Almost a full year since the guys who brought you the original Far Cry split up into separate developers to make Crysis, Ubisoft joined with EA Games to bring us their not-so-sequel- follow-up to Far Cry.

One horrendous breakup, an enormous amount of hype and an entirely new graphics engine later, out comes Far Cry 2.

Or should we say Far Cry 2: Repetitive? Ubisoft decided to head in the same direction as Crytek did by designing a brand spankin’ new graphics engine that would immerse players into the beautiful (and deadly) African setting.

The equivalent of 10 square kilometers is allotted for players to go about their non-linear missions by almost any means necessary with almost any type of projectile, or non-projectile, weapon. There really is no relation to the original Far Cry.

Your main goal: find and kill the Jackal, an arms dealer playing both sides of the war in Africa. You go about doing this by accomplishing missions for different factions in Africa where you’ll uncover bits of information regarding the Jackal’s whereabouts as the game progresses.

To make it a more open-world experience, EA and Ubisoft tried (and I mean that in the nicest way possible) to make the game more interactive. Some features were a nice touch and definitely innovative, but some were just, well, dumb.

For example, there are a variety of side missions you can do for different people. However, after you complete one mission for, say, an arms dealer, you’ll notice the missions can be, for the lack of a better word, repetitive, though repetitive is an understatement. The side missions are always exactly the same.

So either go through the storyline, or be bored out of your mind.

That being said, some of the game-play features the developers threw in are quite nifty.

There are more than 60 healing animations for when the player is wounded. This means when you have low health from being shot at by pretty much everyone, you press whichever button you have designated for healing and it does something according to whether you got shot, you fell, you were on fire, etc.

Shot in the leg? Press H. The player whips out his pliers and pulls the bullet out. Arm on fire? Press H, and pat your arm down till it goes out.

Probably the most impressive feature and the favorite of many gamers, too, is this little thing called fire propagation.

Oh yes, things burn. They burn quite well also.

Out of bullets? No biggie; take out that flamethrower, light up the dried out grass and vegetation, and create a wall of fire between you and your enemies. Then watch the fire spread with the direction of the wind.

This leads to another nice feature of Far Cry 2: its weather and nature system. Ubisoft and EA threw in a fully automated weather system and ecosystem with rain, sun, clouds, wind lightning, animals like zebras and birds, plant growth and a real-time day-night cycle.

Altogether, the engine the developers made doesn’t look that bad. It’s quite nice actually. Far Cry 2 may look pretty and may run well, but it’s nothing special. It’s more of a modern day version of the fantasy first-person-shooter Oblivion, or Ubisoft’s answer to the game stalker.

The landscape will definitely have you driving around for countless hours, as this game has an extremely long playtime. But it adds little to the sandbox shooter genre.

mlbellez@syr.edu

Published on October 28, 2008 at 12:00 pm