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Far Cry 2 - A Triumph of Hype over Substance
Quite some time ago I pre-ordered Far Cry 2 from Amazon, and it finally arrived... well, I'd say "earlier today", but I'm a good two hours into tomorrow by now, so I suppose it arrived yesterday.
Oh, before you ask... no, the game wasn't good enough to keep me up until two in the morning. I went to bed three hours ago, but got bored of not sleeping, so here I am. In the interest of full disclosure, I've only played it for two or three hours so far; I haven't got terribly far in yet, so it may get better further in. Hopefully.
Anyway, let's get the good out of the way first; it won't take long.
Far Cry 2 is a spectacularly pretty game. Incredibly realistic god rays, pretty fire effects (though more on them in a moment), and some quite spectacular terrain. The setting is immersive, the voice acting is good, and even the script is pretty good for a computer game.
On the whole, though, what a letdown. For a start, the marketeers burble on about 50+ hours of gameplay... well, yes. That's because you spend 48 of them driving from one bloody end of the bloody map to the bloody other and bloody buggering back again. The Africa shown in the game is in urgent need of motorways. But the constant to-and-fro wouldn't bother me so much if you could at least get a bit done. But no - you can only have one mission on the go at once, even when you could easily combine several. For instance, I went off to destroy a weapons convoy, and found that on the way I drove past the rail yard (where one of my "buddies" wanted me to find a box of files) and accidentally blew up the petrol station that my "best buddy" wanted me to blow up... But of course neither of those counted, since I only had the convoy quest. Would it really have killed them to include some sort of RPG-style quest tracker, save me a bit of driving?
The vehicles are pretty poor too; in the first three hours of playing, I saw three types of vehicle, all painted in attractive shades of mud-with-a-dash-of-food-colouring. There's the Land Rover with machine gun, the Jeep, the hatchback and one truck. Not one type of truck; one truck. It appeared in a quest where I was supposed to, er, blow up the truck. Now, I know Land Rovers are popular in Africa - as they should be, of course - but do they really all have to be identical?
At least, though, you never need to walk far to find a vehicle. In fact, sooner rather than later they tend to find you, and that's where another problem comes in. Now, I've never been to Africa, but I have read Terry Pratchett's The Last Continent, and I'm pretty certain it wasn't Africa he was talking about when he had a complete list of safe animals reading "some of the sheep".
Seriously - in the Africa of Far Cry 2, quite literally everyone wants to kill you to death. A few people don't try to kill you, but only because they're too busy asking you to go off and kill someone else instead. It does get rather tiresome. You can stick to the speed limits, you can be on a mission for one faction to wipe out the other faction, and still everyone will want to kill you. You can be driving happily along a road, and suddenly there are bullets pinging off your head. I hadn't done anything to him, and suddenly some bugger's shooting at me and swearing in Afrikaans. Okay, I'm quite happy for a few of the people dotted about to be trigger-happy, and if I drive through a roadblock and run down a guard I would expect them to get a bit miffed, but the density of people who shoot at me and no one else is quite ridiculous. You can't do anything without getting into a firefight, and since even a brand-new rifle self-destructs after a couple of hundred rounds (I've used a few guns in my time, and almost none of them have blown up in my hands) the constant "Bugger off and leave me alone" shootous get very annoying very quickly.
By the way, reading that has taken about as long as wiping out the escorts and blowing up the weapons convoy, not counting journey time. Now you have a long, twisting drive - about 5 km as the crow flies, rather more as the hatchback drives - during which you'll be constantly shot at. Go away for a moment, and spend the next ten minutes staring at a blank wall and threading a needle, while a yappy dog tries to bite you. This will fairly accurately simulate the drive back to where you can pick up missions. Sit through two minutes of unskippable, tedious monologue until you get the next mission. Now sit down facing the wall again to simulate the drive back out again... oh, and look, we're about fifty metres down from where the last mission was. Goody.
By the way, if you try to ambush a convoy and miss, don't bother chasing it. It's not going anywhere; it's on a loop, and it's just going round in a circle. This is presumably why Parcel Force deliveries tend to get delayed...
What else... oh yes.
