Yep, its time to mince Far Cry 2 apart. To sum up, it does not live up to the f(l)ame. It is undeniably beautiful, but tedious, infuriating and boring as well. Plus, it gave me a headache due to the (yet again) faulty widescreen implementation.
Graphics
The game is run by the new Dunia engine. I do not kid that I didn't have so much fun watching sunset/sunrise in any other game. The storms are noticeable, but nothing serious. Yes, the game does look very good. As for the headache, they went with the bioshock-esque vertical crop rather than the horizontal plus area, thus the supposedly wide 90° field of view is actually only 70°. No, I'm not the only one who literally got a migraine from this. At least you can already find a 3rd party hack to fix this. (See widescreen gaming forums for it.) No response from UBI, as always, they are off and away counting the money instead of fixing a buggy game.
Environmental Chaos (Or the lack thereof)
The supposed wildfire is just a small patch-fire, as it automatically stops a few meters away. Remember the dev video when they started a huge raging fire toward an enemy base about 100m away? Now you should rather forget it, there is no such thing.
Remember the destruction and mayhem promised to the shanty towns? Again, you'd better forget it, as even a few cm thick board is invulnerable to a jeep speeding towards it at 100 km/h. The only destroyable/movable items are the explosive barrels/some specific ammo piles, TV screens, radios (only to the point of turning them off) some paper boxes and the cars. Oh, and they magically respawn if you don't look in about 5 sec. No, I'm not kidding about the 5 second respawn.
Oh, and don't expect to be able to scale hills or mountains. Or jumping high enough to get on top of anything. Its there for only so that the developers can tell "hey, we included this as well!".
Artificial Unintelligence
So-called non-scripted AI could have been switched with one, as it appears as a low-end scripted one. Take car chases:
-enemy car spawns behind you when you don't look
-the car rams you, while the gunner fires away at you
-car stops next to you
-driver gets out, because he can't shoot and obviously a moving vehicle would be more difficult to target with an rpg/grenade/etc than the now-stationary enemy
This happens every friggin' time. No exceptions. Oh, maybe some, due to me shooting them to bits before they can complete one objective. Zero improvement. Also, if you kill someone in a no-guns zone, you have only to escape to the border and they magically forget all your sins.
Durability: Kevlar
According to far cry 2, even the average half-naked African can soak up bullets as a Kevlar puppet. No, even the head takes more than a couple of point blank bullets to disable the opponent. The chest/stomach wounds? They laugh at them. At least there are some armaments that kill them with one shot: sniper not to the limbs, rockets, grenades, close proximity explosive barrels. They are also quite resistant to fire. In this, they kept to the crysis(warhead) standard. I could understand taking half a kg of lead to the head and still shooting back if they wore full-body Kevlar/ceramic armor, (i.e.: those replica soldiers in F.E.A.R,) but that from an almost butt-naked rebel?
Respawn of a respawn
Are you tired of waiting hours for a respawn to get the item from the epic monster? Fear no more, you have far cry 2! Just forget the premium item, you have a respawn wave in five seconds! Turn your back and there they are. Please be notified that you max be run over, shot in the back and otherwise blown to pieces while showing back. Also, please note that this may happen almost everywhere on the map, especially near roads/POIs of any kind. Annoying, frustrating, infuriating. This is something that can make you stop playing the game, especially in the second part, where you run into patrols almost literally every damn step. At least they drop some ammo and grenades, and are easy to kill (not because they would be taken down with a couple of bullets but because they are highly unintelligent).
Offline grind
While the PR named missions as a good point, I have to disagree. Take the weapon dealer missions for example: each end every one is the same: kill a "rival dealer", who drives around in circles with a truck and some (1-2) escorts. The mobile tower-given side quests are alike, "kill x guy in the city". Same mission, same goal, even the same reward, etc. Boring as hell. Yes, the main missions show a bit more variation, but that is something that pushes this oversight even more into our face.
Sounds
Not that good. As the pattern starts to emerge, I guess its not good because it cannot be shown so much in a game show as graphics. Sometimes sounds are not really where they should be, distance-wise.
Voice actors are good average, if you don't take into account one thing. Theyalltalktoodamnfasttotakethemseriously. Didn't they have enough time to record them in real-life length?
Copy-protection
Yes, I must. There are quite some confirmed reports of SecuROM making players unable to play the game. Just a fun fact: the DRM infested farcry2.exe is ~13MB in size. The one that was cracked is about 30KB. Of course, the cracked PC version was out not even a week after far cry 2 hit the store shelves, with the console version even before the official release. Those who bought cough up the money and have to endure unplayable games and such, while those who didn't have no DRM-related errors. Same old story again.
Conclusion
The game is pretty and may bring you some good moments, but it has some serious design bugs and underworked parts. Kinda like a design-show cloth.
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