Far Cry 2 (2008)

For some people, this is a cult favorite, while others completely hate it

I don't think it's as good as 3, but I do enjoy it. Some of the things that seem to annoy people about the game are elements that I really enjoyed

This game is actively trying to kill you. You've got malaria, your weapons jam, they degrade, fires spread and trap you, that cover you think you're so clever hiding behind will be destroyed, the engine of your ride will stall. It feels gritty and real. You are made to suffer and I loved it

I don't want to talk too much about FC 3, but at least this game was ambitious compared to what came after FC 3. FC 3 perfected the formula and everything that came after just became overly familiar.

The settings, world design, buddies were all well done. The narrative is unfortunately one of the weak points as is the AI

The gameplay allows for a variety of approaches

The gameplay is more thoughtful and slower paced than what came after and with what Ubisoft has learned in the interim, I would love the series to return to a more survival focused game like FC 2

I've been thinking a lot about this game recently, probably owing to my playing of Generation Zero, a game that reminds me a lot of Far Cry 2. The overall feel, look, and tone of the two games are pretty much the same. Both see you traversing a harsh world dotted with towns and villages, yet eerily absent of locals, and danger lurking over every hill and around every turn of the road. In FC2, the player meets a few "allies" which are always welcome encounters because of how empty and lonely the world is.

And it's so unforgiving. Brutally, gloriously, unapologetically unforgiving. I'm reminded of a quote from James Cameron's Avatar, wherein Stephen Lang's character is giving the newcomers to Pandora a safety briefing: "...Pandora will eat you and shit you out dead with zero warning. I read your file, Corporal. Venezuela, that was some mean bush. Nothin' like that here, though. You got some heart, kid, showin' up here." Replace "Pandora" with the unnamed East African nation that serves as the setting for Far Cry 2 and you've really hit the nail on the head.

Allow me to outline just a few of the challenges provided: healing items are hard to come by; ammo is hard to come by; working weapons that don't jam after a magazine and a half are hard to come by; the currency with which to buy decent weapons is hard to come by; working vehicles are hard to come by and are ridiculously easy to destroy, with no respawns; the pills you need to medicate your character's affliction of malaria are hard to come by; friends are hard to come by; checkpoints in the world are hard to come by; and there's no mini-map other than the physical one you pull out to look at - not to mention, looking at this map does not pause the game.

Some of these mechanics get to be damned frustrating. Just as they're a source of praise for some, they're a valid pain point for others. They can feel needlessly difficult to navigate, such as the checkpoints that respawn enemies just minutes after being cleared. But in today's climate, where open-world games break immersion to make things as easy and convenient for the player as possible - plentiful fast travel points, vehicles respawning out of thin air, a constant minimap with waypoints and GPS, weapons that are permanently unlocked and don't degrade in condition, and several different methods to collect and earn XP and/or in-game currency - *Far Cry 2'*s endeavor to be somewhat realistic creates an enchanting 'gamescape' for the player willing to be put through the wringer. It's truly a test of mettle.

Which leads me to think about my baptism through fire with this game. I had no idea what I was getting into when I got it. From what I can remember, it launched with little fanfare and not a whole lot of marketing. I can't even remember what led me to get it, as I'm fairly certain not a single one of my PSN friends bought it. And I had only heard a few things here and there about the original Far Cry.

I can only imagine what my expectations were; I was coming to the game having played most of the popular FPS games of the time, like Call of Duty 4. I was a little unsure of the game at first, mainly because the dialogue and character animations had this strange effect of seeming to be spoken too quickly, almost like it was sped up in post-production or something like that (now, that's actually a charm to me).

But I stuck with it. I was immediately impressed with how amazing the jungle foliage looked and how well the fire mechanic worked - you could light up a small patch of grass with a flamethrower or grenade and before you knew it, the whole fucking forest was engulfed in a torrent of flame. I remember demoing this for some friends who were packed into my small bedroom at my parents' house, and them being equally as impressed by it as I was.

To the best of my memory, I think I completed the game within a month or so. But it wasn't until I booted it back up for another run about a year and a half later that I really fell in love with it and came to appreciate it for what it is. The second time was a charm, I guess. And truly, the world of the game is loaded with charm.