Let's say you've been tasked with killing a bloke in the town. The town, you should be aware, is a "cease-fire zone", where you can wander around without getting shot at, as long as you don't shoot at anyone or wander into the two restricted buildings. So you want to avoid gunshots, and you just want to sneak in, kill the bloke quietly and sneak out again. So far, so good; sounds easy enough, so you draw your machete and hang around behind the bloke's house until he saunters out.
You glance around, making sure that nobody's around, and bring the machete down on the bloke, cleaving him elegantly in twain. He falls, without a sound. Job done. Easy.
Easy, that is, until the psychic nutjobs in the village storm round the corner and pump you full of lead. How did they know? Why do they have mounted machine guns and nigh-infinite spawns? How can a random grunt in a Hawaiian shirt - on Easy difficulty, no less! - take four rounds of 7.62mm in the face before he seems to be inconvenienced? Why am I still playing this idiotic game?
Then there are the little niggles that wouldn't be a bother if there weren't so bloody many of them.
As pretty as the fire effects are, for example, how come you can throw a molotov cocktail and it'll just smash? It'll set grass and trees on fire, but not a wooden table; the spilled petrol won't spill, it'll just deflagrate in a pathetic little fireball; flammable objects won't flamm, they'll just sit there like the rather dull non-physics objects they are.
If you start a bush fire, why will it burn out in forty seconds? Oh, and the RPG back-blast setting the grass on fire is a nice, thoughtful touch only slightly spoiled by the fact that unless the grass is really dry it just won't do that in real life.
With all the chatter about being able to shoot leaves off trees, why can't I shoot branches off them? Why will a thin tree stop a Land Rover at 70 mph? Perhaps it's the tree generator graphics setting, but still.
And how, in 2008, after games like SWAT 3 and CoD4, does a high-profile shooter like this get released without a ballistic penetration model? If someone's hiding behind a single sheet of corrugated iron, and I empty a magazine from a G3 into it, the bullets should not bounce off.
I shall conclude briskly, I think; I'm tired, and the utter bollocks are proving rather easier to find in this dross than the dog's ditto. So I shall just bring up one more of the many things that annoyed me:
The guns.
I like guns. I particularly like guns in games to behave more or less like they should. And so there are a couple of things that really annoy me, and this game features lots of them.
The sounds are a classic problem in games; many games make them too beefy, thumping in lots of bass on the tiniest little .22, while other games go too far the other way and give them a dry little cough like a gnat with a sore throat. Call of Duty 4 almost got it right, but... well, guns in real life are loud. CoD4 had the right sound, but they somehow felt weak. But Far Cry 2 just doesn't seem to be making an effort. The sounds are weak and dry, and somehow get drowned out by engine noise. When they can be heard at all, that is; I shall mess about with the sound settings on my computer in case it's expecting surround speakers, but in headphones the sound has a habit of cutting out.
And why, for heaven's sake, do game developers so often feel compelled to bastardise the design of weapons? All right, so the gun's on the right-hand side of the screen, and it looks pretty if you move the ejection port to the left so the cartridge cases fly across the screen, but... just no. Particularly in games that claim realism, and games that have the rest of the gun accurate and just punch a hole on the other side... it's ugly, lazy, clumsy and just wrong. Besides, this is Far Cry 2. It has volumetric lighting, one of the prettiest lighting models I've ever seen in a game, a spectacular vegetation engine... and they think that what's really missing is a piece of brass flying across the screen?
Then there's the ballistic performance, of course, but I've covered that.
Oh, and it's got SecuROM. Tech support assure me that it doesn't install anything (it does), and that it'll completely remove everything (that it didn't install) if I uninstall the game, and so on. I don't like it, I think the DRM things are stupid, I think DRM causes more piracy rather than less, and I think it's preposterous for a game publisher to release games in such a state as to make people download pirated games to avoid malware. I've bought Far Cry 2 - but if I could be bothered I would have left the game box in its shrinkwrap and installed a cracked version instead.
Well, actually I rather wish I'd downloaded a cracked version first to see if I enjoyed it, because then I'd have uninstalled it by now and saved myself thirty pounds. It really annoys me when companies think that it's all right to release badly thought-out games and then complain when players want to see what they're getting. Try before you buy; if you enjoy the game, buy it. if you don't, delete it.
