I like the the concept and I appreciate what the developers were trying to do, but sad to say, it has its flaws.
You start off by select a character. There are quite a few of them to choose form, and each of them has different employee background, they came from different parts of the world, ect. All of these information doesn't really matters as there isn't any difference between each character besides the looks and you don't get to see your face anywhere in the game. After selecting your favorite character, you'll then put into a short taxi ride from the airport to the hotel, you can't skip this ride scene ,it is long and boring, I guess it's just the way UBI wants to show off the wonderful environment they build. Far Cry 2 is indeed beautiful; everything was carefully designed and really fit the old, rural Africa theme. It showed me different faces of Africa than just the desert and grassland. I love the environment pretty much, and the ambient sounds were great. The music however were very annoying, you get these tension sound played whenever you get near a outpost, even when you killed a guard silently without anybody noticed, the crazy drum theme will still play for a short while… main menu theme is awesome,but for the sake of gameplay, I disabled the music.
As the plot goes, you soon realized that the country was about to start a major civil war, that "everybody is finding a way out of country, only fools stay here…only fools and cab drivers." I think this is also the first game that actually called the player a fool….Your character was infected with malaria, (whoever you chose will end up having malaria, and whoever you didn't choose, they were fine and healthy) while trying to stay alive, you missions for both parties – the APR and FULL. You will also be constantly reminded with the goal to kill the Jackal who supposes to be a famous arms dealer, but anyway, you never really get to kill him. (There is a glitch to kill him but even if you did he will appear in the next act anyway….) It is pretty straight forward and the main quests can simply described as "go here kill him, go there destroy that." There isn't really any plot and you get to do many site quests such as assassination and sabotage. Over all the quests were ok due to its unscripted and non-linear natural, but they are lack of contents. You never understand your role in the conflict between the APR and UFLL and what does that got to do with Jackal. They promised to give you information but they never did, and Jackal's true motivation was never even mentioned in the game. (There were some big twists in the end, which I really don't understand how that happened.)
The gameplay is quite slow pasted as you often get to travel a long distance in order to complete you job. It is ok at first but it will eventually get a little boring and meaningless. You have no allies. Although you have buddies but they will never go out on a mission with you, they will help you only if you are "dead", and helping them to do quests will only increase your reputation and upgrade your safe house. So generally the buddies only serve as some NPC instead of real human buddies whom help you and fought together in missions. There are many outposts and petrol guards in the game, you can choose either to kill everyone in your path, or you ambush them and try to go for the safest route,sneak around under their noses. I choose to sneak around as I'm very good at it. You can choose to go to places by car, by bus or even by boat, and there are gliders placed on the remote area of the map for you to flying around. You can't fly far with gliders and they are hard to control, most of the times you will only need them to get to one or two isolated diamond cases placed on top of huge rocks or hills. You can jump but the jump in this game is rather useless. You can't prone in this game. The healing system is creative and the idea of sleep in a safe house until whenever you feel to do the job is really brilliant.
All the missions pay you in diamonds exclude buddy quests and underground quest. Like I said buddy quest gives you reputation and upgrades to the safe house while underground quest provides you with drugs essential for your character to stay alive. There are tones of different weapons (Sniper rifles, Shot gun, Pistols, Bombs, Flamethrower, RPG etc….) in this game, but you'll have to unlock them by doing jobs for the arms dealer. The shooting mechanics were bad, a lot of guns don't sound right and they don't feel right when shooting. Pistols are hard to aim but surprisingly have better accuracy than many other guns, and there seems don't have rang limits too. Just try to aim a guy in the head at around 40 meters using sniper rifle and change to pistol, and fire a few shot, you will know what I mean.
For totally unscripted AI, Far cry 2 has done a great job to make the AI as humanly as possible, AI will response to the weather, at noon you can sse the guards sat on the ground and complaining about the weather; at night you can see some of them sleeping. My game it rarely rains, so I have to yet to find how the guards react in the rain. AI will engage in conversation with each other and if you have higher reputation, you will hear them talking about you a all the time. They FEAR you XD ! When engaged in firefight, they will find cover, flank you, and when injured they will flee or help each other although once alerted, AI can still spot you form the heavy bushes and attack you with good accuracy, but oval it's OK, this is one of the good unscripted AI I have seen. I didn't have much problems of killing anyone or sneaking around but one thing I found annoying is that guards sure take a lot of bullets to kill, and they respwan very fast too, too fast for comfort.
That's all I can say I think…It's a pretty shallow game, a lot of other factors could be added into the game, like bribe the guards for passage; acquire more allies instead of NPC like buddies, have more addons for weapons etc. Overall it is a good game but still lacks of something to be great.