The thing about Far Cry 2... well. It's the very epitome of a game people should at least try for themselves. It will either all click, click "well enough," make you cry over what should have been, or do nothing for you at all. Because it's so peculiar a game all the reference points in the world may not do you any good extrapolating what you'll get from it. Realizing this, spurred on by the last thread, I grabbed it, patched it up, and have been playing very on and off for a couple of months.
I merely find FC2 "good" which is my threshold for playable: even if my expectations have lowered with the times, it's still hard to hit my sweet-spot and I don't waste time on games that bother me. This is the most I've written about a game in quite some time, and it's rare for me to do so for a game that I don't completely adore. But FC2 is, almost inarguably, at least a very interesting design and attempt, so here goes.
Over all it's a very brave game (every one of which we should remember to occasionally praise, even if for that alone) and frankly there just isn't much else like it. This is really something in and of itself, especially when considering its origin as a AAA shooter (car repair jokes aside) and the less superficial of two follow-ups to a hit game. I mean superficial in a very literal sense there; Crysis amplifies the the jungle vistas, 80s/90s action-movie vibe, carefully funneled coast-line set-pieces, and notorious Sci-Fi plot-twist. FC2 takes on the subtler, less glorious task of stretching out the navigation, scouting, and planning.
One parent pulled in two different directions by its children. Nobody would be shocked to learn if FC2 was adopted or the result of an affair - it looks nothing like its dad - but you can tell they were both raised in the same house if you get to know the family. There is a lot from (or at least in common) with Far Cry, depending on what you wanted from it and how you played it I suppose, to be found and enjoyed in FC2. In addition, it has some clever ideas of its own, and its design approaches "modern shooterisms," like weapon limitation and regen, in a novel manner - almost always adding gameplay instead of removing it (but possibly still distracting from it, again depending on your hankering and approach.)
Don't get me wrong, the game is full of smacks to the forehead. Thankfully (at least post-patch?) most of them are absences and "could've beens," rather than anything in the game being flawed per se... but some of this does reach back and hurt the game. For example, the inexplicable lack of a simple "hand over mouth, slit throat" maneuver is a blight on the otherwise fantastic stealth. Infiltrating a base in broad daylight is an incredible experience, but if you sneak up a behind a target your ONLY option to bring them down quietly is a shot from the silenced pistol to the back of the head. The only thing you can do with your blade from there is a broadhand slash to the back of the head: he screams even if he goes down. Now you're not infiltrating - you're fucking surrounded. It's not a huge issue once you know about it, but it's still silly, and made a good three-quarters of the internet think the stealth was broken (he SCREAMED, they will hear it 20 yards away, this is what screaming is for.) If it was a balance issue, they should have just made you get be super-close, have pixel-perfect aim, and give the animation a long wind-up/down. And there are times I'd've liked to carry some of those bodies around, too, but... it's just not in the game.
Lots of stuff like that - omissions that don't necessarily wreck what's there, but will probably frustrate you at one point or another. This game reminds me of a non-existant one that I want more than this one, and it's easy to be cruel to those. There's the things which are huge jumps in scope, but would've fit right in and made the game downright amazing. Dynamic faction territory, or even battles. More C&C that extends beyond the task at hand. For what there is of that, to not have been wasted on a single, game-long set of effects determined by happenstance (or metagaming) that ultimately don't effect a whole lot anyway. I can see what they were going for there - you're fucked, your fate is luck of the draw, both sides are the same anyway, and you're not special enough to not shoot. I appreciate that they expressed this with the game itself (show don't tell and all that) but it seems wasteful in light of what could have been.
That said, I'm still playing it. The big empty map we'd all love to have seen filled up a little more does serve its purpose in that grants the distance necessary for some downtime, allows you to plot your own approaches, and gives you some wiggle room within them. You can go the long way around, lay in the bushes, mark out the surrounding with your binoculars, cook up a plan, and implement it. I can even say "fuck this, I need a bigger gun," high-tail it back to a safehouse, and switch out that flamethrower that was oh-so-good at rooting those other guys out of the brush, for an RPG to deal with those emplacements I can't find a way around without crossing into the sniper's FOV.
How much more the game could have let me do doesn't outweigh how much it lets me do that other games don't. Fuck, man, in this day and age most FPS refuse to let you out of a corridor. However, like most of the games I like, it is not without its shortfalls and confusions, and it's definitely not for everyone. But it is not the abomination it's generally made out to be.