The world is singularly interesting in comparison with the rest of the Far Cry games. This unnamed Eastern African nation has so much character, so much implied history, environmental storytelling, and a feeling of also still keeping a foot in reality. The subsequent Far Cry games can't help but include a few drug-induced hallucinogenic sequences, gratuitous and obnoxiously immersion-breaking as they are. I have never liked these. I greatly prefer their absence in this entry and I have trouble articulating why so I won't dwell on this point for too long but all of that is to say Far Cry 2's world feels a lot more grounded than the others.

There's also great variety in the environments as well. Dense jungle, sparse forest, savannah, downright desert, rocky arid valleys, and they all have a ton of things to see and do and numerous stories to tell. My memory might be off but I find the world and the different locations and villages of Far Cry 2 as having way more detail and character than the subsequent Far Cry's, which always struck me as having a relatively "phoned-in" quality to them.

The story is easily my favorite of the series. Rather than focus on creating a whacky psychopath with nothing interesting to believe in, say, or do, Far Cry 2 tells a story that is once again grounded in reality. I can't word it better than the Synopsis section on the game's Wikipedia page, so I won't bother; I just love and respect the fact that it's talking about things that go on this very day. It had the balls to do that. No one tells a story like that anymore. No one.

I'll always look back on this game with extreme fondness. I'm sure the gameplay and graphics haven't aged very well but the same can be said for a ton of amazing games. Again, maybe I'm wrong, but I think this game was slept on and it's too bad. I long for a return to this brutal narrative in subsequent Far Cry's. It doesn't look like that's going to happen.

A guy can hope. Until then, I'll just keep watching playthroughs before bed.

Out of my old disc library, I pulled out Far Cry 2 to give a run and see how it fares in my backlog gaming. You play as a mercenary sent to kill Jackal, a weapons trader who provides for two factions that are waging a civil war in an African landscape.

My first impression with this is that after a slow start with the tutorial, I get a bit overwhelmed as I run into enemies that hold outpost on the roads (had to learn things the hard way). After that initial playing period, I've realized where the line is drawn between safety and danger, allowing myself to adapt and make the best out of navigation and combat around the landscape. I've tried out and found my preferred arsenal that could be purchased for my storage (or picked up by fallen soldiers, but at the risk of it jamming more often) and carried out different missions more smoothly. Well, not that notably different since they often recur to killing, destroying or securing targets. But until I do that, I find myself most of the time driving on my way to the target until I get a sense of progress being made. And even with the missions accomplished, I barely feel any satisfaction when I get the job done.

And try as I might to focus on the missions that would progress the story, there's little to no intrigue that I find with being involved with guerrilla forces to track down my elusive target. The peculiar thing is with the voice actors running the dialogues on a rapid-fire tempo, that I barely get time to absorb the mission backgrounds that they try to explain. Whether it's spoken that way or edited to have them fit within the disc size (or by some theory, it was set by a model VA in pre-production), I can only guess but it's hard being immersed into the story this way.

Back to the positives, I must say that the graphics sets a high standard for games of its time and the game still looks gorgeous. And it goes without saying among other reviews that the fire effects is a marvel to look at any time; I can't barely think of other games besides Far Cry that have fire that spreads over the grass fields and up to the tree tops. Such stunning achievement I figure could be hard to achieve even by today's standards, I suppose.

Far Cry 2 is not much of a waste when I paid only €5 for the physical product. After installing the Vanilla Plus mod that revamps and enhances the gameplay experience, I've had my fair share of fun before the repetitiveness got in on me and I uninstalled it. It's not worth more than a few hours of try-out but from what I gather from the people's reviews, experiences may differ so try it yourself before you stick with your purchase. I still have Far Cry 3-5 to give a run, some of them being regarded as classics, so I'm still curious to see how the improvements have gotten.

Beat on Infamous difficulty as Irishman Frank. As soon as I was able I purchased the bolt action sniper rifle and PKM light machine gun, and later the silent makarov pistol. I used those until the 2nd half of the game where I bought the As50 semi auto sniper rifle and m249 saw; skipping the dragunov sniper altogether. I did buy a few other weapons but never bothered to change up my loadout. I got the passive boosts for the guns I used, and the general ones like camo, ammo and health capacity. Never bothered with the repair upgrades. Stats at the end say I did 12/12 buddy missions, 22/40 side missions, found 692 diamonds and currently have 258 diamonds. I found 5 jackal tapes and 0 predecessor tapes (I did put in the code to unlock them). I picked up all of the diamonds I could find but never went out of my way looking for them. Singh was my starting buddy but he bugged out and I had to abandon him. Then I had Warren until the 2nd half of the game. Then I had the Chinese guy, but I deliberately killed him. For the rest of the game my main buddy was Nasreem and 2nd Hakim (who ironically was my 2nd choice of who to play as).

