User Reviews

Okay...in Far Cry 1 you are a Hawaiian shirt wearing wise cracking cynical 'Rambo' by the name of Jack. In Far Cry 3, you play an average white jock who awakens his inner savage and embraces his new psychotic self. In Far Cry 2...you are a psychotic merc with malaria. You are sent to Africa to assassinate an arms dealer by the name of the Jackal. The Jackal finds you passed out from the effects of your condition...realizes that you were sent there to kill him and tells you not to do try doing that anymore. Pretty charitable of him ...considering.

You go around from mission to mission. If you play on hard...death happens...a lot. Kill Him. Blow up that. Right or Wrong? It doesn't matter. The target is the target; that's all. The most interesting way of doing missions are given to you from your buddies. You don't get any extra pay from doing them the 'Buddy way' and it takes you generally 3 times longer. There is also usually some way that the buddy is benefiting by having you do it their way. As you gain 'History' (as it is referred to) with the buddies...your safe houses become upgraded. However...The upgrades to the safe houses reset between acts. Doing more tasks increases your 'Reputation'... which is supposed to frighten enemies into doing stupid things. This, apparently, has been not actually activated in the scripts AI. So that's pointless as well. Aaaaand (**spoilers) all your buddies 'go missing' in the first act. You see them again at the end of the game when they try to kill you (that's gratitude for you). In the second act, the amount of work you have to do to even minimally upgrade the safe houses is, at best, a waste of time. So why do it? Well...this is the game. You play it or you don't. With 5 fast travel points that link to each other only on a VERY large map, you find yourself fighting up to an entire platoon between each leg of your journey...and that doesn't include the people you are supposed to fight. If you like A TON of tactical level combat then this game won't disappoint. You get to appreciate the epic size of this map...over and over again. I wouldn't mind travelling across the map once or twice ...say if your mission was to drive some supplies to a camp somewhere. All the time, though realistic, kills the fun for those who want more than constant gun fights with some stupid little outpost somewhere. You would think that killing a garrison means that you can go back that way when you want to return...nope. Go around the corner and come back and the garrison is back to full strength again...not fun OR realistic. After a while the constant gun battles and travelling just seem to blur together and you find yourself bored.

With paying missions, you can buy better equipment and weapons. The voice acting can be described as quick, monotonic, mumble...which works for a character that talks that way naturally. The problem is: they ALL talk that way! What really bugs me is having to do a buddy mission. Travel across the planet shooting everyone in your way...do the mission...travel back...shooting the same people (because of nasty re spawn rates) just to hear some monotonic 'Thanks'. Couldn't I just call the buddy to tell them it's done??? That's just sloppy. You get the feeling very early on that your buddies are just there to abuse your services...which, I guess, must have been the point. Though I'm sure, with most people, a sledgehammer was a slightly too large tool for the insertion of that point.

There are some fun moments in the game; Ambushing the commander that set you up was one of them. Defending the barge...another. It's a very long (and often tedious) game that could have been pruned down to it's tastier points. I can't complain too much. The team that made this did come up with Far Cry 3...so they did learn from this.

You character starts off as just some kill-for-money goon and goes through the 99.9% of the game as that same character. At the very end, both your character and the Jackal realize they are both scum and decide to do one last good act before (or while) ending their own life. Here's the rub, though; If you are scum and you know it...and you are on the other side of the border with a ton of diamonds...to give away those diamonds for the greater good means that you are no longer the scum you were for the entire story.

You kill yourself doing something for the greater good...and because you are scum. But if you are scum you wouldn't do something for the greater good. Ironic.

Far Cry 2 has some gameplay mechanics that I think are better than Far Cry 3 or Far Cry 4. Foliage physics are better than either of those games, as plants and trees can be pushed aside, set on fire, and have shredding animation when shot. Having to unlock weapons via in game currency is a much better way of rewarding players for exploration than the FC3 and FC4 method of unlocking radio towers resulting in free weapons. The actual game world is very large and incredibly well designed.

