This game had a lot of potential but fell short due to some questionable design choices
- infinitely respawning guard posts; makes it completely pointless to even clear/scout a post as it'll respawn a few minutes later
- fov (field of view); For widescreen resolutions, instead of giving them more viewing area along the left and right sides (like how it's been done for EVERYTHING ELSE EVER), it chops off the top and bottom of a fullscreen resolution, meaning widescreen people actually see LESS of the screen than their 4:3 brethren.
- ai where when you pass within visual range of a post, they always ALWAYS hunt you down by sending at least a jeep after you; a lot of narrow intersections that you can't quite drive around has an inconvenient post in the middle
- very weak emotional pull on the main storyline; the game tells me I should care about this Jackal guy but there's almost no info on him or why I really should care, other than he's generically evil
- somewhat frustrating mission design; I've played through the entire first area and I do missions for these two sides which are all stupid and secret where if I help one side, their troops will shoot me anyway even though I'm helping, so most of the map is all kill on sight. Many of the missions also just happen to take place on the exact opposite side of the map in between bus stations, so I am guaranteed to spend at least 5-10 minutes doing some very boring driving and dealing with the guard posts.
- unimaginative mission design; go here and kill this guy. Go here and destroy this building. Go here and destroy this vehicle. Fetch cargo for me. Pretty repetitive.
- a very boring world; GTA was fun to drive in that there were people and traffic and overall stuff just happening. Far Cry 2 only (besides a handful of friendly mission-giving NPCs) has people that only want to kill you. They stay in the populated areas (guard posts and various towns/industrial sites) with the rest having absolutely nothing but dirt and grass (but very pretty dirt and grass, I quite like the environmental detail in the game). Driving across the map is very boring
- driving; you do a lot of driving. Since your world is not very exciting, driving in this not-very-exciting world is just not very exciting. And you have to drive a lot. In GTA I at least felt I was faster than others, or could out maneuver them in the streets. In Far Cry 2, your choice of vehicles is very slim (your normal roofless jeep and a one-seater buggy for the most part) and in some cases, inconsistency in speeds. What I mean by this is that there will be some missions where you go destroy a long cargo truck. Except if you try shooting to blow it up, it will speed up and drive away. And it drives as fast as your jeep. Meaning you can't catch up. The only way to destroy it is to know the path and cut it off or find a shortcut to ambush it, or carry a rocket launcher on you.
- voice acting; this is more of a nitpick, as I have subtitles on anyway. These people in the game talk fast, but not like faster-than-normal talking, more like "I have eliminated all pauses in speech and am almost speaking an entire paragraph of words as if it were one long sentence." Just another weird design choice.
- guns jamming; Guns you pick up "in the wild" suck and jam from time to time versus the ones you buy new from the armory. However, ammo is plentiful and all I've learned is to buy all my guns from the armory and never touch the ones the enemies drop.
There are a few things (very few) that I actually do like about the game.
- pretty environment; overall I find Africa's landscape to be supremely boring. But somehow with the lighting and the way they modeled their savannahs, it just looks so good to me. Like it's actually pretty and makes the driving in the game minutely more interesting.
- fixable vehicles; all games should have this, really.
- "buddies"; basically friendly NPCs. For most of the main missions, when you accept it, your buddy will call you and you have an option to go do this other additional task that will usually make your main task easier (such as planting explosives at a certain spot will kill many of the enemy force). Whenever you choose to do this and succeed, you gain rep which eventually upgrades your safe houses, which is sometimes a handy bonus.
Anyway, these small, stupid design choices frustrate the hell out of me. Why would they include this? The only way I even made it to the second area of the game was by playing in short sessions (like an hour) because I'd just want to play or do something else.