Far Cry 2 - I Tried To Love You

So its been quite a while since I started a videogame and didnt finish it. Ill do it with books; read half, realize the author is repeating himslef ad nauseum (I almost exclusively read non-fiction) and I will quit out of a DVD without hesitation if its not entertaining me. But not videogames. I will almost always finish a videogame even if its only half good, unless there is something in particular that just irks me so much I cant continue. I can simply force myself to play through most games, especially shooters, action, racing and sports games. The mechanics of these games come quite naturally to me so I can move through them quickly without much thought involved. But most RPGs, open world games, sims, strategy games, MMOs, arent as obvious to me, so I move through them more slowly and in general need the game to be much better than average to fully engage my attention.

Far Cry was an amazingly ahead of its time PC game that the German developer Crytek made way back in 2004, which quickly sold over a million copies when it was released. Mixing first person shooting mechanics with stealth and an open world environment, all with next gen graphics on a brand new engine, the game was nothing short of a revelation for PC gamers and to this day has an outstanding reputation in the PC world (the game was later ported to consoles, with mixed success).

Crytek got off an a bit of a tangent with the remakes of Far Cry which added superhuman abilities (Far Cry Instincts) and a new spinoff series called Crysis, and while these games were also great and sold well, Crytek never forgot about Far Cry and neither did gamers. Well, until now. Its quite clear to me, after playing 25% of Far Cry 2, and doing a fair bit of research about what the rest of the game holds, that Crytek's flagship series is no longer Far Cry, it is Crysis. Its evident in many different ways, for starters, as great as Far Cry 2 looks - and it looks amazing - it still cant touch Crysis with a 10-ft pole. Nothing can. Thats the real problem with Crysis for Crytek - the technology is so far ahead of its time, it renders everything else obsolete by comparison, even the vaunted Unreal 3.5 engine. When Crysis came out, you needed a supercomputer to play it. Now in December 2008, you can get a PC that will run Crysis for under $1000, but the reality is most PC gamers missed out on Crysis because its graphics technology was simply too far ahead of its time.

That being said, the graphics in Far Cry are a far cry from a letdown, in fact they are one of the game's real highpoints. The Far Cry 2 engine looks fantastic and runs quite well on the 360 - we all know its not even remotely possible to run even a scaled down version of the Crysis engine on current console hardware, so we have to be happy with what weve got for now. The game is set in Africa and for the most part its rendered quite beautifully, with Zebras and Wildebeast running across the plains, incredible propagating fire effects, environmental destruction - actually, the entire environment is meant to be destroyed. Because everything in the environment is trying to kill you, constantly.

There is a tiny area in the middle of the huge map, this is the only neutral zone in the entire game world. Everywhere else, for the course of the entire game, there are checkpoints, towns, and shacks all over the countryside, each filled with machine gun toting maniacs whose only purpose and desire in life is to kill you. Aside from the ridiculously impractical implications of such a gameworld, it severely detracts from the realism of an African war zone to actually never be able to leave the warzone. The mission objectives, which often include such predictable fare as infiltrating an enemy base and destroying an object, dont really feel different from the free roaming parts of the game, because you are constantly in combat for the entire game, no matter where you are. It is simply exhausting and makes the game much longer and more tedious than it needs to be. Just getting to the mission objectives takes quite a while, as you have to drive across the entire game map in real time, fighting off wackos every 500 feet, who have perfect accuracy, can see through walls, and take roughly an entire clip of AK-47 ammo to before going down.

Oh the driving. I really, really want to send a memo to every game designer in the world, that says, "If you cant design driving well in your shooting game, please dont even bother. Ill take the bus." Part of the problem is that now every game wants to be GTA. But, even GTA IV didnt get the driving controls perfect! They were simply OK. The driving in Far Cry 2 is insulting bad, and its actually the reason I quit playing the game. Alll the vehicles in the game travel at the same speed - exactly 20mph. They are all stuck in the same hellish second gear. In a way this kind of makes sense, because when you look at how the map and the roads were designed, they are all twisted up single lane affairs with no open straitaways or wide roads. In essence, if they gave you cars that went faster, most drivers would occasionally careen of the edge of the narrow raod into the jungle or off a cliff. So rather than punish the bad drivers for their bad driving, they punish everyone by fixing the speed of all cars in the game to a ridiculously low level.

Imagine sprinting in Call of Duty 4 - the cars in Far Cry 2 might move slightly faster than that. Now imagine traversing an area the size of GTA IV's map at that speed, but the area has no straight roads, so you must take twisted mountain roads, with few or no shortcuts. Now imagine that, but the cops are always after you. You permanently have 4 wanted stars. Now, imagine that your vehicle, even if its an armored transport, can only take a few bullets before emitting smoke and incredibly slowing down to an even slower speed. You have to get out, shoot the enemies (who chase you in seemingly faster vehicles - you cant outdrive them), spend a 10 second animation to repair your vehicle, get back in your vehicle, drive 500 feet, and repeat - all just to get to the area where you can receive a mission. The you have to go do the mission, and then drive back again to finish it. The enemies respawn within a few real-time minutes of you killing them, so often you have to clear the same checkpoint multiple times in the same mission.

There might be a good game buried underneath all the design flaws. The two dozen or so mission I did were all pretty fun, but once I actually got to them I was already exhausted and low on health from all the checkpoint battles. I could see that finishing the game was going to take 40 hours at least - I had put in 10 already - and that over 50% of that time would be spent driving a horribly slow and clunky vehicle and clearing the same few checkpoints of respawning enemies. Its really a shame, because the game could have been soooo great, with faster vehicles, fewer and slower respawning enemies, more mission variety, and overall more things to do than just kill and destroy.

The premise of the game was that I was saving a fictional Central African nation from devolving into a warzone, but all I ever did was kill things, and blow shit up, and even that wasnt as satisfying as other open world shooters like Mercenaries 2. Overall, despite the games high points and its overall sense of polish, the flaws are simply too heavy because they exist for the entire duration of the game - you never get a faster vehicle or one with more health, and the world is simply too big to traverse on foot. You're trapped in the developers horrible vehicles with maniac super-tough to kill enemies everywhere, and the few "buddies" you make in the game are often nowhere to be found, and when they do show up its usually to get mortally wounded in combat and beg you to save them. I really wanted to like this game and even stopped playing Fallout 3 when it arrived in the mail from gamefly. I think Im going back to the Wasteland for now, because at least Bethesda understands that a huge part of an open world game is exploring and meeting people who arent your enemies - if the gameplay revolves solely on everything either being killed or destroyed, no matter how well designed those parts are, the player will eventually tire of them - especially if they have to drive a jalopy there and back.