Far Cry 2

Battle through 50 square kilometres of African war



Brand power is the only reason Far Cry 2 is called what it is, since it has a different development team, a different environment, a completely different set of characters and a different storyline to the original game.

Far Cry 2 does, however, build on the original Far Cry's lush graphics and large free-roam environment, for which the original game received high praise. Graphics aren't as crisp or detailed as those found in Crysis, but the sheer size of the open world makes this the biggest first-person shooter environment we've ever encountered.

You play a mercenary who is sent into an unnamed war-torn African country, tasked with killing an arms dealer known as The Jackal But things quickly go pear-shaped when you get malaria and your target disappears. With the mission on hold, your focus is to get anti-malarial pills and collect diamonds - the currency in African wars – to buy new weapons.

After a brief introduction, you can roam free and complete any mission you please. Soldiers on both sides of the conflict take shots at you wherever you go. so building relationships with other mercenaries is very important. Encounters with the mercenaries, enemy soldiers and a journalist arc all sprinkled in with some excellent voice acting.

The biggest innovation in Far Cry 2, however, is the long flammable grass present across the entire environment. Throwing Molotov cocktails near enemy bases means you can fry adversaries without even pulling a trigger.

Realism is one of Far Cry 2's main goals and the sheer size of the open world certainly cements it, since
going from one point to the next regularly takes 20 minutes by car (with a few gun battles along the way, of course). Guns jam as they age, so you need to buy new ones, and cars regularly need fixing.

Instead of health packs that magically make you better, you have to perform gruesome battlefield surgery on yourself. Alternatively, you can inject yourself with some mystery healing fluid, although that barely seems more realistic than the old system.

There are serious flaws in Far Cry 2's realism in other areas too. Although the world is massive, the scenery is simply repeated all over. This includes the same shop owner copied and pasted into every gun shop across the country. It's also not clear how you've managed to come by a useful map showing where every enemy outpost is. Combative outposts are packed too closely together and there's an eerie lack of civilians – apparently they've all fled, but you'd expect a handful of poor sods to be left behind.

If you manage to complete the single-player mode (there's over 50 hours game play). then there's also a
relatively poor multiplayer option. Our biggest complaint with Far Cry 2, however, is that it crashed to desktop every 30 minutes to an hour on one test system, but not on anothcr. A 64-bit copy of Vista appeared to be one potential problem, but the internet is rife with users experiencing similar problems in other versions of Windows.


Far Cry 2 is an ambitious game where the developers have overstretched themselves. With a bigger budget and an emphasis on quality rather than quantity, Far Cry 2 would have been an excellent game, instead of an average one. Emil Larsen.

Contact Ubisoft Far Cry 2
System requirements Pentium 4 3.2GHz or Pentium D 2.66GHz or AMD Athlon 64 3500+ or better • 1GB Ram • Nvidia Geforce 6800 or ATI Radeon 1650 with 256MB Ram • 12GB hard drive space

Personal Computer World February 2009

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