So I’ve been playing this game for almost a month now and I both love it and hate it. I suspect most people are going to either really like it or hate it. It shows elements of game play that would do wonderfully in a role playing game, large open environment, changing day/night cycles with realistic weather, interaction with characters, etc. But since it’s primarily a first person shooter game the people who play rpg’s probably will get frustrated with the constant fps action that you have to take part in which interrupts the ability to just wander and explore the amazingly realistic environment that they’ve created. Players of fps though will be frustrated as they have to frequently repeat the same battles over and over again as the open world design makes it necessary for guard posts etc to repopulate or else there would be no challenges when trying to complete certain missions. I understand that but having the same fight at the same guard post a half dozen times gets old.
My first impression of FarCry2though was Wow, I love the graphics, attention to details like sounds, terrain, animals etc. The open world design is really fun to explore especially when you find things like the hang glider. The physics that even shows dry grass and trees catching on fire when something explodes and the way it’ll spread in the direction the wind is blowing was very impressive. I found myself spending a great deal of time just exploring the terrain to see what other details they had Incorporated. That brought my to the parts of the game I don’t like. For starters it’s fairly buggy and they haven’t released a fix for that yet. Unlike crysis and other games I’ve played which seem completely stable on my computer, I found FarCry 2crashing fairly often. I was also surprised to find out that the story mode for single player had nothing whatsoever to do with the original farcry, so why they had bothered to call it farcry2 is anybodies guess. Once the splendor wears off the actual game play is rather repetitive and because you spend so much time wandering back and forth across the map you wind up seeing the same thing over and over again.
Overall this game shows a lot of potential, the engine is wonderful, it just seems like they rushed it out without really polishing the game play. Sadly I don’t see any signs that they’re working on really improving it as I think a revamped version of this game, perhaps with a co-op mode would be a blast to play.
UPDATE 3/30/09- Last night I completed the story/single player mode of the game and I really enjoyed the ending. I thought the way they incorporated it in the final map was good as well. Now I guess I can start trying to beat mirrors edge.
Captain Nemo's Log 