If you don't mind all the driving, you will be treated to one of the best shooters of this console generation.
Never before has a shooter done such an excellent job of creating a believable world that makes you feel as if you are living the life of your character. This amount of depth is usually reserved for RPGs like Fallout 3 or Oblivion. The world may not be as large as these games, but it is much more detailed. It doesn't hurt that the graphics are the best I have ever seen this side of Crysis. Seriously, not enough can be said about the graphics.
The game opens in an unnamed African country with a cab ride from the airstrip to your hotel. Along the way, you get a tour of the countryside and your first glimpse of the shear beauty of the game. Trees blow in the wind with each branch moving independently. Fields of grass flow in waves. Even looking around in the cab shows such an amazing attention to detail. Nearly every aspect of the game is photo realistic. Oddly, the only weak part of the graphics is something that most other games have nearly mastered: the water. It looks good enough when nothing disturbs it, but jumping in throws up lame, two-dimensional splash effects and there are no waves or ripples to be seen. The wake behind boats is an animation that looks as if it as hovering slightly above the surface. Since most of the game takes place on land, it is possible to not even notice this, and the rest of the game does nothing but amaze. Everything is always viewed from the first person perspective and plenty of detail is in place to make you feel like you are part of the game. If someone hands you an envelope, it doesn't simply disappear like in most games. Your character actually reaches out and takes it. When sitting in a car, you can not only see your hands on the steering wheel, but also your feet on the pedals. Some of the game's most intense and gruesome moments occur when you are low on health. Your character is actually seen using pliers to rip a bullet out of a wound, tearing shrapnel out of his arm, snapping a broken wrist back into place, or any number of disturbing actions.
Amazing graphics don't mean anything if the rest of the game doesn't back it up, but luckily that isn't the case here. After the lengthy cab ride (which can seem a bit too long on subsequent playthroughs) and a shootout in the hotel that acts as your tutorial, you find yourself working for one of the local militias. Your main mission is to kill the arms deal only know as The Jackal, but this quickly takes a backseat to simply making money and surviving. Over the course of the roughly 30 hour game, you will primarily be working for whomever will pay you, but this doesn't mean you won't make some friends along the way. Your 'buddies', as they are so cleverly called, will show up to save you if you go down in a fight or call you on your cell phone to give you alternate ways to obtain your current objective. You don't talk in depth to these characters, but you do get attached enough to feel bad if one of them dies, especially if it happens in your arms as you try to help them recover from a gunfight. The people you will befriend change with every playthrough, so it will always be a surprise to see who you can rely on and who is out to get you.
The game takes place in an open-world environment. Missions (either main or side) are received from locations marked on the map. Once on a mission, you must travel to your objective. This brings up the main reason why some gamers may get turned off of the game. Even though vehicles are readily available, driving make up nearly seventy five percent of the game. There are a few bus stations that allow you to fast travel from one to another, but not as many as I would have liked. While there is a moderate number of vehicles to choose from, only one of them has a mounted machine gun, which is almost a must for the random firefights that tend to break out. This means much of the game will have you driving the same vehicle along many of the same jungle paths over and over. I can't even begin to imagine how many times I have made the trip from the bus stop to the bar where I met my buddies. How you feel about the driving will make or break the game for you. Personally, I thought it was a blast, but I cannot deny that it got a little boring from time to time.
At it's heart, Far Cry 2 is a shooting game, and the gunplay is impressive. The weapons seem to strike the perfect balance between too accurate that it is easy and inaccurate enough to become frustrating. Each gun has a different and realistic sound and feel. Enemies take slightly more hits than is realistic, but it doesn't hurt the experience. Occasionally, if you don't get solid hits on them, they will crawl on the ground while screaming in pain, then stand up and try to limp away. In the rare case that I allowed one of these guys to escape, they were found minutes later around a corner, leaning against a wall and holding their wound. There is also an impressive number of weapons to choose from. You start with only a few, but more can be unlocked by doing jobs for the local weapons dealer and purchased with diamonds earned through the game (interesting tidbit: the main plot of the games has you hunting down a man who is considered evil simply because he is an arms dealer, while at the same time you are doing jobs for and buying weapons from another arms dealer). By the end of the game, you will have an impressive arsenal of machine guns, sniper rifles, pistols, rocket launchers, and more. You can only carry three guns at a time; one of each category: small arms, rifles, and heavy weapons. This allows you to have enough variety to be prepared for most situations, although I did have one gripe. Sniper rifles and assault rifles are in the same category, so you cannot carry both at one time. This was my standard load out in most other games, so I was a little disappointed that I couldn't do it here.
[Minor Spoilers] Now the plot isn't exactly the main drive of the game, but this isn't an excuse for the ending being absolutely terrible. I'm not going to give away exactly what happens, but the gist of it is that your character has a complete change of heart about the world for absolutely no apparent reason and the game actually tells you that either enjoying or profiting from war is evil and anyone that does this deserves to die. This is not an exaggeration, but a summary of exactly what the moral of this story is. Basically, the developers are calling me a bad person for finding enjoyment in playing their game. I could understand if this was a movie or TV documentary, but it is not acceptable in a game that forces you to do these things in order to play it. This easily makes it onto my list of worst endings of all time.
Aside from the horrendous ending, I loved nearly every bit of this game. The driving can get a little monotonous, but it does help add to the epic feel of the huge world. If you can get past that, you will be treated to one of the best FPS games of the current console generation.