Fuck me? Where am I, well we start the adventure in a jeep driven by a guy who can talk for england, yet not give any plot line away & and I mean any, I’m left feeling by this first few minutes, bewildered as to his whole point. Anyway, I start to feel ill, a bit woosey, and my vision is some what distorted and green for some reason – sod it, I’ve got malaria some how – but hey, its africa, who cares. So I come too, and there some guy talking to me, he tells me I’m dying and how I’d come to kill him, but no one can kill him, yay, well lets take his word for it, we cant kill him… & for some reason which keeps coming up when you load your game – why didn’t he kill you? Seems a whole lot easier, though it would be a short game. So I decided, like all my new games, to pick the hardest difficulty. ‘Infamous’, so I leave off, got a pistol, and the first thing I do is die. YAY… Luckily those bullet wounds aren’t too bad, I come too with a lovely man who gives me guns and sends me on a few errands – but first, lets fix this car, its got a loose bolt, damn them loose bolts, infact every vehicle in the game has a loose bolt when its broken…

So I break away, and head down to the Mikes Bar, and by the way, pretty much everyone is trying to kill me, correction – EVERYONE is trying to kill me, but luckily, when I reach Mikes Bar, I’ve got a couple of friends. Lets talk about them.

The Gun Dealer

This guy is pretty boring, he just sends me on the same mission every single time “stop the convoy bringing in arms to undercut me, if you do it i’ll unlock you some stuff & by the way, you can do this for free” I then shout at him, but seeing as I never actually EVER say any dialogue in the game, its wasted, but I said something along the lines of “how can I buy these weapons if you don’t pay me???”

The Guys in the Bar

These are my friends, I don’t know why they are my friends, I don’t even think they know why they are, they just have to be, because everyone else hates me. They also send me on missions to kill people, always to kill them, never just to threaten them or give them a stern telling off. OH they also don’t pay me either.

How to Get Paid

Oh thats simple, getting paid, so I can buy the weapons that I need, so I don’t keep getting killed. You have to fight your way to an antenna on the map, then you get a call. Which is always to kill someone, its always the same type of mission, and guess what, its miles in the other direction. Now if you go by car, you’ll rarely get through a checkpoint, you’ll also meet other patrols on the roads who have machine guns attached to them, and will damage your car (lucky you can tighen that loose bolt, that also removes bullet damage). So maybe, go by boat. Ok great, but not everywhere can be got to by boat, and there are also patrol boats provding the same function as the patrol cars. So what other ways can we get around? Well although they show a glider in there promotion videos, I’m yet to find it – also on my difficulty, the safest, and funny enough, the fastest, is to walk or swim everywhere – at least that way you can choose your firefights.

Stealth

So I sneak up on this guy right, but whats that, I make a move in the bushes, they hear me (you also cant walk really slow as not to make any noise). I sprint at him and use my machete, YEAH! He’s dead before he can get a shot off. Unfortunatley, he screams somewhat, and the other guards come over anyway. So later on, I actually get myself a silenced pistol, fancy i know… Its quite good, I can get guys if they are close and haven’t spotted me, but for the love of god, don’t miss the head shot, if thats it, game over, they’ll come and find ya – hiding in bushes is quite useless really, they still find you, and hey, you can’t go prone…yay…

Weather & Time of Day

Time to plan my assasination mission, lets do it at night, yes, lets get em when they don’t know where I am… Awesome. So lets set my stop watch, sleep at my liberated safe house, ok its night time, its dark, I run all the way to my target. But whats that? The guys looking after my target don’t seem to have any visual impairment from the dark at all. Fuck me they must eat a lot of carrots, cause they still spot me. I do admit, this is on the hardest difficulty, but steal, leave me something, anything…

So I’m lined up on the first guy to snipe (trust me, get a sniper rifle first), the wind and rain are lashing down, visibility is poor, does it make any difference to gameplay? Well no quite frankly. After I finished admiring the lovely sunsets, and above average graphics, I started to cry a little…

GTA Meets Africa

I’m sure other people will meet this link too, but it seriously is like GTA, except there is no city & no NPC’s and you don’t have to go bowling to keep your girlfriend happy. The biggest difference is GTA is more fun… Far Cry 2 has less variety of missions, less NPC’s, and far more repetitiveness & the story is hardly gripping, because its broken up with mindless quests to destroy a convoy (which is constantly driving in circles why? Don’t they have a location to get to? Couldn’ they introduce at time limit – perhaps drive to a munnitions depot?).

Good Times

This game definatley has a few good points, one of which is when a guy was looking for me, and I was on the roof of a building – I jumped down and cut him up, was a laugh. You’ll have moments like this too. Oh and the fire is lovely too.

Bad Times

This game is so awfully repetitive, so much so, you forget about thes story, where you are up to, because of all the mindless quests. There are so many mindless quests, I seriously want to level up… give me strength points or something god damnit. I’ve seen a few physics glitches, like a zebra in a tree, it was stuck, then it dropped down when I iniated its ’scared animation’.

One really annoying thing is, bare in mind it takes ages to get anywhere, there is no auto save, so unlesss you remember to save it with quick save, if you die, you have to go back, if you haven’t quick saved in a while (I always forget), then you might just have to do that annoying mission again…and again, and again!

This is AFRICA!

I’ve watched the research videos of ubisoft visiting africa… did they go to the most baron part of africa or something? Because in their game, although you dont really want more things killing you, there are no lions, snakes, hippos, infact nothing in the wild can harm you or even hurt you a little. You can kill all the animals, they all die in one hit, and you get nothing from it, so after doing it twice to check, it seems pointless…

Health & Malaria

So I got my medication, which hasn’t run out yet, they better not, cause after hours & hours of play, I’ve only completed the game 4%, and starting to loose the will to live. So you inject yourself every time you’re hurt, its kinda cool, you can do it at any time, but it leaves a needle mark in your arm, and because you’ll die alot, this is going to look kinda silly later, I literally have a hundred wholes in my arms… It looks like I have some sort of rash… I’m not even sure what that bar represents… It seems to go up for no reason sometimes. God only knows. A percentage health bar please! Although I need to do these things, I never neet to eat, now if you’re going to introduce a level of realism, at least make him have to eat occasionally, or sleep. You can go days & days without sleep, i tend to just go right through, using the quick save.

Overview

This game had some pukka previews, and even some pukka reviews when it came out, why? It’s few nice elements have saved it from being a god awful game, I’d rate it as an average game single player wise, I’m yet to test the multiplayer, I hope this makes up for something – we’ll come with another review mopping up the rest later. Ubisoft seemed to have made a crap game, but have marketed their crap game well. They also seem to have stolen the crouch slide striaght out of ghost recon. I do say you should get this game, it’ll give you many many weeks of game play… god bless anyone who actually reaches the end of the game, and works out what the story is about exactly…

Cheers

Wuup Team