Yeah, I’ve been waiting nearly a month to make that headline
joke...
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| All quiet at the moment, but there'll be soldiers waiting behind those buildings... |
Far Cry 2, then. It’s an open world First Person Shooter set
in Africa, specifically a fictional (but probably based at least remotely on
reality!) sub-Saharan country torn apart by civil war. Two factions have laid
claim to the country, and your job is to assassinate The Jackal, the notorious
arms dealer who armed both sides. On arrival, however, you contract malaria and
end up barely conscious and face to face with The Jackal himself, who leaves
you with a machete and a sidearm and leaves you to your own devices. After
escaping the gun battle currently going on in the town, you’re picked up by one
of the two factions, who sets you off working for them. Along the way, you
rescue another foreign mercenary who becomes one of your stable of ‘Buddies,’
and make contact with the underground resistance, who are trying to move
civilians out of the country and can give you medicine to treat your malaria if
you do. After that, you’re on your own, and it’s up to you to find the Jackal
and kill him. But as you get more deeply involved with the politics of the
warring factions and your buddies, you realise that nothing is as
straightforward as it might first appear, and that you potentially have the opportunity
to end the conflict entirely. But with your health deteriorating and the chaos
and devastation you cause, will there be anything left by the time all this is
over?
I’ve owned this game for a long time, and I had exactly the
same problem with it as I had with Assassin’s Creed: I wanted to roleplay it in
a stealth style. That meant sneaking through the undergrowth of the vast map,
not killing unless I had to, and scout the items or mission objectives. It
doesn’t work in this game, since most of the soldiers will attack you on sight,
and while you have the option to use silenced weapons and camouflage later, I
was having a lot more fun running and gunning the different areas. You’re not
graded on the missions, so this is probably one of the only instances I’ve seen
where “open-ended mission structure” means exactly that. You’re given various
different missions by the factions, buddies, the resistance, arms dealers and
even some intercepted telephone calls, and while they are all very similar,
(take a thing to a place/blow up a thing/kill someone,) they each take about
20-40 minutes to do and some are actually quite challenging.
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| Whoever's in that car is in for a nasty surprise... |
The Buddies serve a few purposes – you can pick up missions
from them, or they will subvert the missions you’re already doing to make them
more challenging with a higher reward. Finally, if you lose all your health, they
will come to help you, but only once per mission – you have to visit a safe
house to reset it. The arms dealers will offer you opportunities to attack
convoys of weapons; doing this will unlock more and better weapons. The rest of
the game is exploration: Searching for diamonds to buy the weapons, and for
audio logs left behind by The Jackal.
I’ve had a good amount of fun with Far Cry 2 and for that
reason I found myself more immersed in the story than I might otherwise have
been. Some open world games are better paced, have more to do and have a
clearer final objective, but the conceit of today’s open world games were very
much in development when this was published in 2008, so it showcases the core
experience of its genre. There are some glitches; nothing game-breaking but
some of the soldiers suddenly appear on top of cars, and when I got to the
second main area, the same audio log was coming up each time no matter how many
I picked up. I won’t aim for 100% completion; the game took long enough to get
to the ending, and most of the achievement points I’m missing are tied up in
multiplayer modes with dead servers. But with a little patience, Far Cry 2
became a richer and far more compelling experience than I previously had.
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