Tech Paladin

I wanted to love Far cry 2. On paper, it had all the trappings of greatness for a shooter: an immersive world, realistic physics and fire, a compelling plot, challenging and realistic combat, and a breathtaking rendering of Africa — a place where I’ve lived several months of my life.

The opening sequence filled me with absolute glee. Your character begins in a cab, being driven to a hotel by an exceedingly chatty driver — the spitting image of so many exuberant African cab drivers I’ve encountered, their ebullience perhaps an elaborate (and usually successful) ploy to get a big tip. The car putters down rough dirt roads, bouncing and jostling everything in side it, including the two of you, when another car abruptly cuts you off — and the driver laments the decline in politeness since the civil war started. That drive is the Africa I remember — full of bumpy roads, gangs of roving children, relentlessly curious young men, women selling homemade fried foods, and the occasional bribe to pass by a blockade of armed men.

Sadly, once you’re out of the car, everything goes downhill. You awake to find yourself staring at the Jackal — the bastard who armed both sides of the bloody civil war and who it’s your primary mission to kill. Right off the bat, there he is in front of you, ruining any surprise or the possibility of the Jackal turning out to be one of your friends you’ll make along the way or even — gasp! — being female.

No, instead you find him leering over you like so many snidely whiplash villans before you even have a chance to do anything, musing out loud how he’s not going to kill you now, he’s going to let you live, so you can presumably be killed in some worse way by someone else! Sadly, we all know from years of movie clichés how well this turns out for the bad guy, again ruining any dramatic suspense. He’s supposed to be an arms dealer and he doesn’t have the guts to put a bullet in my head right now? Puh-leeze.

Sadly, the Jackal isn’t the only flat, boring character in the game. In Far Cry 2, everyone else you meet who doesn’t want to kill you somehow automatically loves you. Five minutes later I find myself talking to some dude who’s chastising me for killing some of his men… and then telling me to do some errand-boy task for him and giving me an assault rifle, a rocket launcher, and his own personal car. Do I ever see him again? Nope. Do I remember his name? I don’t even think he told it to me. Why am I working for him, considering that he gave me the firepower to level his compound if I so desired? Unclear. Why did he hire me if I just killed some of his troops? Unexplained. And I could go on.

So I go out and conduct the hit like my mysterious benefactor has ordered. And this leads me to my next complaint: for a shooter, killing is no fun in Far Cry 2. Oh, it’s satisfying, of course — your guns feel solid and real, enemies fall down clutching their wounds after what almost always feels like enough gunfire, and your own character seems just durable enough to sustain going Rambo — but not too often. No, the mechanics of fighting are really very good. And that’s the problem.

You see, each bullet you fire into one of those faceless, nameless mercenaries who are tearing the country apart actually has some real effect. The mercs claw at their injuries, they’ll drop their weapons, fall to one knee, cry out in pain, scream blood-choked obscenities, convulse on the ground, and emit the most spine-chilling death rattles I’ve ever heard from a game. While in a game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky your enemies grunt like kung-fu fighters punched in the gut and yell, “Your mom!” in Russian when you shoot them, Far Cry 2’s baddies are much more human in their reactions to injury. This game reminds you at every turn that bullets do bad things to men, and the gory reminders aren’t confined to your enemies, either. When you become sufficiently injured yourself, “healing” consists of watching an animation of your character pulling bullets out of his leg with pliers, or bending back broken limbs, or re-setting dislocated fingers. It’s sometimes difficult to watch, always reminding you of the fragility of the human body when faced with the business end of a lethal weapon.

