Multiplayer is fun, and people work wonders with map maker. Single player has big problems, constant driving is tedious.
The primary problem is that you have to DRIVE EVERYWHERE. It's tedious, it's boring, I don't want to do it all the time! Not only that, but you're alone like the whole game.
Your character makes lots of friends, and they literally go on a "buddy" list, but these friends never help you in battle or anything, they just give you "tips" and missions and help you improve your safe houses. I guess. I dunno' what they're talking about with that.
I can tell you precisely what would have made the campaign more fun: Fast-forward through the driving!
Better yet, it would have been a lot more fun to have teammates, and if the teammates drove to locations for the player, so the player didn't have to constantly check his map and drive all over the place, it would have been a lot nicer, even if he had to watch all the driving, it'd be way less annoying than manually driving there. It'd be more like a break and less like a chore.
Somebody will give you a mission, and literally you will have to go across the entire map for half of the missions. You can either drive for ten or fifteen minutes (if you don't get lost, run into anything or have to fight anybody along the way, good luck with being that fortunate), or you can cut off some time by going to the bus station, which instantly takes you to the middle of the map, or the corners of the map. But even then, you have to find a car near the bus station and drive to your objective anyway!
It's certainly extremely realistic, y'know, the map is a part of the world, rather than a magical object. You have to look at the map to tell which roads to use, and every car conveniently comes with a GPS to tell you where things are in the immediate area, but ultimately the GPS isn't useful because they don't show enough of the area so you can't see how to get somewhere (and the GPS doesn't tell you where to go).
The game also never remembers what map you were holding, out of three possible maps (immediate area map, local map and whole country map) so if you put the map down, and want to look at it again, you have to press the "map change" button again, which is really inconvenient. Also, the game lets you use a scope to look for ammo and health supplies but I never understood the point. Plus you have to be holding the map, so if you stop looking through the scope so you can get a better view of everything, you get the map in your face so you can't see anything.
What's extremely realistic is how, if you are looking at your map, which you pretty much have to do CONSTANTLY to not get lost, you can easily crash into objects. Wow. You can just taste the realism. That's real fun, crashing into stuff. At least you can fix vehicles by just turning a wrench like magic.
It's really neat how realistic the driving and map-checking to get places is, but it's not FUN. It's not even slightly entertaining. It's just annoying.
You don't have to watch your character sleep for eight hours, you can just fast forward through it. So why can't you fast forward through DRIVING? Why do you have to drive all over the damn place!? You're constantly going back and forth with the driving, the driving is like 9/10ths of the game! And if you lose your car in the middle of nowhere and there aren't any more cars nearby (the player just takes what he please), tough luck! You're walking it! If you open the map on foot, it gets really in your face so you can't see anything, and you have to walk to see, but then you can't see the map. The only alternative to walking at this point is reloading your last save, and you'll probably want to, because walking is UNBELIEVABLY SLOW compared to driving (just like in real life) and it's an even more gigantic waste of time.
Yeah, you can load your last save to fix it, but that's something that's really annoying, the saves. Players have stuff to do in their day, and if they're dedicating their free time to play games, then they want to play games, not dedicate all of their free time to virtually driving around bored out of their minds, so it's a gigantic waste of time to have to constantly drive everywhere, and it's really annoying how YOU have to drive, you can't make an AI drive or something, and you can't fast-forward through it, but then, on top of all that, you can only save in certain places! You save when beating an objective, or when finding a save point, and those things are only in certain areas. So you might spend like 30 minutes driving around just to get some place, talking to people, and crap, and then suddenly, YOU DIE. Yeah, that means you have to do all of that crap ALL OVER AGAIN because you weren't constantly going way out of your way to get to save points! If you're in the middle of nowhere, you'd better find a safe house so you can save because you're going to have to fight through a million guard posts before you can get to a town.
I could probably complain about the driving and its constant problems forever. And I might! The game itself is good, but the driving is a huge problem.
