Far Cry® 2 Reviews

This game isn't great, IMO. It's repetitive, the driving's boring (no fast travel), the plot didn't engage me, and the game's full of bugs. Plus, the graphics are hard to look at (it's incredibly hard to discern enemies from the environment), and it's making my PC run super hot. It's incredibly frustrating to clear outposts when enemies just pop back up on top of you the moment you move away and return a bit later. The fire thing and the way you heal yourself are cool.

On the hunt for the mysterious arms trafficker known only as "The Jackal" a mercenary travels to an un-named section of Africa that runs deep with factional conflict. To further complicate matters, the mercenary is afflicted with malaria and the debilitating side effects of it that requires constant medication to offset. Between the war that rages on, the disease and all the other hostile mercs that call this section of Africa home, the hunt for The Jackal gets complicated by the day... Far Cry 2 is a game that i wish i could look at with praise. Unfortunately, that isn't to be the case. I'd rather catch malaria than play this game again. Between a WIDE range of technical and some gameplay issues though, there are still some qualities to the game that i enjoy. In terms of story, FC2 doesn't really have much to go on. Both factions will task you with performing some form of strike against the other or a mission that will benefit themselves in exchange for diamonds, the only currency of value in the nation the game takes place in. But as you get to the ends of both acts of the game, it does start to pick up more and more, especially in your "meetings" with The Jackal. The Jackal himself is an interestingly philosophical character, that is if you're able to understand roughly anything he says without the need for subtitles because of his fast talking nature. A character you're introduced to in the tutorial, Reuben, is a journalist who managed to have a sit down conversation with The Jackal, interview tapes littered across both major sections of the game that sheds more insight into The Jackal's philosophy. On the topic of gameplay, FC2 has several good ideas but those ideas are just poorly executed. The Buddy system chief among them. Freeing captured foreign mercs will make them your friend and gather them at the bar of the map section you're at. However only four of them appear at a time so if you have more than five buddies, you can't exactly do all their missions requiring some tedious amounts of micro-managing for those wanting to 100% the game. You have two more "active" buddies, the one with the most relationship points is your point of contact to have alternate versions of your main missions by subverting how it's done. Going along with your best buddy's idea will upgrade the various safehouses of the game with a free car, resources such as ammo, explosives, medication and fuel for fire weapons and upgrades to the weapon mounted on top of the free car. Your second best buddy will be your "Rescue ready" buddy, able to save you from the brink of death if you lose all health and "go down" essentially. Both your best and second best buddies are also at great risk as if they get piled on by enemies, they can also be put into a downed state requiring you to quickly revive them or have them die while you try to save them... Or just abandon them or put a bullet in their skull to put them out of their misery. Another topic about FC2's gameplay is it's exploration and map. Both major sections are quite vast and fast travel is very limited to the four corners of the map section you're in and the main hub. Getting to your objectives becomes a game of finding the best bus stop to fast travel to while still undertaking a great hike in terms of driving from the bus stop to where you want to go. Even if you're having to judge where the best point is if your objective isn't in one of the corners of the map or close to the central hub. But the roads are often plagued by other hostile mercs that will chase you or try to shoot you if they're in a truck with a gun on it. Not only that, but they're also littered with guard posts that respawn with enemies essentially after a ten second drive away from the area. These mercs will often get into the cars dotted around these guard posts to chase you down if you just try to barrel through them and ignore the enemies present. I wish these guard posts had a longer respawn timer for enemies or were just CLEARED entirely so nothing spawned there as these posts contain a stockpile of one of the four resources that i listed earlier with safehouses. On the topic of which, there's a mix of auto unlocked and locked safehouses in the game. Clearing out all the locked ones of enemies just gives you that safehouse for free and another point to stock up if you're out in the wild. Both major map sections also have several hidden diamond stashes to track down and crack open if you want to maximise what you're able to buy from the gun stores dotted about the game to get your hands on new gear, upgrades for that gear, car repair upgrades as well as personal upgrades to carry more ammo, health restoring syringes and a few other upgrades. You're also rewarded diamonds for completing the radio tower assassination side missions and can get access to more weapons sold by the weapon traders by blowing up a convoy they specify. Weapons in FC2 degrade over use, even with the upgrades to extend how long guns can be used for until they start breaking down it still didn't feel like it helped. But as your trusted loadout starts getting visibly covered in dirt, they'll start to jam more and more before eventually exploding in your hands. This then becomes a game of scavenging OTHER near broken guns from your enemies before you can run back to a weapon vendor and the adjacent weapon stash to grab infinitely respawning, cleaner versions of your guns. The jamming, while a mild annoyance when you're in the middle of an intense firefight, has some cool animations as you try to fix them before making a trip to swap them out. It's likely the only "inconvenience" I liked of the game. Enemies across FC2 are also interesting as they try to co-ordinate with each other when under attack, calling out for grenades to flush you out or trying to use flare guns to call for backup. As you gain reputation through completing main missions and buddy missions, the enemies will also start to fear you more and more to the point that they all start to upgrade to higher damaging weapons. But that ultimately breaks down because even stealth in FC2 is useless and under-developed. No matter if you use any of the four suppressed weapons or your machete, enemies will become alert and close in on you quickly before engaging in a firefight. Another inconvenience with the game is your malaria flare ups, only solved by using your heal key when you're at full health otherwise you'll have to inject yourself to max your health before "healing" again to take the pills to stave off your condition. These were more annoying as you can't just take the pills when you're alerted to if you're under full health so you have to sit through two animations just to take the pills. Gameplay issues aside, the real problem with FC2 is the technical side of the game. There are SEVERAL games on Steam older than FC2 by ten or twenty years that can run just fine out of the box on modern hardware. FC2 on the other hand is by far the worst game i've ever played in terms of back-end issues. From bouncing NPCs at frame rates higher than 60 to the SHEER AMOUNT OF GAME CRASHES I'VE ENDURED. The near ninety hours of my playtime you see have been dedicated to having to replay my one save from the start and go through all the collectables and buddy mission micro-managing as the game CORRUPTED my save because it crashed MID-SAVE. FC2 is the game that's finally taught me to have two or three backup saves. And with NO form of auto-save, your best best is to save before/after accepting missions, fast travelling, finding collectables, buying new gear or upgrades, scouting guard posts and opening safehouses. My game time has also been drastically inflated by trying to mod the game with unofficial fan patches that STILL didn't help my issues. Is this game worth your time? Fuck no. I wouldn't recommend playing Far Cry 2 at all with how fundamentally broken this game is in both gameplay and technical aspects.

