Guest Post: Exploring what he considers the last good game in the series Hax Monster reminises about Far Cry 2
Posted by: Jason Silverain / Category: Guest, Review, Video games
Like
with your pride the first time you manage to make a fire in the woods
without matches, the amazement about a good video game series simmers
down when it all starts burning itself to the ground. Series like
Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed or Thief are masters of their genre
and pioneers in gaming technology until suddenly they look back,
realize that they’re so popular they’ll never have to do a damn
until the end of days and spend the rest of their runtime extensively
testing that feeling. And usually you can point out one game that was
the turning point; a game that perhaps wasn’t bad itself but which
ushered in the era of minimum-effort player-milking games. With Call
of Duty it was the first Modern Warfare and with Thief it was Thief
(god, that sounds stupid).
With
the Far Cry series, that game was Far Cry 3. While immensely popular
and actually quite good in it’s own right, it forebode a time where
Ubisoft would not know what to do with the franchise; for Far Cry 4
they simply did Far Cry 3 again with some snow added and Far Cry
Primal isn’t really a sequel at all as it has as much to do with
the other Far Cry instalments as it has to do with the newest
instalment of Jaffa Cakes. Therefore I want to reminisce about the
last undoubtedly good Far Cry that I remember: Far Cry 2.
In
Far Cry 2 you take the role of a mercenary sent out to an African
country where two factions are fighting a long civil war. Your job
there is to take out an arms dealer named ‘The Jackal’ and to do
this you do jobs for the warring factions and a truckload of side
missions for all kinds of nutters that are all in their own way
trying to get a slice of the African pie that is the country’s
vanishing wealth. Inbetween the mission you get an open game world
with cars and enemies smeared out evenly like butter on toast, with
the freedom to go pretty much everywhere. So far, so generic. Then
what is it that makes this title the hidden jewel that it is? I’ll
show you!
Pub
quiz time! Name as many games as
possible that are set in Africa!
Well,
how did you do? I myself can only think of Serious Sam 3, although
calling Egypt an African country is like calling Origin serious
competition for Steam; strictly true but practically not quite. The
only other African game that comes up for me is Far Cry 2. So on the
originality scoreboard Far Cry already marks highly on ‘setting’
for me. The setting is perhaps the biggest and most important
ingredient of Far Cry 2’s recipe that I devour with so much gusto.
As soon as you start the game up you are presented with an
overwhelming feeling of being in that dry, war-torn hostile place and
you are immediately immersed eyehole-deep. The colour palate delivers
the dryness of sub-Saharan African steppes in dry season, the
vegetation moves naturally and is very real, the light is beautiful
and intense.
You
get to soak up all of the setting during the game’s very
well-executed intro cinematic that for me is only really bested by
Bioshock’s bathysphere ride. During this first moment of the game
you are driven around a large part of the map where your cheerful
cabdriver acquaints you with fires, oppressive troops, panicking
civilians and misery. Normally this kind of exposition is all setup
and no payoff, but when you do actually roam freely around the world
you get the same feeling as when you were in the taxi. With the
game’s superbly subtle soundtrack and beautiful lighting the game
world always has this characteristic looming feeling of threat over
it. Everything feels even more real when you take a moment to spy on
a few enemy camps from a distance. All those soldiers chat with each
other in really well-voice-acted dialogues and are constantly doing
things normal people do as well, like pissing up trees and try to get
mobile reception for hours. A lot of little details like this make
the world feel ever so vibrant. And although this is nothing as
intense like, say, Spec Ops: The Line, Far Cry 2 managed to do quite
well when it comes to setting up a miserable country with scared
people, traumatized by war.
For those curious here is a video of the intro - Silverain
This
is, of course, all framework. What is the actual painting part of the
painting like? Very briefly described, the core gameplay of Far Cry 2
is that of it’s sequel, only more slowly paced and less forgiving.
The slower pace has to do the higher difficulty of stealthing and the
lower movement speed. This is a lot closer to Arma 2 than it is to,
say, Call of Duty. As far as the unforgiving is concerned, Far Cry 2
is like a cheap hotel bed: full of sand, blood and, most importantly:
obnoxiously hard. On higher difficulty settings especially you will
never win a fight unless you got in a perfect position beforehand and
mapped every enemy out for yourself.
An example of perfect positioning.
Combat from a car is a pain in
the arse in particular because the AI always drives faster than you
do and can have a gunner in the car while someone else is driving.
