Fun and beautiful but lacks ever so slightly.
Right off the bat you are thrown in to a crazy situation. You are a operative on a mission to find out about the Jackal. However you contract malaria and become deeply sick. When you wake up in your hotel there is shooting out side and a man in your room explaining how you need to leave the country. Your mission becomes a struggle to make sense of the country and to survive your illness. This takes you into a game where you have to pick between factions and help refugees escape in exchange for pills to control your sickness. You will also meet companions along the way who will give you side missions or alternative routes on your primary missions as well as helping you in a sticky situation.
The game is stunning. The graphics were obviously taken into consideration in Far Cry 2. The lighting and shadows create the intensely hot and dry climate of Africa as well as displaying its more thick canopy forests. Early on in the game you witness the effect of fire in Far Cry 2. If created in a dry landscape where the ground is long crisp grass with half dead trees you have found the perfect fire zone. Setting fire to these when in combat is an effective way of cornering or catching enemies off guard, but watch it does not catch you as it spreads quickly and without remorse.
The downsides to Far cry 2 are annoying. The AI will often have either pin point accuracy or feel the need to throw grenades at their own feet. Every check point you pass through (which is a lot) they will start shooting at you, and will chase you down in their trucks with mounted weapons. this is where the annoying part about vehicles comes in. Cars and pick-ups break so often you spend more time out of them repairing or finding a new one than you do in them. Your weapons have a degrade system as well. This is a massive issue but the weapons break far to quickly at times. The weapons also look dirty rather than broken, if they had included maybe a method of cleaning and maintaing your weapon it might have been nice but then that would have created a new string of issues.
Overall Far Cry 2 is a compelling and exciting game. That rips away the immersion at points when your having to constantly find new transport or fix the one you have.
Score: 8.5/10