Xbox Gaming in South Africa

First things first, Far Cry 2 is not really a sequel. Actually it has nothing to do with any of the Far Cry games released before it. It is set in some generic African country ravaged by war among its residents and political leaders. The single player story starts off pretty confusing but interesting at least. You are in Africa to kill an arms dealer named "The Jackal".

You get to choose between playing different characters, but the only things it affect are how your hands look and the NPC friends you meet along the way. It is disappointing, to say the least. War is being fought between two factions, you are caught in the middle and then things go south from there. You end up getting Malaria and The Jackal finds you, laughs at you and strolls off into the bushveld sunset. To keep the malaria in check as you progress through the game, you need a steady supply of medicine. So every now and then you have to go do a mission for someone to get more pills that you have to take every now and then when you get woozie.

The gameplay is your basic First Person Shooter mixed with a (mostly) open world filled with vehicles, safehouses, towns, public transport and lots of bushveld to explore. Missions generally involve you driving to a location using your map and GPS. Then talking to some oke who tells you to go kill this other oke and sends you on your way. You get to blow up some big things occasionally and carry around a decent amount of weaponry that includes a primary weapon, sidearm or sub machinegun, grenades and a special weapon such as an RPG or Light Machinegun. When you kill some of the crazed locals you can pick up their weapons, replacing one of yours. Only problem is that all of these used weapons are very old and rusty. So they jam a lot and eventually break. To get new shiny weapons like Rambo uses, you need to go and buy them from a gun shop using diamonds you find/earn. Better weapons have to be unlocked to be able to purchase them by doing side missions for the gun shops. The gun play in the game is very well done. You can hear the bullets penetrating enemies. When you heal yourself, you can see your character performing first aid by doing things like pulling out lodged bullets with his teeth or scorching a wound shut. The sequences are impressive but are sometimes a bit glitchy. Weapons feel quite different from one to the other so it all comes down to your preference. Explosions sound great and they can start veld fires that will blaze down an entire grassy area. These fires can be used to you advantage if enemies hide in the bushes or if you just want to get some distance between you and your foe.

The vehicles handle well although you do get them stuck quite often if you deviate from the dirt roads. This sometimes leaves you stranded in the middle of nowhere without a vehicle. The enemy AI is good but not very realistic since they can see you from a mile away as you are crawling through thick grass. Most of them also seem to think they are invincible since they hardly ever take cover.

In terms of visuals, Far Cry 2 is one of the best looking games in the Xbox 360 catalogue. The vegetation looks amazing and plants have physics that you can interact with. The game also features a dynamic weather system that also works in mutiplayer. Textures and effects are crisp and the whole experience is enhanced by great sound effects. It is not all butterflies and rainbows though, since there are numerous small graphical glitches. In addition the NPC's voices are not always the right volume and the music gets annoying very quickly. The other thing that is a bit disappointing is that it doesn't quite look like African bushveld. The lighting is not quite right, far from the scorching African sun that we know and the vegetation is not really the same as you get in the veld. So immersion is a bit lost for me as a South African. The areas are huge and you will only have to endure loading times if you fast-travel or load your game. The framerate is very consistent and the texture loading is smooth.

Unfortunately this game does have quite few problems/annoyances. The main story seems like an afterthought. The missions are very repetitive and usually involve the same objectives. You don't have enough weapons available for purchase in the earlier parts of the game so you will be running around with a G3 or AK47 for hours. The gun 'health' system sounds great on paper but it gets really old, really fast. Just wait until you pick up a hardcore sniper rifle for the first time and it jams before you have even fired your first shot! All of this is nothing though compared to this game's biggest flaw. Let me explain. All along the game world's roads are guard posts with a bunch of bad guys, mounted machine guns and vehicles. Every time you have to drive anywhere (and you will drive a lot!) you have to pass through these guard posts. And since pretty much anyone you meet in this fictional country wants to kill you, they start shooting at you even if you are a kilometer up the road. Most guard posts are placed in such a way that you cannot drive around them. And if you drive through it, one of the following will happen. You'll die. Your vehicle will take too much damage and break down in the middle of the road. Or they will chase you and catch up to you after you have passed a few trees. Now this would all be okay if these trigger happy hooligans only reappeared/respawned like once a day or so. But no, UbiSoft thought it would be a good idea to let them respawn just about every time you drive up to them. During the one mission I had to drive back and forth between two general locations, I had to go through the same two guard posts four times! Stopping, killing baddies, repairing my vehicle and then driving off again. I really like this game and some things they did really well but because of this one huge and frustrating flaw, I hardly ever felt like playing the game. Only popping it in now and then if I felt I had enough patience.

The mutiplayer modes are straight forward and are the typical deathmatch and capture the thingamajig. It plays well and latency is not bad for us South Africans. The game features an easy to use map editor much like Halo 3's Forge. Players can then download your creation and you can all run around in it, blasting each other full of lead. This nice feature is actually a bit of a curse as well. Now every yahoo thinks he can make a map and wants everyone he knows to try it. So now you have to play someone's map where they have beautifully crafted a sniping spot that only he knows how to get to. Don't get me wrong, some people’s maps are very well made and I'd love to try them but in the long run, it is irritating. The other big problem with the mutiplayer is that your rank and earnings gets reset back to zero each time you join a new Player Match. You keep your stuff in Ranked Matches but not Player Matches. And since we can’t really host a Ranked Game filled with only South Africans, it sucks.

I would love to say nice things about this game and some of its features are extremely well done but because of a few tremendous flaws, I find it hard to recommend. This game is all wow for the first hour or two but it only goes down from there and that is a real pity! With just a few issues fixed, this game would be simply outstanding!

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