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| I've only played Far Cry 2 and Far Cry Classic. by Dream Cast 03/27/2018, 8:43pm PDT | ||||
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| I didn't like Far Cry Classic at all. I don't know if that's because they changed too much from the original PC version that I didn't play, or because they didn't change enough, but either way it wasn't for me. Far Cry 2 was way better, which somehow made it even more frustrating. Here are my Far Cry 2 stories.
I thought the No Country for Old Men diamond tracker was a great idea. I love anything in games that isn't going where I'm told and killing the guys who try to kill me. So the first thing I did was set off diamond hunting. In the second sector, the tracker picked up a diamond on top of an "unclimbable" plateau with no obvious path to the top, causing me to spend what felt like an eternity switchbacking up a just-slightly-too-steep incline, scrambling between stumps and bushes to keep from sliding back down, only to crest the cliff face and run smack into an invisible wall at the top. Apparently, that plateau was only supposed to be accessible by hang gliding from a different hill. Most games have some arbitrary scripted puzzles like that, but then again most games would place the hill with the glider on it inbetween the spot where you first enter the sector and the unclimbable plateau, rather than on the far side of it. Or if they didn't, they'd at least make sure the unclimbable plateau was actually unclimbable. Then I tried doing the missions, all of which involved going where I was told and killing some guys who tried to kill me. An early mission sent me to a refugee camp at the bottom of a gully, and parked halfway along the path leading down to it was a brand-new product-placement Jeep Liberty. Sweet! I was going to get to re-enact the scene from Jackie Chan's Police Story / Bad Boys II where they drive an SUV through a shanty town. SHIT JUST GOT REAL. My elation lasted precisely as long as it took to plow full speed into the first shack, where I came to the kind of instant stop that's only possible when you touch a piece of level geometry in a video game. The shacks aren't destructible, they just have a couple of physics objects stuck to them that fly off when they blow up. I had to get out and kill about a dozen of the one enemy type in the game by hand, like a dumb animal. THIS SAVAGE LAND WILL MAKE SAVAGES OF US ALL. All my Far Cry 2 stories are like that. I get sucked into the promise of Warren Spector-style immersive simulation, then it turns out to be all smoke and mirrors because the only stuff they managed to effectively systematize was cosmetic (A+ weather, grass blowing in a rainstorm at sunrise looks BEAUTIFUL). Then not even having good traditional game design to fall back on when that doesn't pan out. The gameplay sucks, the story sucks, there's no perfect storm of systems to emergently generate The Legend of Zelda out of a hurricane blowing through a junkyard or whatever the fuck is supposed to happen in a Looking Glass game. But the music is good, the environmental effects are magical, and Africa is just an inherently fascinating place to explore, so it's not all bad. I'd definitely recommend anyone give it a shot, just set your expectations closer to annoying walking simulator than superfun bush war simulator. |
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