So, now that I got all of the positives out of the way, I want to go through the list of problems that this game has:

1. Fast Traveling - As I said in the positives, the map in this game is huge. Open world sandbox games need a large map, but also require a decent fast travel system. Far Cry 2 may have the worst fast travel system I have ever used. You are not allowed to fast travel between safe houses or major towns. Instead, you can only fast travel between bus stations. The main problem is that these bus stations generally are not near main mission locations, and are few and far between. A nine square kilometer grid (the game has two of them) has only 5 or 6 bus stations.

2. Game Saving - There is no auto save in this game. That is not inherently a problem, as there are many locations, including safe houses, ammo stores, and mission completions where a player can save. However, due to large amounts of traveling around the map, there are many opportunities to die repeatedly on the way to one objective. Enemies constantly respawn, and later in the game can kill you extremely fast. This makes getting across the map a chore, which just pisses you off more that there isn't a good fast travel system.

3. Diamond Briefcases - There are too many of these. These can't really be considered collectibles, as diamonds are needed to buy weapons and weapon upgrades. The sheer size of the map makes finding all of these daunting, but to find 221 of them? Absolutely ridiculous. Only collecting the flags in the original Assassins Creed game is worse than this.

4. Malaria - To be clear, I actually initially thought this was an interesting idea. Having to constantly keep medicated to keep symptoms at bay sounds like a decent added mechanic. Unfortunately it is an incredibly shallow tacked-on aspect of the game for plot purposes. Symptoms show up rapidly and do not go away until you press a button and pop a pill. In the middle of combat this is annoying, but acceptable. What is unacceptable is that you have unlimited pills as long as you do not do main storyline missions. I started the game looking for diamonds and doing contract killer missions, so my first bottle of malaria pills lasted over 15 hours of gameplay. I then hit all of the story missions in quick succession, and went through 2 bottles in 3 hours. This indicates that the pills themselves are merely a plot contrivance to make you do underground resistance missions.

5. The Campaign Story - This story is hilariously shallow. Blatant references to Heart of Darkness indicate what the plot was going for, but it just sucks. The Jackal is not that interesting as a villain, or an antihero. The revolution missions are all the same. Blow stuff up and kill people, then do the same for a different faction. That is seriously 70 percent of the campaign. It directly rips off A Fistful of Dollars. Manipulate two opposing factions for money. In dull and repetitive missions.

I think that this game has a couple of gameplay mechanics superior to the sequels, but Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 have much better overall playability and story than Far Cry 2.

I personally love the Far Cry series and this game was just the start of many more awesome games to come. This action-packed story isn't just fun, its amazing with its realistic mechanics and purely strategic story line. From getting malaria to roaming through the African deserts, this game is tricky yet satisfying.

This game is placed in Africa and the times are rough. There is war throughout the game and you get to pick which side you want to be on. Speaking of rough, rough diamonds are the currency and you will need them in order to buy upgrades and new weapons. Because of the harshness of the environment some weapons you find might jam or almost instantly break. As well as weapons you buy. But don't worry, you don't have to rebuy them. Once unlocked with diamond, you own it.

Saving is the tricky part since it only saves your game when you sleep. There are also very limited autosaves. Remember to rest.

This Far Cry game ends when you beat it so make sure to finish up whatever missions in the story that you want before you complete the final mission. Before starting the final mission it will give you a warning asking if you want to continue because you cannot go back.

Overall, This game is absolutely amazing and you should try your luck in this war torn world of Far Cry 2. Personally if Ubisoft chose to remake this game with some slight changes to graphics and saving I would personally purchase it for my next-gen console.

Sometimes fun but mainly boring, frustrating, stupid. Just some words which I would use to describe FC2.

Why? Well, lets examine the above in more detail.

Sometimes fun: Weapons are fun to use and there's lots to choose from. Battles are generally fun. The graphics are quite impressive. The vehicles handle well. Many characters to choose from. The environmental sound is good.

Boring: Driving, driving, driving and more driving or other transportation. Running through outposts, monotonously killing NPC's every time you have a mission is ridiculous. Music is above average but very repetitive. I noticed that if I fire my weapon, even when there's no enemies around, the music changes from "ambient" to "battle" - not terribly smart? Frustrating: There are good mixed points with the bad and it's hard to understand why the game irritates. At times I couldn't wait to finish it just to be done with it (I didn't even bother finishing it the first time). Other times I because quite engrossed with the gun fights, especially towards the end. Random save points around the area don't make sense as "quick save" can be used unless they server as a "reminder" to save. Voice dialogue is rushed and flat. I actually believe that I could do better.

