Video Games – Far Cry 2 is Terrible, Part 2

The game has a buddy system; they are just friendly NPCs who help you or ask for help from time to time. The first part of the game, I liked the buddies. Specifically, I liked Michele Dachss. I’d get a quest, she’d call me up and offer an additional way to fuck over both the UFLL and the APR. She was always full of piss and vinegar, snapping about how she hated all these bastards and wanted to hurt them. My kinda gal. We had good teamwork.

Michele, seen here doing sit-ups at a safe house. She needs to stay in shape for all the bloody-thirsty ranting she does.

Then she dies at the end of the first act. All your buddies do, apparently. I couldn’t find a way to prevent it. And then, act two tried to replace Michele with some piece of shit scumbag, Xianyong. When I do a quest, Xianyong would call me up and whine. He was very annoying, and most of his side missions involved covering up for him. I had no motive to do so. I started ignoring him after a while. He’s no Michele, that’s for sure.

I replaced Xianyong with Marty Alencar, mostly because I like to pretend his namesake is Marty McFly. But Marty isn’t very interesting. His personality is flat as a board. What’s worse, he is involved in the malaria cure mission. He wants your help to steal the cure. I agreed, figuring that he would then, I don’t know, give me some? But no, you just get the cure for him and then nothing else happens. Total waste of time, absolutely stupid.

There’s a bus system, to get around the game world. It isn’t effective, and you always have to drive somewhere. Driving is boring, and every road has a little camp on it that is just jam-packed with enemies, so you have to keep getting out of the car and fighting them. Huge pain, and it isn’t fun.

Thank god, another brown dirt road. I never got tired of that, no sir. Best part of the game was the tedious driving times. You can put the gun down now.

Enemies always seem to drive just fast enough to catch up, and they have other people with them who can shoot at you while in the car. You can’t shoot back while you drive, so there are these laborious stops to kill four or five people every time you pass enemies who have a vehicle.

Oh, there are stealth weapons too – silenced pistols, a dart gun that works like a sniper rifle, and so on. They are useless. The enemies are instantly alerted to your presence if you dart one of them who is standing by himself and out of sight of the other enemies. Not only are they alerted to your presence, but they know exactly where you are. It doesn’t matter that it’s night, and you’re hiding in bushes a hundred yards away, and maybe it’s even raining. They just know.

It’s a shame, because I really love playing the sneaky-sniper guy. Emptying a place of enemies without being detected – sometimes before even entering the place, if I have a steady sniper rifle – is one of my favorite things to do. But not in Far Cry 2. I eventually just took all the weapons that used explosive rounds and used them almost exclusively.

Here I am, setting the world aflame out of frustrated anger. Just like my dreams!

Finally, we are at the end. We come face to face with the man we’ve spent so long waiting for (I’d say “spent so long hunting,” but you don’t do that. You don’t hunt him, you show up and faff about until you stumble across him).

There he is. You re-enter the prison that you were, uh, imprisoned in, and the Jackal is waiting for you.

He’s right there in the open.

So naturally this is a section of the game where you aren’t allowed to attack anything. In fact, instead of carrying out your original mission and killing the Jackal, you immediately start doing his bidding. The game gives you no other choice. You just work for the Jackal now. Basically, he tells you this: “Go kill the leaders of the new UFLL-APR alliance, then pick up some diamonds for the Jackal, honey. Then we’ll have a night out on the town.”

Well not that exactly but yeah, you just kill more people at the behest of the man you were sent here to kill. Then you get him diamonds, and he gives you a choice. The choice is shitty.

At the end, you kill yourself. You can either go to blow up some dynamite, killing yourself in the process, or use diamonds to bribe some guards to let a bunch of refugees flee, after which you apparently shoot yourself in the head, because the Jackal tells you that’s what you should do. Hooray!

The Jackal, just returning from a Grateful Dead concert.

Overall, the game feels like it wants to be a message about the psychological damage that killing takes on a person. This is difficult to do in a game that specifically rewards you for killing people. It’s a murder simulator. The game makes you kill all these people, and then goes “Killing is bad! Your character hates all the killing he did (which you made him do)! Now he kills himself!” Everything about it falls flat.

Oh, and to come full circle to your useless beginnings at the start of the game, you actually solve nothing by the end of the game. The Jackal may or may not be dead (“His body was never found”), the unnamed nation you’ve been working in remains in a state of anarchy for decades after you kill yourself, and the reporter you’ve been helping is ignored by the big news organizations. Nothing is fixed and no one is helped and now you’re dead, you stupid idiot.

This game was poorly thought out, badly written, had atrocious voice acting, and all around felt like a waste of my time. Your time would be better spent playing with cat shit as if it were play-doh. Just mash it up in your hands. Go ahead. You’re having more fun than you would if you were playing Far Cry 2.

Bonus! After finishing the game, you are treated to the credits, which last for about seven to ten minutes and cannot be skipped. It was the parting shot of “fuck you” that this game was designed around. It’s like the developers knew I would want to get out of the game as fast as possible and write about how awful it is.