There are other problems, too. Like I said, you're alone all the time. There's no co-op mode, you're the only person going around on these fabulous adventures. What's worse is, unless you're in town, there's not a single friendly person outside! Everybody you run into wants to kill you! There's hardly anyone in town, either, everyone just hangs around inside, only soldiers walk around outside.
The soldiers won't shoot you in town, because all of the towns have a ceasefire, but even then, the soldiers have these places where they'll kill you if you enter them, but these places are really small and just have diamonds in them so if you're willing to go on a killing spree you can get the diamonds, but an endless horde of enemies will attack you and they seem to do EXTRA damage. Even if you make one faction mad, the OTHER faction will attack you! There is literally like no difference between them. I'm not sure how you're supposed to get those diamonds, really.
Otherwise, soldiers leave you alone in town, but if soldiers catch you outside of town, they'll go on a manhunt for you, they want you to die so bad. They don't even know you! They're easy to dispose of, but it's really annoying that you're by yourself and the only people you run into are hostiles. There aren't even any animals anywhere. I found that to be really weird. I never wanted to swim because I figured it'd be full of various beasties or something, but no, go ahead and swim, ain't nothin' in there at all.
Actually, one time I saw a gazelle out in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. One time. One gazelle. This place is really bustling with life.
Then I accidentally ran it over and it died horribly. All the gazelle in the area are probably extinct now. In fact I probably wiped out the entire animal population.
I mentioned "buddies". Buddies don't do anything useful, they just give you tips on how to do a mission, or they give you missions way across the freaking map. Yeah, way across the freaking map, and then, you have to drive ALL THE WAY BACK! Thank you, Far Cry 2, for being so fun. I've always wanted a tedious driving simulation. Dream come true.
Actually, what I've always wanted is a first person shooter set in Africa, and when I heard about Far Cry 2 being set in Africa with free-roaming and a war going on, I thought, that has to be the best idea for a video game I've ever heard. TOO BAD YOU JUST DRIVE THE WHOLE TIME AND THERE'S NO WAR.
Some buddies will save you when you die. These buddies are the cool buddies. When you run out of health- I got ran over suddenly and instantly died when I got saved- the buddy will appear and in a very cinematic scene it'll show him drag you away as he fires his gun at your enemies (he seems to randomly switch guns during the whole process). When he's dragged you to a safe place (not far from the battle), he hands you a gun, tells you how many enemies he thinks are left, and urges you to get on your feet and start fighting. It's really awesome, because, when I first heard about buddies saving the player, I imagined them just taking him to a safe house. But instead, the buddy brings him back to good health in the immediate area and then helps the player finish off the enemies. It's rad.
But then, once the enemies are all gone, the buddy just patrols around the area. He doesn't leave and he doesn't even follow the player. He just patrols about. You can drive up next to the buddy with a jeep, but he won't get in. Which is surprising, because you can be twenty feet from an enemy, but they'll still get in a jeep to cover the distance between you and them.
Make sure you don't TOUCH your buddy with your jeep because it might instantly kill him no matter what speed you're going. More on the jeep thing in the multiplayer section.
So all you can do is just leave. The whole being saved thing is really awesome until the fight is over, then the game goes back to sucking. To make it so that your buddy can rescue you again, you just have to go to a safe house to meet him.
One time, after the buddy asked "You need some help?" and it said he was rescue-ready, I was able to press Y on him. When I pressed Y, he said, "You got it, I stick close by," but then he just stayed in the safe house. I assumed this was some way to make him follow me, but instead it looks like it didn't do anything. I couldn't press Y again, either. Lame.
What's really stupid is, if your buddy goes down, you can save them. Well, that's not the stupid part. The stupid part is that you can save them, or, if you don't have enough syrettes (those are the things you use to heal), or if you just don't feel like using a syrette, you can either "leave them to their fate" by pressing Y, or you can literally pull out your gun and kill them to "end their pain".
What?
WHAT!??!?!?!
