I was really hyped for this game before it came out. Probably the only game in 2008 I wanted to play, badly. Well I got it a few days after the release and finished it just last week.
The game looks solid and it has some great physics to offer. For example fire spreading around the bush and destructive shelters, vehicles. Action starts right away, so there is not much of an introduction to the story (wonder why?). There are a lot of different guns in the game and they all sound pretty solid. You always want to buy new weapons and this makes the game a bit more interesting. Another interesting aspect of the game is searching for diamond cases, it's fun. The last thing I found positive about the game is the map, it's huge and varied. Those kinds of things really make you think "this is going to be a great game".
But it really isn't all that great. Gameplay starts to get repetitive quickly, because there are no civilians on the map and everyone you come across wants to kill you. Not to mention that all the bad guys you have killed are magically resurrected from the dead after five minutes or so. And the missions are all the same - kill that man, destroy that pipe... It wouldn't be as big of a problem if the AI wasn't so bad. Your enemies will be able to see you through the whole jungle and shoot you in the face, but when they come close (and I mean a few feet close), they become blind, rotating in all directions and wondering "where is he?". Even though there are a lot of different guns in this game, some very popular weapons are missed out, for example M16/M4, G36, F2000... all those weapons can be found in Africa so there is no explanation why are they not in the game. There is also no explanation why all the weapons use the same kind of ammo (yeah, it's a console port) known as the universal ammo. Furthermore the story practically doesn't exist so there is no motivation to finish the game at all (I needed four months). Remember when I said the graphics are solid? Well that's true except for the human models. They are plasticized as if they were made with Doom 3 Engine. And the last thing - there are no rpg elements in Far Cry 2, just fps, and we all know that you can't have an open world game without some rpg elements.
As you can see, there are much more negatives than positives in this review. Yeah, I found Far Cry 2 to be disappointing. Far Cry 1 and Crysis are both better games, but that doesn't mean FC2 can't offer anything to a first person shooter fan. All in all, it's a pretty nice looking game that is actually pretty playable. It just has some (big) problems. The biggest ones are definitely the AI and the lack of story, which leads to repetitiveness. PS: you'll need at least 30 hours to finish this one, so it's up to you.