If there’s one lesson this game has taught me, it’s that fighting sucks. Where in many other shooters I find myself becoming almost bored of violence after hours of killing, Far Cry 2 makes me feel sickened. I avoid the endless guard posts not because I tire of slaying legions of grunts (like I would in another game), but because I feel like a bad person when I send bullets their way. Every time I run out of ammunition for my assault rifle and have to get up close and personal with a pistol, I can feel a knot form in my stomach as I coldly murder the frightened men whose faces I can see fill with fear. It gets even worse if things get so desperate that you have to use your machete. You’re treated to an animation of your character swiftly slicing a throat, with the accompanying cries of pain and desperation from your victim as he collapses to the ground clutching at his ruined neck. Sometimes it’s not quite enough, and he reaches for his pistol to take you with him. There really is no other option than to finish him off, which you do by delivering a coup-de-grace of machete-to-stomach, ending the man’s life with a sickening howl that is almost nausea-inducing.

The first time I did it, I found myself yelling out loud, “Oh my God, I’m a terrible person!” I glanced around, embarrassed, then realized that, no, it was true — my character really is a a terrible person. Later on, after a particularly grueling battle that came down to molotov-tossing and throat-slitting, I found myself wondering, isn’t there another way? Surely we can end this without bloodshed.

Alas, we cannot. Maybe that’s one of the lessons the game is trying to teach me: that sometimes bad men get guns and need to be killed before they kill you, and that diplomacy or stealth or sleight-of-hand won’t always be options in the face of something as monstrous as a civil war. Maybe. Meanwhile, the world of Far Cry 2 is populated by bad men with guns who very much want nothing more to kill each other and you. And that’s all — this isn’t the agency-filled world of an RPG where you can make, you know, choices, and have, you know, conversations.

Which is a real shame. The world seems less like a small African country invaded by mercenaries than it does an anarchic training ground with some buddies of yours hanging out. Having myself lived in an African village, I expected far more, well, Africans! I was expecting burned-out villages, communities huddled together trying to survive, looters, robbers, thieves, old men with world War I rifles, teenagers hawking boflotos and maybe ammunition, and more of the like. Instead, the population seems to consist almost entirely of the mercenaries who are fighting the war. It was actually pretty disheartening when I realized that I could count on every human being I met outside of a cease-fire zone to run at me guns blazing. I’d just be driving along when another jeep would pull up alongside and start shooting! Who are they? Who cares! They want to kill me, better kill them first!

Even the so-called unique locations on the map are no better. The airstrip? Sounds interesting, but it’s just a long tarmac with some rusted hangars inhabited by hostile mercenaries. There’s nothing there you can interact with; the different locale just offers some character and pizzazz to the inevitable gunfight you’ll get into once you arrive there. The chemical company? A couple train cars and a little station populated by thugs with guns. The cockfighting ring? Though the ramshackle sheet-metal compound was brilliantly faithful to real African shanties, I saw a lot less cockfighting than I did armed men shooting at me. Once the smoke cleared and I kicked my way out of the pile of mangled bodies I had managed to surround myself with, I found the actual cocks — all sitting placidly in the same pen, doing anything but fighting. Figures.

I could go on and on; sure, the locations themselves are extremely well-rendered and very unique, but their potential is mostly squandered since the only thing you actually do once you reach them is shoot at men. Again. And again. And again.

Basically, this game is such an exemplary shooter, it makes me wish it did everything else as well as it depicts fighting. I want to be able to upgrade my vehicle at the junkyard, bargain for information at the bars and chat with my buddies about their personal lives as a way of cooling down after a grueling battle. Speaking of my buddies, I want actual relationships with them. I want them to have compelling reasons to be my friends other than “oh, I’ve heard you’re a badass. Let me help you out!” or, “Thanks for rescuing me. You’re now my own personal Jesus!” I want to walk through villages of terrified, starving villagers trying to survive, cringing at my weapons but thankful that I’m not the type who comes in shooting instead. I want my cars to require more to repair them than tightening the magical repair bolt for a few seconds.

Far Cry 2 is such a rich world, full of wondrous peaks, haunting deserts, eerie towns, crumbling infrastructure, and improvised dwellings — but populated entirely by a bunch of trigger-happy goons. A world this compelling practically begs for something other than yet more gunplay.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Games, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.