Why can't you just CARRY them!? Why can't you put them in a car and drive back to town or some other place where you can get medical suppies!!?!??! You do enough freaking driving in this stupid game, it seems like driving your friend to get medical attention would make perfect sense, and it definitely makes a thousand time more sense than KILLING THEM! I mean, what if you generally want to save them, but don't have syrettes? Then that's it? They just die? Do you have time to DRIVE FOR YOUR LIFE to the nearest medical cache abd hopefully save them? You have to load a game where they're alive and bring more medical supplies next time, or just keep playing the rest of the game without them? WTF is the point?
Anyway, these buddies would have been way more entertaining, and the convoluted revival system would have been a lot more useful, if they went with you to do things. The battles would be ten times more exciting if they were on a slightly larger scale, y'know, instead of having the player fight like 12 guys by himself, have the player and some buddies fight 30 guys.
Sometimes, when the player ACTUALLY gets to fight, he'll take on a whole village by himself, the village miraculously being occupied solely by enemy soldiers, just an unstoppable one-man army. And plot-wise, nobody notices how much of a non-stop killing machine you are, like in most games where you take on the whole world by yourself. I'd rather die really easily and have a team than be one lone unstoppable guy. But I wouldn't want to die really easily and have no team, which is what you get if you crank up the difficulty.
Not only would buddies be fun to have in fights, but like I said, they could also drive places. Having to drive everywhere wouldn't be a bother at all if SOMEONE ELSE could do it, but no, the player has to constantly look down at his map so he knows where he's going, and he has to do all the driving. It's really annoying.
Also, the game is full of jeeps that have machine guns mounted on the back. You see the AI driving around all the time, a man in the driver's seat and another man on the machine gun. These guys are all over the place and they like to shoot at you, by the way. They're amazingly ineffective. They're usually just free jeeps for the player to take after he disposes of the two guys riding it.
But the player, he has to drive by himself. So if he wants to put that machine gun to good use, he has to stop driving and get on the machine gun himself. If an AI were driving, or if an AI were gunning, then the player could actually be mobile while using that thing, which is what they were freaking designed for.
This is especially awful, because many missions require the player to stop a convoy. Unless the player gets ahead of the convoy and has the right weapons (like a well-aimed RPG), the convoy can just cruise right past him. Convoys generally consist of two jeeps (which means two drivers and two gunners), and a big truck that must be destroyed. The excitement of getting a gunner and driving alongside it whilst the gunner shoots the convoy up is really appealing, but in this game, you can't do that. You would have to drive ahead of them and stop, because if you stop near them and get on the machine gun, they'll just drive away.
Because other AI are driving around all the time, it's not like it would have taken extra work to have the AI drive the player around along the roads to at least get near places. Plus, it'd be more fun to fight with teammates. So, you'd kill two birds with one stone: Get the player and a couple of guys into a vehicle, have the AI drive to locations, then have them all jump out and do a mission together. It'd be a lot more fun and exciting that way, and the player wouldn't have to do any tedious driving.
The other big problem, aside from the constant driving, is the lack of warfare. The two mercenary groups, which look exactly the same, just hang out in towns, like, literally right across from eachother, even though they're bitter enemies. Because they have a ceasefire, they can somehow stand being within 100 feet of their hated foes. The game does start off with a bang, though, because the two groups start fighting suddenly and the player has to escape the area.
When you get out of the ceasefire zone, you never see these factions clashing. It's just the player, by himself, getting attacked by anyone that sees him. In the beginning of the game, it starts off with a driving sequence where you just ride in the back while a cab driver drives. TOO BAD THERE AREN'T ANY FREAKING CAB DRIVERS TO DRIVE YOU AROUND IN THE REST OF THE GAME. You'd better appreciate RIDING while you still can because later you'll be doing all the driving. Anyway, on this ride, you go by lots of soldiers, and through a checkpoint where the cab driver bribes the soldiers with promises of beer to get through. But, after this whole driving scene, you're suddenly public enemy number one for no reason, and all of the soldiers want to kill you without explanation! If you run into a checkpoint, get ready to kill everybody there. Even after you kill everyone, they just magically come back as soon as you leave, unaware that you had killed them all minutes before. They still shoot at you though so at least there's some continuity THERE.
