of large maps, some interesting and unique gameplay modes, and much of the great action that makes the single player game so much fun. But the best feature is the included map editor that lets you quickly put together natural-looking terrain and foliage and create all kinds of structures. Far Cry Instincts: Predator on the 360 also included a map editor for online play, but its tools were more simplistic and there was no rating system or quality control, so most maps were made in 10 minutes and had perfectly flat ground with a few super-tall hills with sheer drops and 80 shotguns just tossed in the center of the map. Here, there's a rating system to hopefully get the better maps to percolate to the top. Either way, this is a much more robust system than something like Halo 3's Forge mode, but it remains to be seen if it's really used to its fullest.
Great, but not quite legendary
Far Cry 2 includes a lengthy campaign that will take 25+ hours to complete, even if at least half of that time is spent just driving across the game's 50 square-kilometer area. The action is great and your ability to plan an assault your own way makes for a lot of fun and really channels what made Crytek's first game so compelling in the first place. Sure, the story kind of falls flat with its fictional African country and made-up conflict, but the firefights are the big draw here and the game can easily rely on them for most of its entertainment. The online play is made unique with its map editor and online rating system, but it still really hinges on whether gamers can make the most of the editor and the final quality of the maps made - if the community really comes forward, then Ubisoft will have a major hit on their hands in both offline and online play. Either way, Far Cry 2 should be pretty close to the top of any console FPS fan's list this holiday season.