For the record? I would have deleted Far Cry 2.
What a bloody waste.
Oh, before you ask... no, the game wasn't good enough to keep me up until two in the morning. I went to bed three hours ago, but got bored of not sleeping, so here I am. In the interest of full disclosure, I've only played it for two or three hours so far; I haven't got terribly far in yet, so it may get better further in. Hopefully.
Anyway, let's get the good out of the way first; it won't take long.
Far Cry 2 is a spectacularly pretty game. Incredibly realistic god rays, pretty fire effects (though more on them in a moment), and some quite spectacular terrain. The setting is immersive, the voice acting is good, and even the script is pretty good for a computer game.
On the whole, though, what a letdown. For a start, the marketeers burble on about 50+ hours of gameplay... well, yes. That's because you spend 48 of them driving from one bloody end of the bloody map to the bloody other and bloody buggering back again. The Africa shown in the game is in urgent need of motorways. But the constant to-and-fro wouldn't bother me so much if you could at least get a bit done. But no - you can only have one mission on the go at once, even when you could easily combine several. For instance, I went off to destroy a weapons convoy, and found that on the way I drove past the rail yard (where one of my "buddies" wanted me to find a box of files) and accidentally blew up the petrol station that my "best buddy" wanted me to blow up... But of course neither of those counted, since I only had the convoy quest. Would it really have killed them to include some sort of RPG-style quest tracker, save me a bit of driving?
The vehicles are pretty poor too; in the first three hours of playing, I saw three types of vehicle, all painted in attractive shades of mud-with-a-dash-of-food-colouring. There's the Land Rover with machine gun, the Jeep, the hatchback and one truck. Not one type of truck; one truck. It appeared in a quest where I was supposed to, er, blow up the truck. Now, I know Land Rovers are popular in Africa - as they should be, of course - but do they really all have to be identical?
At least, though, you never need to walk far to find a vehicle. In fact, sooner rather than later they tend to find you, and that's where another problem comes in. Now, I've never been to Africa, but I have read Terry Pratchett's The Last Continent, and I'm pretty certain it wasn't Africa he was talking about when he had a complete list of safe animals reading "some of the sheep".
Seriously - in the Africa of Far Cry 2, quite literally everyone wants to kill you to death. A few people don't try to kill you, but only because they're too busy asking you to go off and kill someone else instead. It does get rather tiresome. You can stick to the speed limits, you can be on a mission for one faction to wipe out the other faction, and still everyone will want to kill you. You can be driving happily along a road, and suddenly there are bullets pinging off your head. I hadn't done anything to him, and suddenly some bugger's shooting at me and swearing in Afrikaans. Okay, I'm quite happy for a few of the people dotted about to be trigger-happy, and if I drive through a roadblock and run down a guard I would expect them to get a bit miffed, but the density of people who shoot at me and no one else is quite ridiculous. You can't do anything without getting into a firefight, and since even a brand-new rifle self-destructs after a couple of hundred rounds (I've used a few guns in my time, and almost none of them have blown up in my hands) the constant "Bugger off and leave me alone" shootous get very annoying very quickly.
By the way, reading that has taken about as long as wiping out the escorts and blowing up the weapons convoy, not counting journey time. Now you have a long, twisting drive - about 5 km as the crow flies, rather more as the hatchback drives - during which you'll be constantly shot at. Go away for a moment, and spend the next ten minutes staring at a blank wall and threading a needle, while a yappy dog tries to bite you. This will fairly accurately simulate the drive back to where you can pick up missions. Sit through two minutes of unskippable, tedious monologue until you get the next mission. Now sit down facing the wall again to simulate the drive back out again... oh, and look, we're about fifty metres down from where the last mission was. Goody.
By the way, if you try to ambush a convoy and miss, don't bother chasing it. It's not going anywhere; it's on a loop, and it's just going round in a circle. This is presumably why Parcel Force deliveries tend to get delayed...
What else... oh yes.
Let's say you've been tasked with killing a bloke in the town. The town, you should be aware, is a "cease-fire zone", where you can wander around without getting shot at, as long as you don't shoot at anyone or wander into the two restricted buildings. So you want to avoid gunshots, and you just want to sneak in, kill the bloke quietly and sneak out again. So far, so good; sounds easy enough, so you draw your machete and hang around behind the bloke's house until he saunters out.