What's also magical is that, when one of these guard posts spots you, the game will magically spawn a bunch of vehicles to chase you. I think that you have to be in a vehicle for this to happen, but if the guard post spots you in the vehicle, and you get out of the vehicle to fight the guard post, you will immediately almost be ran over by a car or a jeep. It's really annoying that the game so readily spawns cars to chase you, especially because when you get out of your car, you can be run over by a vehicle that just magically spawned behind you. Literally, they just magically spawn like thirty feet behind you.
You can do missions for both of the factions, though, so WTF's with the shooting? I haven't gotten far enough to see if either faction ever becomes friendly and stops shooting at you, because I'm too busy complaining about the freaking driving.
In fact, I can't even tell the difference between them visually. They will literally say that the missions they give you are secret so none of their guys will help you, or know you're working for them, or anything like that. Basically, this is just an excuse to make the game BAD. All of the enemies look the same, so there might as well be just one faction, because you can't tell the difference between them, and they both want to kill you no matter what you do, and they never fight eachother.
Also, all of the side missions suck. You have to drive way out of your way just to do something annoying like destroy a convoy and that's it, you don't get any plot advancement so it's just free time down the drain. The main missions aren't way better, but at least the plot keeps moving, and things happen. What's ridiculous is the game literally lies to the player.
They say something cool is going to happen, like one of your buddies is going to ambush a convoy with you. When you get there, she's wounded, so if you didn't bring syrettes, she has to die unless the game lets you go get syrettes. Plus the convoy is already blown up and there's just a ton of enemies you have to fight, she doesn't help you at all, being wounded. Why did the game wimp out? Why did something else happen? How come I couldn't get there, and then wait for the convoy to get by, and ambush them with her? Why did pre-destined stuff already happen before I got there so I get zero excitement?
There's another mission where you have to destroy some commandos' equipment. Your buddy tells you that you can redirect the commandos into an ambush, making it easier to destroy their equipment because they're distracted. When I got there, there was no ambush! There were no commandos! I just had to kill a bunch of soldiers by myself, and then blow up a bunch of supplies. The game flat-out lied to me! It even said in the objectives, "Destroying the equipment will be easier because the APR will also be fighting the commandos." It was just me versus everyone, there were no AI fighting any other AI at all! This game is so unbelievably lazy, it just lies to your face about something fun that's going to happen, and then they don't deliver!
A truck also gets blown up with the equipment, and immediately, my buddy calls me as if she saw it happen, and she goes, "You didn't just blow up a truck, did you? I'm with the APR guys and they're mad about that." Then they start shooting at her so I have to go help. How did anyone know I blew up a truck full of medicine for the APR guys? Who are the freaking APR guys, anyway? Wasn't I just fighting them when I was supposed to be fighting commandos? If my buddy had an agreement with the APR about the ambush, how come she didn't tell them I would be there so they shouldn't shoot at me?
At least when I got there to help her out, she was ACTUALLY fighting, instead of just being wounded when I got there. Then for no reason she fell over wounded anyway in the middle of the battle, but I couldn't revive her until the battle was over. This game is just ridiculous. When she gets revived, she just sits there and does nothing, like when the buddy who saves you just patrols around the area after he saves you. One time he just sat still and shot at ghosts, leaving me to fight by myself. They don't make it clear the first time that you're supposed to just leave, I keep thinking they'll follow me or something.
It's AMAZING how fast word will travel in this game, the second you do something, someone else will call you and go "I HEARD YOU DID SOMETHING" which should be impossible. Word certainly travels a lot faster than the PLAYER gets to travel.