Stupid: Everyone is out to kill you with the exception of truce zones which is silly. Outposts are respawned when you get a small distance from them. More time should have been spent integrating more flora and especially fauna into the maps. While this may have been a "decision" made by the director, it made the game feel awfully two dimensional. It makes no sense hear monkeys but never to see them. The story is just plain terrible. Basically it assumes one believes the following: "Africa is a mostly terrible place", then proceeds to treat the player like a moron with a story that actually bests "Half-Life full life consequences" (google / youtube it). While I understand that it's an FPS there's no elaboration on characters, people, places, history, future, psychology etc which is especially needed for non-linear games. It's so paper thin, it's transparent. Each scheme devised by an NPC is more hairbrained than the previous. The reputation, journal, jackal tapes etc become so peripheral to the game because of the lack of immersion, they become rarely checked. Buddy missions sometimes don't get you anything but increased history with a corpse - waste of time (apologies for the morbidity but where's the "fun"? Genearal: Because of the above, this game feels half finished. Two more years sorting it's negative points would have seen a much better game hit the shelves. This game is a big step up in many ways from "Boiling Point" - it even has some attributes such as guns jamming, weather changing etc. However, the missions in Boiling Point were better thought out from what I can remember as well as the story (and that's not saying much). It falls down in many of the same areas - boring repetitive gameplay, travelling everywhere with everyone out to kill you and all the time, while you play the game, you feel like time is being wasted - an eternal and unsated search for the "fun" in the game.

Gameplay: There's something to be said for linear gameplay - the Half-Life series is a great example of how a linear game can have excellent gameplay (and with oodles of multiplayer potential). Regarding non-linear gameplay, Fallout is a very good example - giving players freedom but making the game so much fun with immersive environments - basically succeeding nearly everywhere FC2 failed). Now, I know the latter is more of an RPG game, but there is no excuse ignoring what makes a game fun - not just guns and explosions and why FC1 had less story, it was linear and managed to be much more fun, for reasons outside the scope of this review. Sadly, FC2 doesn't come close to the juggernauts that are Half-Life or Fallout. While FC2 probably wasn't in development as long, it certainly was worked on for at least two years. One has to ask themselves, where was all the time spent? Unfortunately, it feels like the time was spent prettifying dawn and dusk.

Few games will actually make me sit up and write a review - this is surely one of them. If mediocre games like this are released and accepted, it's a sad day for the FPS. For the frustration it caused me and the feeling that I wasted time playing it, my verdict has to be spend the money elsewhere, and avoid another mindless GTA'esqe, albeit pretty game.

Hey, I bought FarCry 2 used for nine bucks and I got a blast out of it for about 40 hours. It's hands down one of the best first person shooters I've ever played. I loved how gigantic the sandbox world is and I don't know why people complain about how far you have to go to get to missions (it is called FARcry you know) since there is so much to do on the way, like battling your way out of ambushes or searching for diamonds or taking side missions from cellphone towers or gun shops. There are a few weird things, like how you can swim forever without any problem but you can only sprint a few feet before you get tired and your eyesight gets all blurry, making you nauseous in real life. The entire bit about having malaria also turns your stomach as you play and not in a good way. But otherwise this game is simply crazy. Do yourself a favor, though, and play it on the easy level because otherwise you will be torn to shreds during most gunfights before you even know what hit you. Even on easy you'll end up dying several times before the gigantic story is over, so make sure you save at every last safe house that you pass otherwise you will be crying about losing your last half hour of play. Also beware that you are not a good guy or a hero in this game, in fact you are a full fledged terrorist blowing up pipelines, assassinating people and otherwise playing double agent to the two warring factions. If you think that will bother you, you should really skip it because your character has not morals whatsoever. As for me, I can't wait to play FarCry 3.

Basic plot attempt to kill the jackal good missions ,and awesome missions and open world Africa the jackal is a good guy and save some prisoners.

You will have fun with easy mode.