Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Minimum requirements: Windows XP / Windows Vista; 3.2 GHz Pentium 4, 2.66 GHz Pentium D, AMD Athlon 64 3500+ or better; 1 GB RAM; 256 MB DirectX 10.0 / 9.0c-compliant video card with Shader Model 3.0 or higher; DirectX 9.0c-compliant sound card; 12x DVD-ROM; 12 GB hard drive space
Genre: FPS
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

The battle between style and substance has been going on for years in PC gaming; we’ve all played games that look much better than they play. Such is the problem that plagues Ubisoft Montreal’s Far Cry 2, an epic-length shooter that features astonishingly good graphics and frustrating gameplay in equal measures.

Far Cry 2 is really a sequel in name only, as it has no connection to Crytek’s 2004 original. The action shifts from Far Cry’s tropical island to the African continent. You play a mercenary who has been hired to find and eliminate The Jackal, an arms dealer who has sold weapons to both sides of an ongoing civil war. After a Half Life-style introduction in which you are driven to your first location, you are captured by The Jackal, making your first mission one of escape. Eventually you meet the leader of one of the two warring factions, who sends you out on a mission. As the game progresses, you use a handy GPS unit to navigate from place to place in the massive game world, acquiring tasks from revolutionaries, gun merchants and the leader of an underground faction that is trying to help the innocent victims of the war.

There’s more to Far Cry 2 than just bloodthirsty mayhem. Your GPS unit, aside from helping you get from Point A to Point B, also doubles as a treasure finder. Scattered throughout the game world are 221 suitcases containing rough diamonds, the preferred coin of the realm. As you come close to one of these cases, a green light starts to blink on the GPS. Finding and opening them deposits the diamonds into your inventory. These are used to purchase guns and supplies from the arms merchants, who will unlock new types of weapons for you if you complete tasks that they set for you. Also, as you find and unlock the many safe houses on the map, you meet fellow mercs who volunteer to help you out if you get into trouble. They can come in handy if you get caught in a firefight; they will help you to safety and watch your back while you recover from your wounds, but if they die, they’re dead for the rest of the game, so keeping them safe is a major priority.

Far Cry 2 is the best looking and sounding game I’ve ever played. It looks great in DirectX 9, but a DX10-compatible video card turns great into amazing. Individual blades of grass can be seen blowing in the wind; tossing a Molotov cocktail into the grass causes a fire to spread with the wind, which can be useful in battle. Wildlife such as zebras and wildebeest can be seen wandering the savannas. A day/night cycle is included; as the day progresses, twilight gives way to dark night, lit by an enormous full moon. Owners of 5.1-channel sound systems are treated to the best use of positional audio I’ve heard in any game.

Unfortunately, for all of Far Cry 2’s technical splendor, it falls disappointingly short in gameplay. Missions are limited to three basic types: assassination, convoy interdiction and theft. Convoy missions are especially puzzling, since your target keeps looping around a preset path, waiting for you to find and destroy it. As you travel the roads on the map, you can count on every intersection to be inhabited by hostiles who respawn shortly after you defeat them, meaning that you have to fight them all over again if you return. You start out with a vehicle repair skill, but you don’t really need to use it since there are cars, trucks and jeeps everywhere, and they never run out of gas. The enemy AI is a mixed bag; they try to flank you and hunt you down, but when they find you they’re just as likely to stand there and wait for you to shoot them. Online multiplayer is limited to 16 players per map, controlled by the Punkbuster anti-cheat system, which kicked me out every time I tried to play a ranked match (turns out that vital Punkbuster files were installed in the wrong directory; copying and pasting fixed the issue). But the biggest problem with Far Cry 2 is a crash-to-desktop bug that not only freezes the game, but also causes an endless loop in the audio channel that can only be stopped by rebooting the PC. And in case you’re wondering, the bug is found in both DX9 and DX10 versions, so don’t blame Vista!

The first few moments of Far Cry 2 give you a taste of what promises to be an involving, exciting, amazing-looking game, but the developer fails to deliver on that promise, offering instead repetitive, unimaginative gameplay. If the same attention to detail found in the graphics and sound had been used in the rest of the game, Far Cry 2 would definitely be a major achievement in PC gaming, but as it is, it’s merely an ordinary box wrapped in a pretty bow.

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