Community fixes will only get you so far, this game remains a broken buggy mess. Even when it works it's a pretty boring game, the story could be interesting but the voice acting is utter trash with every line delivered in a soulless way and sped up 1.5x for some reason.

This is a game that doesn't care about your feelings and it's set on making the player suffer, they constantly shove the players with obstacles without any hand-holding. it's one of the most immersive games ever made with the best details, physics and animations of its genre. The devs deliberately made Far cry 2 a challenge and a pain in the ass (you have to search for resources, medication and plan your actions carefully). Its setting, narrative and characters are merely a premise. In the story our motives are clouded, perhaps almost aimless as you are there to make money as a mercenary without caring for either faction. Then the game shifting morality and perspective perfectly illustrates the duality of man, the grey area and how ambiguous the nature of people is when fighting for survival. The game is not without it's flaws (I don't consider the outpost enemies respawning a flaw), this is not a perfect game by any means, released in 2008, Far cry 2 is a game that set the standard for what a game could offer and even now there aren't many games with such an aura. Now, the game doesn't work in the newer systems like it should, so modding the game it's almost mandatory like in Fallout 3 and such. If you aren't used to playing old games, modding and all the bullshit that follows I recommend you don't even touch this game.

My favorite Far Cry game, AI isn’t the best, malaria is annoying, some guns are just broken and the story is basic and short. But the sound design, gunplay and atmosphere are amazing. There’s something here that’s missing from all the other Far Cry games. All in all, it’s an amazing game.