Your chances are therefore very slim in chases. Then there is the
tricky health system. There is practically no regenerating health and
once you are at low health, pressing the heal button makes your
character arduously extract the bullets from his arm or put a bandage
on it which takes about as much time as getting three hundred
involuntary metal piercings all over your body. You also don’t have
a minimap that is always visible and weapons degrade quickly, which
can be very frustrating unless you neurotically switch your gun for a
new one every single time you pass by a gunstore. So the game is
harsh, but that too builds atmosphere. Where in Far Cry 3 you felt
like some kind of demi-god that could survive a breezeblock to the
face, you actually feel very human while playing Far Cry 2. You are
still a squishy walking pile of meat, stuck together with flimsy
bone. That feeling is quite rare in shooters these days.
Then
there is another fine bit of original immersing game design: the
buddy system. In Far Cry 2 you, over the course of the game, meet a
bunch of NPC’s who become your friends and give you side missions.
One particular buddy also gives you optional objectives for main
story missions and, most remarkably, another buddy will appear into
the game and revive you whenever you die. Then he fights alongside
you. That and their wide variety in looks and, albeit shallow,
personalities makes you care about them. It’s only a shame that
they are just like you: walking piles of brittle meat. They die the
moment an enemy so much as looks their way and sometimes when they
are downed, if the gods of random number generators are not on your
side, they die no matter how hard you try to revive them. For me,
whenever that happened, it was actually a sad moment. All of them can
die. This frailness also makes them feel like actual people that you
care about, not refrigerators with miniguns strapped to their pecs
that kill all threats for you.
Then
there are a bunch of other details that make the game as great as it
is. Sometimes, when you shoot an enemy, he is downed but not dead. Of
course you can just shoot him again to kill him but if you don’t do
that, the enemies think you have left and the stars have aligned then
a teammate of his will come up to revive him. When he is being
treated the panic in the injured soldier’s voice is also really
well-acted and believable. In general this game has really good
voice acting. It is odd, however, that things like enemy taunts are
really well-acted while a lot of the story cutscenes have really
dull, uninterested voice actors. Luckily, considering that there are
not that many scenes of that kind, it’s no dealbreaker. Then
there’s stealthing. Far Cry 3 gave you an enormous arrow indication
that lit up when an enemy so much as smelled your farts but here,
there’s nothing like that. You actually have to listen to what
enemies are saying to know if they spotted you or not, which will
happen very quickly because this is not Skyrim, where you can stay
invisible in plain sight when you are at a high level. Here enemies
actually have realistic cones of vision so staying hidden is really
hard because you can’t allow yourself to see the enemies either, or
they’ll see you.
If
all this is great, then why was this game forgotten so much that you
need me to tell you about it again? Beyond the high difficulty that
can be attributed to a few factors. Firstly, missions are quite
repetitive. Missions from the same sources always have the same
layout and objective and only differ in location. Then there’s the
really annoying feature that this game is a sandbox in the same way
as Borderlands 2 for instance: not really an open world, but a bunch
of linear paths that cross each other a lot. There are so many
mountains that you can’t cross that the game world is an enormous
Swiss cheese. The kind of gaming audience that spends hours in
Skyrim walking over mountains just for the sake of taking the direct
route isn’t going to like that. Then there was the money system
that I didn’t really like. Money was very limited and could only
come from the finite number of missions or from exploration. Because
of this you could never really get a lot of weapons and that is a
shame because there aren’t really many in the first place.
On
console ports aiming your gun felt as clunky and slow as redirecting
a nuclear submarine and the multiplayer was practically unplayable
because of that it required ALL twenty-or-so people in the game to
ready up for the next round. On the PC version I couldn’t even get
it to work in the first place. The console version also has a ported
level editor that is more annoying to work with than an autistic
baboon. I can’t imagine why that was designed in the first place.
Furthermore I think it was a shame that we don’t actually notice
the war itself going on beyond one or two scripted events where the
two factions actually fight each other. The war’s feeling of threat
is there alright but we never see it actually happening. If I’d
lure enemies from one side to a camp of the other faction they would
just all fight me like they are one team. They are supposed to be
actively fighting each other if you’d believe the story, but you
barely see that happen beyond fixed moments of exposition.
Beyond
that there are a few technical imperfections. Clipping issues are
very common, especially when you shoot someone sitting in a car and
enemies have this curious tendency to end up in a shoulder-shrugging
position when they are dead. Explosions can make large things like
cars spaz out and one other glitch once caused the enemies I was
fighting to suddenly stat shooting the corpse of one former comrade
of theirs that I just killed. Then there’s the slight issue that
the AI can’t drive DLC-added vehicles.
So,
undoubtedly this game requires your attention if you’re up for a
shooter that’s a little more organic than a nuclear power plant. I
can’t guarantee that it will work on newer computers because I
can’t run my old disc copy on my Windows 10 machine, but that might
also be because of that the disc is seven years old. Avoid the
console ports and just get it for PC. Get it and enjoy yourself,
just try not to run over too many zebras on the way!
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