I'm only about 25% of the way through Far Cry 2, but I fear I'm getting bored already.
I wanted to love this game. The first Far Cry was my second favourite game of all time, and although this game has little in common with its predecessor beyond a large, beautiful open world and lots of shooting, my expectations were high.
The world is undeniably gorgeous. The buildings and vegetation look great, the sun rises and sets, rain storms blow in and the sense of immersion is convincing. It's helped by a display usually uncluttered by any health bars or ammo indicators and a map that you pull out and hold in your hand while you're reading it.
But what's really sapping the fun out of this game for me is the huge amount of driving (be it in a car or on a boat) that you need to do to get anywhere, and the way the occupants of the many guard posts scattered around the map (who always shoot on sight) respawn after just a couple of minutes.
All the story missions are doled out from a single town at the centre of the map, and involve navigating tree-lined roads or narrow rivers to get to the mission area, usually at one edge of the map (buses do provide instant travel, but only between a few preset locations). Inevitably, this means going through or around a large number of guard posts. Once complete, you have to trek back to the town for the next mission, negotiating the same guard posts you did on the way out which have already been inexplicably repopulated (a massive disincentive to ever stop and take the time to clear them out). If the respawn times on the guard posts were much longer (or infinite) and the story missions were supplied from several different locations (so you weren't endlessly traipsing back and forth along the same routes), the game would have been so much better.
I'm also underwhelmed by the buddy system, which allows you to befriend some of the people you meet on your travels. In certain situations, just as you're about to die, one of your buddies will show up to pull you out of harm's way, giving you a chance to avoid having to reload your game from your last save. But they essentially materialise out of nowhere to rescue you, they force you to take a pistol that replaces any other weapon you may already have in that slot, and they pretty much stay rooted to the spot after that. You can't ask them to accompany you on any missions either. Other that acting as additional mission-givers, I'm finding them pretty forgettable, and see little value in working to build up my relationships with them.
In the hope that things improve later in the game, as some reviews suggest they do, I'll stick with Far Cry 2 a bit longer. But so far it's definitely a bit of a disappointment.
