With great sadness I inform that Far Cry franchise has been infected with consolitis.
- repetitive gameplay.
- large areas to explore with little content
- good polished graphics
- lack of depth
- boring tasks like collecting items
- cookie cutter graphical elements
When you play game with "symptoms" above, it doesn't take you long to figure out that it's been designed primarily with thought of PS3 and Xbox360. Now, for some players this might be fine and acceptable but some hardcore PC players expect more.
Far Cry was a linear FPS with graphics that set it aside from other FPS games of that area. Everybody who played it on decent rig remembers how alive the jungle felt, how realistic the water looked and etc.
As the predecessor, Far Cry 2 impresses with great graphics. Looking the river, realistically glittering in the sun, surrounded by Africa's grasses I thought it looked like the real thing. Fire is very well implemented too and it even behaves realistically: at one point, eager to try my flame thrower I set ablaze small patch of grass and watched it spread to a trees. Small brush fire I caused started spreading, eventually engulfed my vehicle and destroyed it. Setting graphics detail to high and resolution to 1280x768 yielded great texture quality and detail. My PC, which has AMD Athlon 64 3700+ processor and ATI Radeon 4850 graphics card, was able to run the game fairly well, mostly staying well above 16 FPS. Game developers need to be praised for including with game utility which makes it easier to test and compare different graphics settings. It greatly helps in picking optimal settings for your machine.
Unfortunately, graphics is the only high point of the game. Far Cry 2 ditches linear format of the predecessor in favor of more open ended structure, which seems to be very popular these days. Personally I don't see what all the rave is about; most of the times the open-ended means that you are able to do missions out of order. In Far Cry open ended nature and large map means you have choice to get to your mission target from any direction. Big deal. Unfortunately, whatever road you chose means that you'll have to drive through the same checkpoints and save game at similar looking regularly placed safe houses. Thirty minutes into the game you realize that this is going to get repetitive soon and it does. While graphics is great, once you see one checkpoint or one safe house you've seen them all. Trying to break the monotony of all the driving developers have thrown in an element of diamond search. I've seen this item collecting in number of console games and I could never understand what's the fun in that. Am I supposed to go "Yay! I found diamond case number 25, I have 200 more to go! Fun!"? If dull driving wasn't bad enough, now I have to run around everywhere looking for diamond cases to finance my operations. I feel sleepy just writing about it.
Plot is as simple as they get. There's this bad, bad man that deals weapons and you have to kill him. That's it. I don't think I'll ever see the evil prick's demise because this game just doesn't have enough to keep me playing.
EDIT: Reading more about this game I found out that Far Cry 2 was not made by team who made Far Cry, but developers of Assassin's Creed. Now it all makes sense.