Far cry 2 is dated but worth your time. I absolutely loved the games presentation, the gritty aesthetic definitely made it a memorable experience and I haven't seen any game replicate its war-torn Africa setting since. The gameplay is another thing I loved about it, especially with how your weapons can deteriorate in condition, making it jam or even explode in your hands if its been well-used. It makes the combat more exciting with its unpredictability, though its kinda bullshit how it never seems to affect your enemies. Some people may hate these mechanics, but I personally think Ubisoft seriously blundered by not having the whole 'weapon condition' mechanic in the other far cry games. I also really like how you have to pull up a physical folder of papers for your map instead of just having a mini-map at a corner of the screen. Honestly, I didn't really feel like the limited fast travels options were too much of a problem, at most it was a minor annoyance since I liked driving around the map (which looks beautiful btw). Though those outposts are a pain in the ass sometimes when you cant drive around them. The story is definitely not the games strong suit, I didn't really care much for it. Your whole point being in Africa is to "Kill the Jackal" yet you do literally nothing to find him. Also the journal literally lies to you by implying the reason your doing the missions for the factions is that they give you information on the Jackal, which is just false. I think the Jackal is a pretty good character, even better than Vaas in my opinion. But you barely see him and the ending feels so rushed. Overall, I think Far Cry 2 is a really fun and unique game. It's one of the best in the series (gameplay-wise at least). And I would recommend this game to anyone who is a fan of open world games with realistic gameplay. (Also one important thing to note is that I played this game with a [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/farcry2/mods/317] mod[/url] because the enemies are really bullet-spongy on infamous (which is the games hardest difficulty), and also I just recommend installing a mod-patch for this game as it can be bugged at times.)

I will first off say that Far Cry 2 is an amazing game and I enjoyed my time playing it since it's such an unique entry in the franchise and is loved by most of the community. So many great game play mechanics that really do make you feel like you are just another merc and not an overpowered protagonist like the later entries do. You're just there to find and kill one man that is supplying both sides of an endless bloody conflict in a war torn undisclosed state in Africa. Also this isn't my first time playing since I have beaten this game years ago on my PS3. But anyway the reason why I can't really recommend this game is because of all the major technical issues that persist and had to spend a great deal of trial and error getting this game to run before playing, installing mods to make the quality of life in game a little better but even then there are things that mods just can't fix (or at least I don't know about at the time of writing this review) like the xx% glitch which involves getting stuck with one of factions HQ doors not opening and not being able to start a main faction mission. And yes I've tried all the ways to fix it and couldn't get any to work for me so I am just stuck without a way to continue really, and I don't want to start the game all over to try that fix for the issue since I'm really just demoralised at this point. So at the end of the day yes I enjoyed playing Far Cry 2 again and it's really been fun for the most part, but in it's current state I won't be coming back to it anytime in the future on PC, and as for any other ways to play. I would just emulate it in all honesty. As the PS3 version I don't think has that door bug but the last time I played like I said was years ago so don't quote me on that.

I like it but you need to go to nexusmods and download the unofficial patch. Without it the game is dogshit, with it it's pretty good

While this game is better than Far Cry 1, it still suffers from lots of bugs and glitches, even more so than Far Cry 1. I have tried fixing it, but nothing has worked. Then I realized something, I shouldn't be be forced to download "unofficial" patches and go through game files and tweaking them to fix their game. It'd be one thing if it was a quick fix, but I've spent almost an hour trying to fix this to no avail. I know this is arguably the best or 2nd best game in the series, but I simply can't recommend it due to Ubisoft being too lazy to fix the technical issues this game has.

Although it's age is glaring at times, it is easily the best Far Cry game in terms of its direction & presentation. The game takes its war-torn Africa setting seriously(unlike the newer games). It provides a very gritty and consistent aesthetic that many games failed to imitate since. A common criticism is that the game might feel restrictive or even an annoyance to play with its mechanics such as unavoidable malaria attacks and weapon condition deterioration with RNG jamming, but these mechanics add to the overall aesthetic, theme, and game-play loop that the game was trying to create. It is nearly unplayable on modern hardware without patches, but a lot of games of this age are, just typical Ubisoft abandonware. It is as easy as installing a tool to patch it for modern hardware. It also has the traditional Far Cry blunder of having bullet spongy enemies, but that is also remedied with a few easy to install mods, which I highly recommend as it makes combat far more immersive. An often overlooked gem that can be appreciated with a little patience and appreciation for what the developers were trying to create, it is a work of art and a shining example of what direction open-world shooter games should have kept going in. I definitely recommend this game as long as you are fine with patching it, and can tolerate older 3D videogame jank.