Ever played Oblivion or Fallout 3? Once you've visited a place, you never have to walk there again. You can just "fast travel" which is the same as teleporting because the player has to do nothing whatsoever, the only thing that happens is the player is somewhere else and the time changes according to the distance. In this game, not only do you have to cross long distances, but you will have to fight TONS of enemies unless you take massive detours.
Y'know what really doesn't help the driving is you don't get a radio. You better turn on the built-in XBOX 360 music player, or any alternative on your PC, because the car rides are dead quiet, except for the sound of the engine, tires rolling over grass, and the chirp-chirp-chirps of nature. Yeah, that's something you can tap your foot to. But the cab driver in the beginning of the game has a freaking radio in HIS car, and throughout the game, there are radioes all over the place, actually playing some sound, even though it's always some guy giving speeches, as opposed to music, from what I've heard.
The actual game's soundtrack is pretty good in some situations, but you barely ever hear it. It's usually just background music, a little bit of a tense underscore.
I guess that should cover all of my problems with single player. Let's recap:
You have to drive everywhere, manually, by yourself, constantly checking the map. No radio, no fast-forwarding, no AI to drive you. There are also enemies all over the place, no friends or neutrals, so if you don't take crazy detours or sneak past the guard posts (which requires getting out and walking anyway), you have to fight lots of people, and you can't just drive past them because most of the time they will all get in jeeps and chase after you so if you don't outrun them (outrunning them is unlikely because they shoot up your car as you drive away,) they'll catch up, so your best hope is to get out of your car and go hide in a bush. Why do they want to kill you? Why would they chase you to the ends of the Earth??? It's insane. Shouldn't they be fighting a war? Seems like they would have more enemies to worry about than the lone player.
Another thing that's no fun is you're alone. Fights are more fun with teammates. Not a big problem not having them, though. Teammates would fix the lack of AI driving, but even if they didn't drive, it would still be nice to have them. Also, the player has a phone. It'd be nice to be able to call for a ride or something. Or backup in a fight. All he can do is take incoming calls. Why even have buddies?
Nobody's around outside, not even animals (though I did see that one gazelle). Only soldiers are outside when in town, and every soldier outside of town attacks you. There's an explanation for a lack of people: They all left. But it just makes the world lifeless, no animals, no people but soldiers outside of buildings.
The factions don't fight eachother at all. I've never been driving around and randomly run into a battle between the two sides. Just me versus them. Aren't they at war? Seems like there would be some actual WARFARE in the game but aside from the intro, I haven't seen any at all as far as I've gotten.
Also, mission objectives just plain lie about when there will be fighting between other people who aren't the player.
Here's something that's unpleasant: When you fire the sniper rifle, you have to zoom back out to pull back the bolt. If you stay zoomed in, you'll be pulling the trigger and nothing will happen. Why doesn't he just chamber another bullet automatically? No matter what, when you zoom out, he's going to pull the bolt back, so forcing you to manually zoom out so he can automatically do something is just pointless.
The multiplayer is at least really awesome and problem-free, thought that sniper thing carries over, but who cares. There's one REAL, glaring problem with the single player that turns up in multiplayer: If your jeep is moving, AT ALL, it'll kill anybody it touches. You can back up REALLY SLOWLY to pick up a teammate, y'know, get the teammate on the gun mounted on the back of the jeep, but if you back up and he touches the back to try and get on the back, HE DIES. You can be backing up at a speed of one foot per hour and it'll still kill your teammate.
How can such a problem exist? You'd think that, in a game where you would expect teammates to touch your vehicle, you couldn't accidentally kill them just because you weren't completely motionless. Look at other games like Halo. Your friend can wack his warthog into you and it'll still do zero damage if it's not going extremely fast, making it perfectly safe for him to back up slowly to get closer to you so that you can hop on.
In fact, in the single player, you can take vehicles into town, but all of the soldiers walking around town are in car-proof areas just so you can't accidentally run them over because they knew they messed up with the car thing, but for some reason still refused to actually fix it.
