It very directly channels the ghosts of a colonial past, presenting the machinations of outside power perpetuating a war for war’s own sake. Other games seize upon exotic locations as a form of videogame tourism, National Geographic backdrops to be gleefully detonated, but Far Cry 2 feels rooted in its setting despite its picture-postcard amalgamation of distant and distinct African geographies. The heart of darkness isn’t a holiday destination, then. Suddenly the chaos can snuff out the pair of you if you aren’t careful where you lob your Molotovs. It doesn’t make you like them, particularly - they are too thinly drawn, your interaction too brief for that to be the case - but it’s another way of extending and enlarging the dynamism of these battles. Dubious acquaintances you’ve made during your journey will turn up before you choke, drag you out of trouble, pull you to your feet and give you a second roll of those cursed dice. And then you’ll have a malarial attack and keel over into the furnace.īut such an end isn’t The End in Far Cry 2 thanks to the buddy system. The game never lets you maintain the upperhand: you’ll set out as the stealthy sniper, intent on cleaning out a guard post from some distant hillock, and somehow find yourself dancing over a pile-up of flaming jeep carcasses, trying to shake loose a recalcitrant cartridge from the malfunctioning chamber of a scavenged shotgun, hoping that you’ll just be able to make it to the outcrop of rock before the entire savannah combusts. It’s not mere sadism: it’s to force you to improvise, to lurch wildly beyond your comfort zone, often by setting that comfort zone on fire. Oh, sorry, were you too busy trying to dig that slug out of your forearm to notice the trio of gun-mounted jeeps skittering over the horizon? Oops - looks like your rocket launcher has just disassembled in your hands! What’s that? You’re feeling a bit peaky, too? Just as things are at their most fraught, when your attention is most strained, the game gives you a little push - and over the precipice you go. Everything teeters on the edge of your control. The result is a combat system unsurpassed in its generation of dynamic, chaotic inspiration. You can’t rely on anything here: not your weapons and not even your ability to stand on your own two feet. Minus those specific gripes, however, much of the meanness of Far Cry 2 is really its point. A single mission might send you back and forth through the same guard post three times in only thrice as many minutes, and each time the goons are there waiting for you. People got annoyed at this stuff, and they weren’t always wrong - the instant hostility of NPCs suggests a level of clairvoyance that pulls you from the fiction, and the guard posts. Weapons jam or break completely, ammunition depletes, malarial attacks might strike you down at any moment and even running a short way will leave you puffed and your vision a smear. The game risks being outright cruel - guard posts respawn almost the second you’ve turned your back on them, jeeps lurch out of nowhere to ram you off the road or harass you for miles.
If you played it on consoles, even the places you can save are few and far between. It risks being stingy, with its ammo and resources, with the weapons you attain and how quickly.
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There’s nothing wrong with that, and Far Cry 3 inarguably tightens many of its predecessors’ nuts and bolts, but it also buffs smooth the texture of a game intended to be abrasive.įar Cry 2 takes the risk of being a pedant, making you patch together your car after every prang. You can’t really say that about Far Cry 3, a game which I also love, because its purpose is much more overtly the simple gratification of a consumer. And like Dark Souls, the purpose of its difficulty isn’t the bolshy self-aggrandisement of players who beat it, but part of the game’s aesthetic, its message and its mechanism. Before Dark Souls got its reputation for foisting uncompromising hardship on the masochistic player, Far Cry 2 was already there, studded collar and whip in hand. That fact alone puts it in a special category of games which are not merely glossy entertainment flumes down which the player effortlessly slips.
It isn’t the most fun to play, I’ll grant you that, but then fun isn’t really its end goal.
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It’s also the reason that Far Cry 2 - a game which doesn’t give you what you want and slaps you for asking - is the best game in the series by far. You shouldn’t always give people what they want.
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