Far Cry 2 was supposed to be rubbish, wasn’t it? As someone who was slightly interested in football and Championship Manager in the 04/05 era, I know how these things happen: developers and publishers split, the developers go on to make a fantastic game with a slightly different name, the publishers desperately try to cash in on the established name with a completely different development team and end up making something vastly inferior. That’s how it works in the world of Football Manager, anyway, so surely that’s also how it works in the world of open-ended shooters with oddly irrelevant titles featuring the word ‘Cry’?
Apparently not. Far Cry 2 is lots and lots of things, many of them awesome, some of them irritating, but one thing it is not is a lazy cash-in. The game is reeling with new ideas, tottering under the weight of adaptive storylines and realistically propogating fire, and, yes, occasionally it collapses in on itself and you’re stuck driving around the map doing the same thing six times in a row; but when it all comes together, it’s sublime.
Time for an anecdote, then. (Spoiler warning: the bit that I’m going to talk about is in the endgame, although I’m leaving out all the details and, at any rate, they might be different for you – it’s that adaptive storyline again – but if you really care that much then skip to the next paragraph). I have entered a ceasefire zone, a clearing in the middle of dense jungle, tasked with assassinating two men that are powerful within the factions that are warring over our tiny Central African nation. My reputation precedes me; the guards watch me edgily, conversations hushed into silence as I approach, whispered references to a ‘psycho merc’ heard in the distance, and when I casually knock one of them with my shoulder he practically leaps back in terror, apologising profusely for getting in my way. It’s midday, and outside the cover of the forest the sun is overpowering, casting sharp, short shadows and reflecting blindingly off my skyward-pointing Desert Eagle. I walk casually through the camp, ignoring the other mercenaries and the prickly tension, until I come across the small shack where my targets are planning the next move in their increasingly complicated war. As I enter, I holster the Desert Eagle and pull out a slightly rusted light machine gun, a powerful one with both letters and numbers in its name. The two men know something is wrong, but don’t mention it; they owe everything to me, and greet me with forced politeness, acting as if I’m just here for a contract. I open fire. Three bullets tear into my first target’s stomach and then – ‘Fuck!’ – my ancient LMG jams. The second man is already outside, yelling at the guards, and within a few seconds red lines are appearing all over my vision as the mercenaries open fire, still shouting orders at each other. I bash desperately at my gun, eventually unjamming it, then finish off the first man and sprint outside, still under heavy gunfire. I duck behind the shack and dig a bullet out of my leg, and then rush around the corner, throwing a Molotov cocktail before gunning down the first merc I see. My LMG jams again, so I stab the merc through the chest and then grab his shotgun, using it against the others. Eventually, I find my second target, crouching behind a fence, pistol in hand, and – after unjamming the shotgun as well – I fire a single shell into his face. Around me, the flames from my Molotov ignite fuel tanks and (naturally) red barrels, sending them flying into the air before they explode into fragments of twisted metal.
Something like that could happen in pretty much any shooter, I guess, but here’s what makes it such a big deal: it didn’t have to happen. The only part of that whole overlong story that was scripted was the dialogue; everything else was a result of Far Cry 2’s immaculate world responding to my presence and my actions, and then chucking in a few random events to see how I handle it (answer: with fire, obviously). Every objective you have – and, to be honest, you’ll either be destroying something or killing someone – can be approached differently: with a dart rifle, silenced MP5 and IEDs; or with grenade launchers and flare guns and mortars. Much (virtual) noise has been made about the checkpoints full of perplexingly hostile, respawning mercenaries, but at the very least they allow you to try something new every time you attack, and at any rate a shooter where you don’t have to shoot anyone would be more than a little weird.
As your missions and objectives will quickly establish, Far Cry 2 is a game about being a bastard. I can think of perhaps four or five individuals in the game that aren’t utterly contemptible, and you certainly aren’t one of them. Not a mustachioed villain either, all thrilling charisma or broiling anti-heroism; you’re just a prickish thug. A thuggish prick. Defoliating fields, destroying water pipelines, blowing up anti-malarials, needlessly exacerbating a senseless conflict between two utterly generic factions that spout near-identical drivel, sabotaging peace deals; pretty much everything you do in Far Cry 2 makes things vastly worse for our unnamed country. The whole ‘unnamed country’ thing is reminscent of a criticism I made of Call of Duty 4; namely, that the story and setting were so hopelessly vague that I didn’t care that I was saving the world, and I never really felt very heroic (except perhaps during That Mission In Chernobyl). In Far Cry 2, the combatants – the Alliance for Popular Resistance and the United Front for Liberation and Labour – are even more vague than those in CoD4, and in fact are pretty much indistinguishable, but that’s the point: this is a senseless, meaningless war fought by greedy men for greedy reasons, for whom war is more profitable than peace and the civilians don’t matter one bit; and you’re the worst of the lot, not a hero out to save the world. You’re a mercenary, in the dirtiest, crudest, most despicable sense of the word, and you better get used to it.
Whether you can play a game where the protagonist is so loathesome, in a human, muddy, ugly kind of way – rather than entertainingly evil a la BioWare’s moral compasses or Tommy Vercetti’s undeniable style – is up to you, but it’s a brave decision from Ubisoft Montreal. They give you a staggeringly beautiful country, full of wheeling birds and dusty roads through buffalo-studded savannah, or mud villages on a hillside, and then they say: it’s you, and it’s people like you, that have doomed this place to constant and arbitrary conflict. Driving around the deserts or jungles, from the very first taxi ride to the endgame, it’s impossible to ignore the violence and brokenness; it bubbles away just out of sight in the ceasefire zones, and explodes in your face outside them, into thrilling, grim, dirty, unpredictable combat. Too much combat? Arguably; an open world starts to feel a lot more closed and a lot less atmospheric when practically every NPC acts like Generic Space Alien X from any other shooter, attacking you on sight and chasing after you with ridiculous determination. For a game where you have to cauterise your own wounds, it’s weirdly gamey at times. But Far Cry 2 is a game, and it’s a first person shooter, and despite the apparent expectations of certain sections of the internet, it was never going to be anything else. It pushes and prods at the FPS, yes, and drags the apparently very stubborn genre forward a few more yards, but at its heart it is just an FPS, albeit an incredibly beautiful, incredibly volatile, and incredibly good one.
