I also love, and people have talked about this for days, the way they use your hands/arms in the game, it adds a hell of a lot of immersion to the game in an elegant and sometimes disturbing way (see: pulling rebar out of your leg)

Unfortunately I have to run the game on low graphics settings, so I’m missing out on the environmental atmosphere that also seems to be one of the game’s strong points. I played about 10 hours like this and then set it aside, waiting for a new graphics card.

“This is video game Africa to be sure, but closer to real Africa than most video games would bother to go.”

I’ve really been wondering about this; apart from visual fidelity and the wildlife, I’m not sure what people mean. It hardly makes sense to run around asking people where they’ve been in Africa and what about it was correctly reproduced by Far Cry 2, but I do really feel a kind of fatigue and horror that Africa is treated so credulously as every Amercian’s on-demand, playground for plausible violence and for exploring philosophies on violence, as though there were nothing else in an entire continent, no everyday life, just potential victims waiting for their genocide to arrive, one nation or town as good as any other.

(tangent)FC2 sort of ruined the single player side of Call of Duty: World at War for me. After having so much freedom, one heavily scripted sequence after another was just stifling. WaW isn’t a great game on its own merits in the first place, but the strengths of FC2 made me less inclined to forgive the weaknesses of WaW.(/tangent)

FC2 could have had a more developed plot, and less of that “everyone will try to kill you once you cross this magic line” mechanic, and it would have been a better game. But there is a lot to like if you’re willing to make your own fun, instead of waiting for the game to force you to have fun.

The world isn’t ALIVE. Nothing you do really affects anything else. If I blast my way through the cease-fire area, why doesn’t anyone recognize me next time around? Why is the SAME guy guarding the APR or UFLL door? Completing missions for one faction or another doesn’t affect your environment in any way; The checkpoints still all shoot at you, and everyone on the map tries to kill you. To me, the whole “deniable asset” thing is just a way around having to code anything meaningful as a result of your actions. It’s easier to just have every NPC out for your blood than to have an organic-feeling group of people inhabiting the game.

Frankly, the game just doesn’t feel finished. There’s a whole lot of interaction that could(should!) be present, but it just isn’t. In a game like half-life 2 you don’t need to worry about having a living world because the story is the life of the game. The story of half-life(or other games) drives the player and the experience forward, introduces new elements etc. What is there to accomplish that in far-cry, exactly? Sure, I can complete missions, but to what end? The world is static, and you just can’t have a static world *and* a free-roaming nature unless you want to make a MMORPG.

What’s more, to suggest that the game isn’t incredibly repetitive is to have not played it. The first time my buddy rescued me from a firefight in which I had gone down, it was pretty neat. What about the 15th time? It’s useful, but I don’t find it particularly memorable. The missions are all identical copies of one-another, ocurring at different geographical locations on the maps. Heck, the missions for the weapons dealers don’t even require you to complete them in a certain amount of time. Seems odd that the truck-driver gets lost and drives in circles forever and ever, no?

There’s two approaches to a game like this; Make a story, or make a world in which a story might take place. If you opt for the latter you’d better be sure that your world *works*. It can’t just be there, it has to be functional in some way.

I like that there is respawning of the baddies, it would seem odd and boring if you cleared a camp and it stayed empty. But respawning the same amount of bad guys, with the same weapons, in the same general spots just become far too tedious.

That and the odd meth-head dialog. I really don’t understand why they thought it would be okay if they cut out the spacing between sentences. It sounds weird, annoying, and breaks the immersion that the game’s wonderful environment gives you.