FarCry 2 PDF Print E-mail
Written by Adam McAllister   
Well, Crysis has been the benchmark game for graphics and processing power for computers, but FarCry 2 seems to have some pretty high requirements itself, so what do you get for you power?

FarCry is set in Africa, a barren desert landscape which is filled with half dead trees, fragile guns and cavemen. As a first person shooter, the variety of guns is acceptable and the way to use them is pretty easy, point and click is the order of the day. However, lacking a crosshair on medium and up difficulties makes this a tad harder than it may originally seem. There is a custom difficulty option, allowing for you to have easy opponents and no crosshair which is a nice feature.

As FarCry 2 is a first person shooter, we shall start with the guns. FarCry 2 has a good number of guns to use. These come in 3 categories: Primary, Secondary and Special. Primary consists of Shotguns, assault rifles and the like, secondary is a pistol oriented section allowing small firearms to be used, a machine pistol is also available. The Special section is the fun and expensive bit. Rocket launchers (Which you can pick up at the start of the game with 4 ammo or you might get a flamethrower), Machine guns and other high powered weapons can be put here; these tend to have a quite limited ammo supply but can take out a convoy in a matter of seconds. One difference in the game though is the fact that your guns can, and will, break or jam. This will always happen at the most inopportune moments because there isn’t much of a reason to fire guns in any other place. This means in the middle of a fire fight your weapon will jam and you will have to spend several seconds hammering the reload button to make the blasted thing work again for it to jam in another 5 shots. Purchasing weapons using rough diamonds will ensure your weapon is in tip top condition and the chance of it going wrong is reduced by a large margin. Along with jamming comes breaking, your shiny weapon will be in bits on the floor, meaning you have to use another weapon. You do keep the ammo you have picked up so scavenging a dirty gun isn’t always a bad idea. Lastly is misfiring. This happens to the rocket launcher an abnormally high amount of times I found. This can be very annoying when firing it into a position where your target is and it just flops onto the floor and spins around for a while. It could get stuck or go halfway to the target and randomly fly off in any given direction or best of all hot the target and not explode. These could be glitches as it has only happened once to my copy of the game. Lastly is grenades and molotivs. These cause explosions and fire respectively, handy for using the fire physics of the game to get your enemies where you want them. They cause a nice bang but osffer from the short blast radius. A bit larger would make these a lot more fun and useful to use. I understand the need for realism in a game but this is a bit extreme, jamming and breaking weapons is something I can handle, having them break after about 35 shots is just madness! I think the need to tone this down wouldn't go amiss but definitely keep the feature. The guns are overall well modelled and look real, down to the dirt and scratches on the ones you find on the body of an enemy.

AI should be good in a game using the famous Cry Engine. It isn't. I found the enemies to be abnormally good with weapons and able to trace you for mile after mile no matter how much you get away, meaning any time you might want to fix your car you get assaulted by men who dislike you and early on in the game this is just about everyone. As far as weapons go, they are great with them. Fantastic. Deadly accurate. Like military trained soldiers. They can snipe with AK's from about halfway across the map but the very second you get hold of them, they turn into weapons of epic fail. The accuracy is scaled down to -100000% when using any more than a one shot burst and the bullets must have hit the economic Crysis because they seem to do little damage short of a headshot. I found the AI to be quite two sided. They can shoot you from a quarter mile away facing the other way in a desert but they can’t seem to handle the concept of moving out of the blasted way while you drive at them. I found myself waiting for over 5 minutes for a guy to meander out of the way of my vehicle after that I decided to run everyone else in my way over. This tends to have a negative effect on your relationship with them and the whole chase starts shortly after in which you get chased by a 4X4 armed with a machine gun and a deadly accurate gunner. I also managed to find on easy mode the reaction times of the enemies were about 2 seconds, far too much time for you to select your weapon cap them carefully in the head and move off to the next dumbfounded enemy. The AI was claimed to be very realistic because they can flank you in a village. This is not the case; the AI will flank but turning around and sprinting as fast as you can, should foil their plan pretty easily. The AI can be competitive, superhuman reactions will swiftly take care of that, but human like AI is not possible at the moment. The AI cannot "learn" the same way a human can. Aside the obvious flaws in the AI system, the AI was found to be acceptable in large fire fights and on harder difficulties I was killed quite often. A good effort with a few minor flaws which can be patched quite easily.

Vehicles. Let’s get things straight here; this is not Gran Turismo 5. Nor is it Gran Turismo 1. It has a poor driving engine which is a big shame since the only sensible way to get around is the bus or a vehicle. The vehicles early in the game are: Coupe, 4X4 with gun, New Jeep, Truck and boats. Any others have certainly missed my eyes. They can come in a small variety of colours but I wasn’t expecting a million billion colours myself. The cars headlights turn on at night, the vehicle can be repaired by you (Despite just tightening a bolt on the radiator) but physical damage will remain. In a gun mounted vehicle, a simple button press will switch you from the driving seat to the gunning position allowing for quick access to the weapon without having to get out and charge around the vehicle. The gear changes are a bit odd, all the vehicles seem to have a manual gearbox (Stick shift) and the character at no point uses his hands to change these. A small flaw in a relatively easy driving experience I would say. The driving engine is "enough" for the game I would say, having anything different would require more power which would really spoil the game. The nice thing is that if the character is not in the vehicle, the green locator light and SatNav in the car are still working which is quite nice. Overall the vehicles are pretty good, especially for an FPS that isn't Halo.

As far as graphics go, they are excellent. Best on PC but the console versions are superb. The minimum requirements for the game are an ATi X1650 graphics card, 1GB of RAM and a 3.2GHz Pentium IV. These are the exact specs my system has and the game ran at around 40 frames per second on low and around 20-30 on medium. On the recommended setting the game ran at about 12 frames per second which is not bad at all, more so since my computer is very old and not a gaming machine. The graphics are comparable to Crysis though and they are astounding. Nothing to worry about in this department, aside from a few failed textures and a few animations missing. Overall the graphics are great and are great to look at on almost any system. On a physics note, the engine makes great use of fire, allowing the user to set alight to trees and foliage, trapping a group of enemies or just maybe, the player themselves. Explosions, molotovs, flamethrowers, flare pistols, sparks, dust, walking or general movement can start a bush fire pretty swiftly and it spreads at a realisticly quick rate. I dont understand the need for a "Tree Phyisics" option but the more customization the better!

Overall FarCry 2 is a great first person shooter which is definitely worth picking up for your collection. You won’t be disappointed by this game whether you are a graphics critic or an FPS fan. This game gets 8 out of 10 on the proviso that the bugs get pushed out in a quick patch then the game will jump up to 9. Great job.
 
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