You glance around, making sure that nobody's around, and bring the machete down on the bloke, cleaving him elegantly in twain. He falls, without a sound. Job done. Easy.
Easy, that is, until the psychic nutjobs in the village storm round the corner and pump you full of lead. How did they know? Why do they have mounted machine guns and nigh-infinite spawns? How can a random grunt in a Hawaiian shirt - on Easy difficulty, no less! - take four rounds of 7.62mm in the face before he seems to be inconvenienced? Why am I still playing this idiotic game?
Then there are the little niggles that wouldn't be a bother if there weren't so bloody many of them.
As pretty as the fire effects are, for example, how come you can throw a molotov cocktail and it'll just smash? It'll set grass and trees on fire, but not a wooden table; the spilled petrol won't spill, it'll just deflagrate in a pathetic little fireball; flammable objects won't flamm, they'll just sit there like the rather dull non-physics objects they are.
If you start a bush fire, why will it burn out in forty seconds? Oh, and the RPG back-blast setting the grass on fire is a nice, thoughtful touch only slightly spoiled by the fact that unless the grass is really dry it just won't do that in real life.
With all the chatter about being able to shoot leaves off trees, why can't I shoot branches off them? Why will a thin tree stop a Land Rover at 70 mph? Perhaps it's the tree generator graphics setting, but still.
And how, in 2008, after games like SWAT 3 and CoD4, does a high-profile shooter like this get released without a ballistic penetration model? If someone's hiding behind a single sheet of corrugated iron, and I empty a magazine from a G3 into it, the bullets should not bounce off.
I shall conclude briskly, I think; I'm tired, and the utter bollocks are proving rather easier to find in this dross than the dog's ditto. So I shall just bring up one more of the many things that annoyed me:
The guns.
I like guns. I particularly like guns in games to behave more or less like they should. And so there are a couple of things that really annoy me, and this game features lots of them.
The sounds are a classic problem in games; many games make them too beefy, thumping in lots of bass on the tiniest little .22, while other games go too far the other way and give them a dry little cough like a gnat with a sore throat. Call of Duty 4 almost got it right, but... well, guns in real life are loud. CoD4 had the right sound, but they somehow felt weak. But Far Cry 2 just doesn't seem to be making an effort. The sounds are weak and dry, and somehow get drowned out by engine noise. When they can be heard at all, that is; I shall mess about with the sound settings on my computer in case it's expecting surround speakers, but in headphones the sound has a habit of cutting out.
And why, for heaven's sake, do game developers so often feel compelled to bastardise the design of weapons? All right, so the gun's on the right-hand side of the screen, and it looks pretty if you move the ejection port to the left so the cartridge cases fly across the screen, but... just no. Particularly in games that claim realism, and games that have the rest of the gun accurate and just punch a hole on the other side... it's ugly, lazy, clumsy and just wrong. Besides, this is Far Cry 2. It has volumetric lighting, one of the prettiest lighting models I've ever seen in a game, a spectacular vegetation engine... and they think that what's really missing is a piece of brass flying across the screen?
Then there's the ballistic performance, of course, but I've covered that.
Oh, and it's got SecuROM. Tech support assure me that it doesn't install anything (it does), and that it'll completely remove everything (that it didn't install) if I uninstall the game, and so on. I don't like it, I think the DRM things are stupid, I think DRM causes more piracy rather than less, and I think it's preposterous for a game publisher to release games in such a state as to make people download pirated games to avoid malware. I've bought Far Cry 2 - but if I could be bothered I would have left the game box in its shrinkwrap and installed a cracked version instead.
Well, actually I rather wish I'd downloaded a cracked version first to see if I enjoyed it, because then I'd have uninstalled it by now and saved myself thirty pounds. It really annoys me when companies think that it's all right to release badly thought-out games and then complain when players want to see what they're getting. Try before you buy; if you enjoy the game, buy it. if you don't, delete it.
For the record? I would have deleted Far Cry 2.
What a bloody waste.
An update
Worse, though, it now refuses to start. I'm updating my graphics drivers right now, so hopefully it'll run again after that; if not, sod it. Back for a refund.