Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2: A Game Without Frontiers

by Tom Chick

You start out in Far Cry 2 with malaria, a machete, and a hostile army chasing you. The first step is getting out of Dodge. Where you go from there is up to you.

Far Cry 2 is probably one of the most open-ended shooters you'll ever play. The world is split into two giant maps, but the first region is wide open from the get-go (the second region unlocks about a third of the way into the storyline). On these maps, which Ubisoft says are 50x50 kilometers, you can go anywhere, at any time, and do nearly any mission you'd like, in rain, shine, day, or night.

Not to say that Far Cry 2 will be aimless. The early parts of the game are slightly predetermined to get you underway and introduce you to a couple of key characters. But after that, this swathe of Africa is yours to roam as you please. There maps are criss-crossed with roads, rivers, and railways, and dotted with settlements, guard outposts, villas, and depots. Exclamation points show the location of missions. There are different kinds of missions that play out in different ways.

Far Cry 2 is probably one of the most open-ended shooters you'll ever play.

Take the arms dealers, for instance. These guys maintain armories where you can go anytime to refill ammo, health syringes, and weapons from your infinite (and free!) cache. Unlike the weapons you pick up from killed enemies, your weapons don't degrade quickly. To unlock new guns, you can spend the diamonds you find to buy from whatever the dealer has available. But before the more powerful toys are available, you'll have to do missions for the weapons dealers. They'll ask you to disrupt an enemy convoy, which is a relatively simple matter of chasing down a truck driving along a pre-set pattern. That's "relatively simple", because these trucks tend to have armed escorts. Get ready to unleash your inner Road Warrior.

Guns are rated for damage, range, accuracy, and reliability, so there won't be any guesswork in terms of what guns are better for what situations. Each weapon also has "manuals" that you can buy to improve their accuracy and reliability rating. You can also buy bandoliers that increase your ammo capacity and upgrades to the various vehicles. There are also frag grenades and Molotov cocktails scattered fairly liberally around this part of the world, encouraging you to use them freely.

There are missions for the underground, which you'll have to do periodically to refill your supply of malaria medicine. To advance the storyline, you'll have to do faction missions, opting to work for one or both of the region's warring factions, who pay you in diamonds. These missions can be "subverted" by your various mercenary buddies, who might ask you to modify an objective on their behalf. For example, in one of the game's earliest missions, the UFLL (United Front for Liberation and Labor) wants you to disrupt a foreign army that's just arrived to capture a "high value target". The Front wants you to mess up the army's supply stash to dissuade them. Easy enough. You can drive out there, shoot them up, and collect your reward.

But on the way to the mission, you'll get a phone call from the first mercenary you've met in the game, an Israeli named Paul Ferenc. It turns out he's AWOL from the Israeli Defense Force and he's the high value target in question. He wants you to do the mission a little differently, which will make it more difficult for you. But if you fulfill these sorts of requests from your buddies, you'll improve your standing with them, unlocking missions specific to each character, and making the character available to rescue you if you die in the field. These rescues are pretty dramatic, with your buddy showing up to drag you from the immediate area and then hanging around to help you finish the job. And considering the game can only be saved in certain places (such as safe houses and bus depots), these second chances will be much appreciated.

To advance the storyline, you'll have to do faction missions, opting to work for one or both of the region's warring factions.

There are even side missions you get by tapping into local communications. Or you can just run around clearing out guard outposts to make it easier to travel on the open road without being harassed. Or just hunt diamonds, stock up on the best weaponry, unlock all the safe houses, and then go gunning for one of the factions. They're each sitting on what seems like a considerably supply of diamonds.

But at no point is any of this mandatory. Far Cry 2 may be one of the first shooters to truly break out of the corridor mentality of guiding you from point to point. But I know what you're wondering. What happens if you just keep walking in one direction? Here's where you'll apparently run into this game's equivalent of invisible walls: stretches of desert where you drop dead (of sunstroke? thirst? ennui?) if you go too far. But short of striking out here, you're finally playing a game without frontiers.