I honestly couldn’t tell you what it was that possessed me to pick up a copy of Far Cry 2 the other week. I just saw it in my local shop and figured I’d give it a shot. The back of the box seemed promising enough offering me online multiplayer, the ability to create my own maps, over 50 kilometres of open world to visit and the most realistic fire ever in a video game! But do all these features make an exciting shooter?

Far Cry 2 sees you take the role of one of many mercenaries who then enters a country midst an ongoing war to complete a specific task. Kill a mysterious man named “the Jackal” who is the sole reason the country is in the state it is. Things don’t start off amazingly as you develop malaria and end up being taken to recover in a nearby town. What continues are a series of tasks and missions that eventually lead you to the Jackal so you can complete your objective and finish the guy off.

Missions take a few forms and each offer unique rewards. If you want to you can just breeze through the thirty or so main story tasks and complete the game avoiding all side missions. However if you want you can undertake submissions that include assassinating someone, destroying convoy trucks, saving your friends and so on which in turn give you newer weapons, reputation or more importantly medicine to keep your malaria at bay. How you go about completing tasks is entirely up to you. You can go for full on force and use explosives, take a stealthy approach and hide amidst the foliage waiting for the best time to strike or call in backup from your buddies. Either way the result is always the same with entire camps being wiped out and you walking away ready for your next mission.

If there’s one thing that does impress it’s the sheer vastness of the Savannah-like environment. Linearity doesn’t exist here as the entire land is your oyster and you can do as you please venturing where you like when you like. But sadly that brings us onto perhaps where Far Cry’s biggest fault lies in that it’s just TOO big. A lot of your time will be spent driving or walking from one destination to another that it tends to bring the experience to a grinding halt. It’s just boring going by the same old looking scenery just to witness a short shoot out and then have to do the same again on another mission. Variety and excitement tend to take a backseat most of the time.

The actual gameplay itself is solid enough with gunplay similar to that of any other shooter. The right trigger fires while holding the left trigger will make for more accurate shots. Both analogues to move... you know the drill... The driving of vehicles is surprisingly good too if a little too frequent. While it is all very “shoot ‘em up 101”, a neat feature is the quick surgery feature where a quick press of the left button will make your character patch himself up via removing bullets or moving bones back into place. This stabilizes your health and during heated battles can become very tense with bullets flying everywhere and your health decreasing. The idea of your character having malaria was an interesting one that sadly isn’t explored further other than simply taking pills every half hour or so. It’s a shame as it becomes little more than a slight annoyance when it could have been made much more. Guns available are your basic affair too with shotguns, assault rifles and pistols being your main means for killing and destruction. There are variations on each type but all feel very similar and to be honest lack any real punch to them when you fire. The gameplay feels competent enough but never really excels.

Visually the game isn’t anything too impressive. Characters look and move very oddly and textures are fairly simple at best. I suppose you could argue this is due to how big the environment is, but maybe it would have been better to have a smaller area and a little more brush up in terms of graphics. Load screens are rare and thankfully so since you’ll often be waiting up to twenty seconds every time. The music is very suiting of its setting and gunfire and explosions sound good too. As for the voice acting it is okay and nothing too special with characters talking alarmingly quick and on edge.

Multiplayer is pretty fun with four game types available including the classic death match, team variant and capture the diamond (flag). When playing on enclosed stages it is extremely exciting and action packed, however when faced with expansive open areas its often just a waiting game as you sit with your sniper rifle looking for any signs of life. Like the main game the environments can sometimes just be too big. Something I’m a big fan of is the idea of ranking based progression as kills, revives and wins give you experience and unlock new guns and upgrades. It adds incentive to keep playing.

Length wise the game is around fifteen or so hours with more time spent if you want to finish every mission. Driving takes up a good portion of the game so be prepared to sit behind a wheel a good deal of the time. Multiplayer definitely adds to the replay value and while not as good as the likes of COD, it’s still good fun.

Far Cry 2 seems mind blowing on paper, but put into practice it starts to reveal its nasty flaws. The single player mode is an acquired taste and the multiplayer is solid enough to keep you playing, but on a console full to the brim with first person shooters it does little to sway you to pick this over any of its competitors.