A little rough on the polish, this is still a great game to play. Too bad there's no split-screen!
You are a sort of mercenary in an untitled African country. The scenery is very pretty to drink in. Fire in this game is pretty, and it spreads realistically. The game looks fantastic, which is a positive, obviously.
Of course, you are playing around in an entire country. So you will be walking, driving, or taking the bus a lot. The free bus in this game, which can take you from the center of the map to any of it's four corners is more useful than any weapon you will EVER use. A big negative is that you can spend a half hour on a single mission this way. Traveling, doing the mission, and then taking another long while to return to for another mission. This is without subverting your missions, which is pretty much, you and a buddy you met in the campaign team up. "Hey, instead of going to point A, go to point B, do this, then come with me to point C and save me when I get shot down in battle." Then a half hour mission can take forever.
All the missions in this game and the many ways to complete them make this game pretty good and lengthy. Maybe too lengthy. While the missions are linear, you can approach them anyway you like. Guns blazing…or…you die. Stealth is near-impossible in this game. You can have the Camo Suit, a silenced sniper, and a silenced MP5 and crouch walk one inch an hour into a guard post, and the clairvoyant AI will spot and subsequently light you up. And they happen to have 50/50 aim. Either they can't hit you from close range or you can get mortared from a million miles away. This is on Normal mind you, I can't imagine anything harder.
Driving in this game is solid, as it damn well should be, considering how often you spend game time driving. And the actual gunplay is interesting, providing you can convince yourself to vary your weapons. I stuck with the same weapons set (Dragnov, Dart Rifle, Uzi) for two-thirds of the game. But you can buy IEDs, SMGs, Assault Rifles, and anything in between.
Repair guides, weapon upgrades, and the aforementioned, practically useless camo suit are purchased with diamonds, which you earn by taking missions or by driving around and finding secret briefcases with them in it. (Yes, one or two diamond(s) in a single briefcase, IDK either.)
Also, sometimes you can be attacking a guard post with four or five guards and take it out without getting shot. Or you can just drive by an enemy camp, get followed by the godly mortars and two pickup trucks until you are forced to jump out and attack them, where you are fuster-clucked by a dozen attackers and killed.
It manages to have flaws and still be pretty fun. And the random animals you encounter can make for a fun hunting "mini-game". Too bad they can't hit you back… I will tell you this is a definite 'try before you buy' game. As I said, you'll either love it, hate it, or you two will have love-hate relationship, as was the case with me. I played this game until it's halfway point and then took a week or so break from it. I got back into playing it and completed it, just today I completed it as a matter of fact (12/01/08). This is the best way to play this game.
Despite a wishy-washy AI and some long driving bits, this game should keep you interested. And at an average play though clocking in at about twenty-thirty hours, you should be busy for a while. Oh, and there is an epic map editor, where you can build maps from scratch for multiplayer. I would say more about this, but how I played my Far Cry maps is in split-screen multiplayer, a glaring absence from this game. So I haven't really used it.