If you’ve only got your gaming fix from consoles this millennia, mentioning of the Far Cry franchise may only conjure images of a number of sub-standard console ports bearing the name. The original Far Cry on PC was an open world shooter ahead of its time that tested the grunt of many a gaming rig for years after its release. Its spiritual successor Far Cry 2 is a sequel in name only; gone is the main character, the tropical island setting and mutants (sort of?). The only thing it has in common with its predecessor is jaw dropping graphics, an open world FPS perspective and a hang glider.

The setting this time around is civil-war torn Africa, you choose your character from a list of mercenaries (male & female) of various nationalities. The remaining mercs populate the game world and will help you or require your help from time to time. You have been hired to kill a notorious arms dealer known only as The Jackal, he is said to be responsible for arming the two warring factions and ultimately the conflict itself.

The mission structure is very much like the Grand Theft Auto series. Most of the time there are optional side missions such as assassinations which will net you diamonds, the currency in the game. There are various arms dealers spread across the map who request you dispose of competitors’ convoys and in return make more powerful hardware available to you, but you still have to buy them. I know, why don’t I go straight to the Jackal, buy a gun from him and shoot him in the face? Because at first you don’t where he is, so you must complete main story quest missions to slowly and I do mean slowly uncover his whereabouts.

On a technical level the game is very impressive, screenshots and videos do not do the game world justice. It is absolutely gorgeous, particularly in the lighting department where shadows and light filtering through the jungle canopy are jaw droppingly good, couple this with wind effects and tropical rainstorms and you have a very believable world you can blow back to the stone age. Equally impressive are explosions during some of the game’s plethora of random firefights. Nailing a rebel technical(improvised 4X4 with rear mounted weapon) with a grenade launcher causing it to launch skyward and somersault end over end just never gets old. Finally there is propagating fire in the game which reacts to the aforementioned wind. It is limited however to a set radius, otherwise you could start a fire and return hours later to discover all of Africa has been decimated and The Jackal now resides at the local crematorium. Simply unlock a flamethrower from your weapons dealer then set a blaze downwind from an enemy encampment and pick off the stragglers with a sniper rifle if you so desire.

Freedom to carry out your missions however you choose is the game’s big selling point. You can go in all guns blazing in broad daylight, sneak around in the middle of the night or start sniping from afar. Gunplay is not as satisfying as I expected, the entire game is trying to sell an ultra realistic representation right down to high recoil and jamming weapons yet it takes an unrealistic amount of bullets to put down an enemy. Speaking of enemies, they are in equal amounts brilliant tacticians, deaf and dumb, insanely stupid and able to materialise out of thin air. Alert guards to your presence and they will flank immediately making life for you extremely difficult, the game basically cheats however when enemies invisible to you bar the very top of their heads due to sloping terrain and long grass will turn on aimbot and gun you down in the blink of an eye. Vehicles have been given an extremely high priority in the AI’s programming; enemies will make a beeline for them regardless of the situation or whether it has any armaments and then stupidly drive right up alongside your vehicle before attacking.

One of the biggest frustrations is the spawning of technicals when major firefights break out. Engage a couple of enemies and suddenly a technical will appear out of nowhere, usually behind you roaring its engine like a rogue elephant and attempting to run you over resulting in instant death regardless of your health status.

The health system is one of my favourite parts of the immersion process. Your health consisting of 5 individual bars can be restored at any time by injecting a morphine syrette into your forearm. That is unless you get below one bar at which time you have to heal yourself in first person splendour as you wrench a nail from between your fingers post explosion or my favourite, force open a gunshot wound in your knee with a knife and extract the offending bullet with pliers. There are literally dozens of different wounds that require attention and they are a fun innovative approach to a tired aspect of FPS’s.

The gameplay delivers mind blowing action moments and unbridled freedom to explore your game world and carry out missions however you see fit. This is offset at every turn by unbalanced and too frequent random enemy encounters which are unrelated to your missions and serve to only draw out the gameplay and frustrate the hell out of you. Your missions are spread out over a ridiculously large game world, you must navigate a labyrinth of dirt roads which on their own would become repetitive due to the sheer amount of driving time. It is not uncommon for you to drive from one side of the map to the other, a task measured in minutes not seconds only for your next mission to be located in the region you just vacated. Add to this brilliant gameplay design(note sarcasm) faction checkpoints at every intersection, regardless if they are members of the faction you are completing a mission for or not they all want to shoot you on sight. Your tasks become a repetitious cycle of being tasked with a mission where you either have to shoot an enemy or blow something up, obliterate 3 or 4 checkpoints on the way and occasionally be killed unfairly and reach the brink of hurling the controller at your plasma(I’m sorry beautiful, I would never really do that). Rinse and repeat.

There are some major game breaking bugs in Far Cry 2 as well. Developers Ubisoft Montreal went to great lengths to highlight there are no mutants in this new iteration but I beg to differ. On a number of occasions I was killed by a Rock Mutant, what is that exactly? Picture yourself being shot repeatedly in flat open grassland and the only thing you can see is a muzzle flash. You return fire to the muzzle flash for no result and only upon inspecting up close and personal do you see that your attacker is a large rock that has grown a human head which is able to shoot at you from inside its rock domain and can only be killed by a grenade right on top of it or a perfect headshot. Far and away the worst bug however is the one that broke the game for me, after sinking 25+ hours and achieving a progress of 88% in the main story the game will not let me proceed any further. There is only one mission playable yet when I reach its destination it will not trigger and I cannot progress the story any further. Reloading of a number of save games has also proven ineffective and given lengthy, repetitive gameplay on offer I have no intention of starting over. The Far Cry 2 official forums has a thread currently 11 pages long with people experiencing similar ‘broken game’ scenarios with no solution offered from the makers. I would find it very hard to believe that testing didn’t uncover this bug prior to shipping. Considering no other reviews have spoken of this, one can only assume a minority are affected.

On the multiplayer side, 16 player adversarial modes are available but it isn’t anything Call of Duty 4 hasn’t already done ten times better. There is a map editor which again is technically impressive, there is an insane amount of customisation available in designing new maps. But what is the point of designing maps for mediocre gameplay other than for novelty’s sake?

Far Cry 2 is a beautiful looking game which becomes infinitely more enjoyable as the story progresses and the player unlocks better weapons, a lot of tedious grinding is required to achieve these payoffs however. What started as a great idea is held back by questionable game design choices. I’m giving Ubisoft the benefit of the doubt and not reducing our rating based on the game ending bug as tempting as it is. It is still a better than average shooter, it just requires a lot of patience.

If you’re looking for a good story driven piece, Ubisoft’s excellent Brothers In Arms: Hell’s Highway is superior and if you just want silky smooth gunplay you can’t go past Call of Duty.