ANYWAY
The multiplayer is cool, aside from the death-touch from jeeps. It's got all the fixings of a decent shooter, y'know, weapons are fun to shoot, enemies go down relatively easily, the engine is nice, there are vehicles (just don't move when people are getting on!), and the player count is 16. 16 isn't a lot, but it's enough, unlike other games that think it's cool to put a max player count of 16 or 18 on the box, then limit you to 12 players or less in all of the gametypes. Cough cough Halo and Call of Duty.
You can also revive teammates, which is cool, and what's also cool is, rather than just magically regenerating your health, you have to hide and then press the heal button, which does an animation where your guy takes a bullet out of himself. Once that's done, you're fully healed, but you're defenseless during the animation so you can't heal while people are after you.
The thing that makes the multiplayer a real winner, on top of its functional gameplay, is the MAP EDITOR. What an amazing thing: It's five billion times better than Halo 3's forge, and I've never seen any other game with anything like it. On the PC, map editors are common for most games, and when you play anything using the Half-Life 1 or Half-Life 2 engine, you're in for millions of billions of custom maps.
But on consoles, you NEVER get that. Even in the aforementioned Half-Life 2. I think you can make maps on Unreal Tournament 3 for the PS3, but I've never seen any.
So, Far Cry 2, with its built-in map editor, is REALLY impressive. The map editor is really versatile. Personally, I've never tried to make anything and don't really want to, I've just screwed around to see what it did.
But the maps I've seen people make are AMAZING. I played on a map recently where EVERYTHING, from the ground to the ceiling, was built from various objects. Then it became apparent to me that this person had literally built a big airplane in the game and turned it into a level. You could even go outside and, even though the big airplane, and the little biplanes below it, were all frozen, it was still really cool to see that the airplane is actually in the air, far above the Earth (probably as far as the game allows), and below are water and islands.
I'd seen other user-made maps, but this map in particular showed me that the map maker could literally do ANYTHING.
You can't bring in your own textures or models, but what you CAN do still allows for limitless possibilities. The map downloads are also extremely small since they never use any new resources.
Of course, not every map you will end up playing on will be good, as many of them are far too open and lack cover, requiring you to do an excessive amount of walking with high chance of being sniped on the way to the enemy.
Still, most user-made maps are winners, or are at least fun to play on.
The multiplayer is seperated into player and ranked matches, like lots of games. In most games, such a seperation is stupid and pointless, but in this one, they're at least completely different. In ranked matches, you play on the maps that came with the game, and nobody can join in the middle of the game. So, of course, why the hell would you want to play on the ranked matches?
On the player matches, anyone can join at any time, and you can play user-made matches.
I actually have no idea what the maps that came with the game even look like. I've just seen lots of user-made maps, but they're all great, so I love to just play the player matches.
It is amazing that this extremely awesome map maker isn't adopted into other games. I can imagine one reason being that game companies couldn't sucker you into paying big bucks for their crappy map packs. Cough cough Halo and Call of Duty. On the PC version of Call of Duty, they didn't even charge for the map packs, just in case you're wondering. Not only because it'd be difficult to do but also with all the free custom maps people can make on the PC version, who would pay for them?
This lengthy review should cover all the bases on my impression of the game. The single player could have been a lot better, but it's brought down by an empty, lonely world (especially because there's no co-op), and brought down further still by the unnecessary amount of tedious driving. Plus the enemies never really fight eachother. Teammates would have been awesome too. Not necessary. But awesome.
The multiplayer is great, because it's plenty functional, and it's made thousands of times better by the map maker. It won't make you forget about your other online first person shooters, but it sets a standard for console games that other games need to meet, but probably won't, especially because Far Cry 2 isn't popular enough. I didn't even know there was a map editor until I actually got the game itself and saw it.
So, if you like multiplayer games, get it. If you don't, I dunno' how much I could recommend the single player. It has its moments, but the driving is a HUGE turn-off and the action and fighting isn't fun and exciting enough to make up for it.