Far Cry 2 - About the Game -
I didn't get proper warning going into this. so maybe I can properly warn you. far cry is ridiculously hard. jack dies fast and moves rather slow. health packs are rarer than they need to be. firefights start hard and only get harder - and there's 20 missions. how does hard get harder than hard? far cry does it. the game is also brutally punishing. crytek decided the quicksave standard cheapened their game, so it's developer mandated checkpoints that could be anywhere from 3 - 20 minutes apart. not only is the game hard, but it's brutally punishing. 'easy' mode is no escape from this. crytek obviously loves the genre and expects you do as well, the difficulty makes far cry a genre piece that only the patient or the skilled can enjoy.
there isn't a lot of variety with your weaponry, which put me off at first. you're limited to four weapon slots and there isn't any room for mixing and matching. you need to use everything at your disposal to get through most encounters. it will be you and your assault rifle for hours on end. far cry creates, encourages, mostly forces, but really delivers on long range gun fights. figuring out the exact place to minimize damage while being able to pick off five, six, seven guys. it's intense, more than intense, it's stressful. it pushed my ability far beyond what I had when I went in. I adapted and overcame; precision became my second nature. ammo for other very important weapons - shotgun, sniper rifle, and missle launcher - are scarce, which altogether marks one of far cry's fatal flaws: it's a bit dull using an assault rifle for hours on end. a game can have repetitive core mechanics if the rest of the design is fantastic enough to encompass it and I believe far cry passes, making its one weapon reliance an interesting design choice, rather than a weighted dullard.
more modern-traditional corridor levels do not have these long-range gunfights (for the most part). they make up about half the game and are very competant. however, they're often very simplistic, with uninteresting goals and encounters. only until the later levels do indoor maps offer a better dynamic than just being a breather from the outdoor maps. although this dynamic is mostly cheapness coming from very powerful enemies in close quarters. the aforementioned long-range gunfights dominate far cry's many outdoor stages. most of far cry takes place in a massive expanse of island. crytek offers multiple ways to tackle any given objective, though it usually boils down to stealth or not. mercenaries can be largely avoided - or they can be met head on. I usually opted to go in guns blazing, although this is not as acommadated as being a pacifist. either way is very much possible and many a time I was very surprised at all of the different directions I could have blazed. a stealthy approach becomes more necessary during the midpart of the game and it can be frustrating trial and error finding out where exactly you need to go. but you don't have to figure that out, you could man up and take out all of the guys. although that usually also ends up in frustrating trial and error.
the ai is bonkers. it's borderline psychotic. it made me paranoid while playing, though checkpoint system was also a fat stress producer. the bad guys can see you from very far. sometimes just staring at them will get your attention, like the horrible monster you weren't supposed to look at. noise will alert them from an equal distance. firing your weapon at all will plunge you into war. if mercs are alerted, every single merc in the vicinity, and sometimes even farther than that, knows where you are. they will all fire where you stand. they will either run for cover or zig zag around like maniacs, even when you aren't firing. and they have nigh perfect accuracy. if they miss it's because they're far away. this is pushed to absurd degrees when snipers and rocket infantry are placed in extremely far towers and aimbot your stupid face. if this sounds cheap and unfun, well, to some degree it is. it's never quite pushed to unfair territory, but it borders, it borders so close. this is the reason I loved the game so much. a game that's brutally hard but has the markings of being fair; design being pushed to its limit is something I love so much.
there's some crap levels. my least favorite is treehouse. it's full of red herrings and way too many solutions while you're underequipped to deal with instant kill monsters. however, it's also the most stressful map in the game for those reasons, so you may very well love it. driving jeeps is stupid. I'm really against crappy vehicle segments and that's all the jeep ever is. thankfully jeep driving is usually short. but then there's boat driving. being a boat is more fun and that counts for something, but it's usually just as pedestrian. the vehicles seem there to be vehicles and they're no where near as polished as the rest of the game, which makes them stand out all the more, and aggravates me to no end. there are a few totally filler levels where textures and even firefights are liberally repasted into new environments. I can't tell you what they are, because I don't remember them, heh, but I distinctly remember two real lame indoor levels. outdoor stages somewhat change fauna, it's not a lot, and it can feel like they bleed together, but they're much more fun so you don't really notice.
it's hard to believe this game came out in 2004. not the punishing difficulty or old school nonlinear design philosophy, that stuff makes sense, but the graphics. after the fact my computer can max everything out and it puts games from 2006 to shame. it looks decidedly old but it still looks great if that makes sense. water is so shiny but so benchmarking good. character design is a little lame, trigons look more goofy than sinister even though they try to spook, mercs just look like soldiermans, token girl partner is very token and very uncanny valley unappealing, villians are just business-science. the story isn't all that impressive so those things link up. confessionally, I enjoyed the story. it was basic and b-movie and jack's voice was one of the most hilarious things ever, but it tried just hard enough for me to be engaged. in that respect I'm easily impressed, yet considering it as just an afterthought, it's a pretty good one.
it's kind of a crime far cry isn't infamous for it's rediculousness. it's an experience no big tough hardcore gamer should skip out on. somehow it got lost in the annals as just another generic fps, but it's my favorite stress simulator ever -- review from steam
Video Gameplay Far Cry 2:
Minimum
Supported OS: Windows® 2000/XP (only)
Processor: AMD Athlon™ 1 GHz or Pentium® III 1 GHz
Memory: 256 MB
Graphics: 64 MB DirectX® 9.0b-compliant graphics card (see supported list*)
Sound: DirectX 9.0b compliant PCI card (Sound Blaster Audigy series recommended)
DirectX: DirectX 9.0b or higher
Hard Disk Space: 4 GB
Multiplay: Broadband with 64 Kbps upstream (512 Kbps upstream to host 8 players)
Mouse/Keyboard: Windows compatible mouse and keyboard required
Recommanded:
Supported OS: Windows 2000/XP (only)
Processor: AMD Athlon 2-3 GHz or Pentium 4 2-3 GHz
Memory: 512-1024 MB
Sound: Sound Blaster® Audigy® series (see supported list*)
Graphics: 128 MB GeForce™ 4 128 MB to GeForce FX 5950; ATI Radeon 9500-9800 XT
*Supported video cards at time of retail release: NVIDIA GeForce 2/3/4/FX families ( NVIDIA based cards must have ForceWare drivers 53.03 or later; GeForce 2 and GeForce 4 MX cards do not support all graphics features). ATI Radeon 8500/9000 families (ATI Radeon 9500-9800 XT recommended; ATI-based cards must have Catalyst drivers 3.9 or higher).
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