Far Cry 2

This week Zero Punctuation travels to Fictionesia, Africa for Far Cry 2.

Transcript
Far Cry - or Far Cry 1, as it must now be known - chronicled the adventures of Jack Carver, a man whose loud shirt so offended the gods of fate that he was forced to run around a tropical island full of mutant supersoldiers while wearing a giant neon sign on his head that made him visible from inside a toilet five miles away.

And now, four years on, Jack Carver returns for Far Cry 2, if by, "returns", you mean, "has nothing to do with". Dude's nowhere to be seen, for once in his life. We've also traded out the tropical island for something slightly more equatorial. Is there at least an army of mutants? Yes, but only if you '' classify a hilarious South African accent as a mutation, choinah!  Sort of makes you wonder why they called it Far Cry 2 rather than something more appropriate, like How to Run over Zebras.'' The only things the two games have in common is that they're both FPSs and they're both big on huge, exotic locations with lots of vegetation that doesn't conceal you for shit.

You're one of several lumpy-faced mercenaries sent into a fictional war-torn African nation to find the local arms dealer and kill him, presumably because he's making the CIA feel redundant (satire). Sadly, the instant you begin the mission, you contract the local sniffles and have to be nursed back to health by the very person you're supposed to kill. Now, as assassination missions go, that's pretty fucking pathetic. Your character probably lost a hell of a lot of lunch money at mercenary school. Anyway, your target disappears, and your former employers aren't answering the phone, so there's nothing left to do but '' pass the time with some odd jobs and take out your frustrations on the zebras. ''

Meanwhile, the country's about as stable as a skateboard in a canoe. Two utterly interchangeable factions are openly battling it out over the best way to make life better for the people, both wearing absolutely massive irony blinkers as they drive around the countryside shooting at anything you-shaped. Yes, it's very difficult to make friends in Fictionesia. Your character must be wearing some kind of Michael Atkinson mask, because everyone hates you on sight. In fact, most of them will just drop everything to run you off the road in armed jeeps at the merest sight of you, even if you're in the middle of a mission for them. The official reason for this is that they're secret missions. The more obvious reason is that programming friendly A.I. is hard.

First impressions of Far Cry 2 are good. It's got the standard current-generation graphics problem where everything looks like it's been dusted with cocoa powder, but in this case, it fits. They're going for a realistic depiction of the grim, chaotic oppression these countries exist in, and for the most part, pulls it off (main character's mutant healing factor and magical teleporting gun shop TARDISes notwithstanding, but shut up, it works!). The dialogue's well-written, and true to CryEngine tradition, the scenery deliriously humps your eyeballs and ejaculates spurts of wonder across your slack-jawed brain, and by that I mean it looks nice. It all goes together '' to create a marvelous sense of my beloved immersion that adds a pinch of nutmeg to the bog-standard rice pudding of shooty gameplay. ''

But after playing for a while, it became apparent that all of the above is nothing more than a colourful sandwich wrapper. It's only when you unwrap the sandwich and bite into it that you discover that it contains nothing but margarine and vitamin pills. As you stumble around the sandbox world, you are free to take missions from the factions, the gun shops, and some weirdo on a phone who sounds like Zordon from Power Rangers. And every mission from a particular source is identical. Both factions will make you blow up something belonging to the other one, Zordon has you assassinate random individuals, and the gun shop will have you ambush convoys, all of which drive reliably around in circles until you lay a mine and put it out of its misery (so presumably there're all being driven by my mum).

The problem I have is that after a while I had no idea of what I was ultimately trying to do. The initial goal of '' killing the arms dealer guy had apparently been abandoned, because the dude kept selfishley doing me favours and being friendly. Eventually, after completing a mighty fuckload of faction missions, I was given a story mission to assassinate the local leader of Group A (let's call them the mods), and after a sequence of spectacular cock-ups, I then also had to kill the leader of Group B (let's call them the rockers). ''

I kind of assumed this meant things were wrapping up, but then I was made to drive to another very similar sandbox map full of even more faction bases, gun shops and direct lines to Zordon. I continued to do the same identical missions for a while, but there was no sense of achieving anything. I certainly wasn't helping stabilize the region; once the mods ran out of quests, I ran straight over to the rockers to do theirs. In terms of calming influences, I was somewhere between Henry Kissinger and a tank of gasoline.

You see, for sandbox gameplay to work, you need a deeply varied world that calls for exploration, à la Saint's Row 2; and/or some kind of clear ultimate goal hovering overhead, à la Assassin's Creed. Far Cry 2 has neither. Its approach is to plonk us without instruction in the middle of nowhere and knock off for lunch. It brings to mind an animal rights activist freeing a captive bunny rabbit into the wild, only for it to bewilderedly sit on a daisy for several hours before a predator comes along and bites its entire body off.

There are enough open world sandbox games '' out to choke a basking shark, and letting the player create their own experince is pretty much the new bullet time. '' But it's always done at the expense of proper pacing. Maybe sometimes I don't want to '' create my own experience. Maybe I want to have an experience that's been carefully crafted by professional designers and artists.  But in recent years,  a prevalent delusion has arisen that absolutley anyone can contribute something valid, regardless of qualifications. '' In TV news, for example, you'll often see them pause to hear the opinion of a seventy-five-year-old housebound racist from Leamington. And now you get games like Spore or ''LittleBigPlanet that rely heavily on user-made content. Which I prophecize doom for, because most people are not game designers, and you're just going to end up with oceans of slurry, as indeed we have''. It's like giving someone a stack of'' paper and a biro and claiming that that's as good as the latest Dan Brown bestseller. Actually, that's a bad example, 'cause you can throw up on a typewriter and say the exact same thing. ''

Addenda

 * Pry him from my cold, dead fingers: Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw
 * A joke: How many South African policemen does it take to break an egg? NONE IT FELL DOWN THE STAIRS OK
 * I wanted a mission and for my sins they gave me one