Farcry 2

Farcry 2. A shooter game. Yup that's mostly it. Farcry 2 is a shooter game with malaria and some treasure hunting thrown in and a storyline of some sort that is what I'd call shooter porn. Dangerous fella ships weapons around (threat to the World Order), so obviously our brave hero has to get in there and stop the horror. Typical.

Ok what's good. I like the visuals, the feel of driving vehicles, the standard weaponry. I especially like the way explosions finally wipe people out in a respectable radius and are quite proficient at starting fires...which in turn spread all over the place according to the wind. Nifty. Weapons jam and blow up when worn out...not so nifty, but ok it's semi-realistic. I really would have preferred it if the sniper rifles had either variable scopes and/or longer ranges, tho.

Now for the bad. Besides the story, which is as good as nonexistent. We don't care about stories in shooters, silly! Anyway, I am quite annoyed by the whole malaria and enemy spotting spiel. Right so we have the hero down with malaria, which gives periodic debilitating attacks...sometimes in the middle of battle. Fair enough...so we have malaria medicine to deal with the attacks. That's really great, except the meds don't cure the malaria. They treat the symptoms or something, because the malaria intensity level actually varies as the story progresses! Not to mention it's actually possible to run out of malaria meds so you wind up crippled in the middle of nowhere...without even an enemy to take you out.

Now about enemies spotting...you. Enemies have an uncanny ability to spot the hero through foliage. In fact, it is entirely possible for an enemy sniper to peg you right through a tree's foliage when you can't see the enemy if you're looking right back at the time. Come on guys! Dammit, man. I hate getting shot at by an enemy that should not be able to see me!

It may be nice that the world map is reasonably large and has bus interchanges whereby it becomes possible to cross the map without having to drive through the darned thing. Problem being, of course, that since the maps are quite big, there's a goodly bit of driving around to be done anyway. And of course the mission area will be somewhere far from where you are, so...drive away. That would be no problem, except there will be populated guard posts along the way...with a bunch of enemies shooting at you. No...if you depopulate them with a hail of lead, they'll be repopulated eventually. Nasty.

I like shooting enemies. It is fun. Especially with my sniper rifle. But even for me, it gets pretty old after awhile, primarily because I get virtually no kickback for doing it. No special weapons upgrades or items to pick off them or leveling up my hero. Well...I suppose I could just get in a vehicle and zip past so I can get away. Right? Wrong. They'll pop into the tacticals parked in the area...and use the mounted machineguns to shoot, so they'll have to die anyway.

Yes. The answer was staring me in the face. I shall use explosives to take out their vehicle. Well...not exactly. Since they regard their vehicle's machinegun as a sort of melee weapon, they're busy trying to kiss my vehicle's butt even after I get out of mine. Say hello to my grenade launcher! *BOOM* Dammit...now I just blew up my own ride along with theirs. Well I hope you're happy, because now I'm going to have to walk to my mission...or pick up a ride along the way -_-

Indeed, it is entirely possible to have a game with such great physics, gorgeous graphics, large maps, spreadable bushfires and nice numbers of enemies...yet still make it less than fun.