My strategy was to snipe from afar, circle around at a distance to find stragglers and then go in with the LMG for plenty of sneaking around and corner camping. Occasionally I would use the pistol or machete to silently assassinate unaware enemies. Did not use a whole lot of grenades or molotovs, but they were especially useful against assault trucks. I greatly enjoyed the combat and was impressed with enemy AI, and even more impressed with the foliage graphics and fire mechanics. I did find shotgunners laughably inaccurate while others were too accurate for supposedly poorly trained militia. They took too many shots to kill with anything other than a head shot or sniper rifle; it was like they all had body armor. 1 shot anywhere should be enough to stagger them to the point of being unable to shoot accurately for several seconds at least. Most of my deaths were from driving along and suddenly coming upon an enemy assault truck. Best way I found to deal with them was to park my vehicle sideways in the road so I have cover when I get out, and always have the LMG equipped. There was a point where I stopped driving and got around on foot; which is the only reliable way to survive assault trucks. But I don't have time for that; instead drive around like mad and load quicksave if I die. Speaking of saving, the game made a new save file every single time I saved, so I ended up with 100s of saves with the load menu taking several seconds to show the list.

The biggest problem I had was how much time the game wasted making me drive around the same roads and clear out the same guard posts over and over. I planned my routes, drove offroad and used the bus fast travel system as much as I could to avoid guard posts but it was still incredibly obnoxious. The open world design of this game is just not well implemented and the pace of the game is ruined with the long boring stretches between firefights. Making every cleared safe house and guard post (with the guards not respawning) a fast travel location would make this game immensely better.

7.5/10

Five minutes in this country and it is clear - things are about to go very bad.

I haven't been playing games recently, but decided to dig into this. It is super annoying and incredibly hostile, but I am also finding it thoroughly engrossing. I love the environment, the map, the malaria and my dumb broken-ass gun. I don't love the enemies that respawn when you turn your back to them.

I assume sequels worked out the kinks to craft a more enjoyable experience that doesn't hate the player. Still, I kind of adore how defiantly un-fun this game is.

A game for fools and cab drivers.

I hate leaving games unfinished, but try as hard as I did, I just could not bring myself to finish this one. There are so many more deserving games on my backlog.

I still give it 2 stars because I can still see the game it used to be before its graphics/mechanics/mission structure and game play all aged horribly. I did have some moments of fun between all the frustration.

Narrative This is the hardest to review because I only got a little over halfway through it, but the whole idea of two factions (both equally horrible) fighting a Civil War where all the citizens lose no matter who wins isn't terribly novel, but it is still intriguing. How effective this narrative is really depends on how well it's executed. For me, that was not very well. I did appreciate being able to choose what side you wanted to work on & also being able to work both sides, but I found it hard for me to care because there were hardly any characters for me to latch onto. And when the NPCs speak, all the voice actors seemed to be rushing through their lines. Everyone spoke so fast and with very little emotion. Just terrible performances. I found the plot hard to follow, not because it was complicated, but because I found it hard to care and therefore sometimes forgot to pay attention. Yikes.

Game play What was once probably this game's strength is one of its weaknesses. Very clunky shooting mechanics. Really no way to play stealthily because even when you sneak up behind enemies and try to execute them with the machete, they still don't die in one hit. Instead they scream out before you can finish them off. (One of my favorite things about Far Cry as a franchise is their ability to nail both action heavy and stealth play-styles).

The open-world map is such a chore to get around. I appreciate their attempts at immersion (Limited fast-travel, all maps are natural maps found in-game, etc) but there are still some bafflingly stupid mechanics at play here, such as NPCs driving vehicles drive faster than you. You find yourself driving through enemy camps roughly every 20 or so seconds. Even if you try to blow past them, they will get in trucks and over-run you. This means every 20 or so seconds you need to stop, get out or switch to the gunner's seat to kill all the enemies, switch back to the driver's seat and get ready to repeat again in 15-20 seconds. As you can imagine, this makes getting across the map very infuriating, especially since fast travel is limited to 5 bus-stops around the map that you have to physically go to in order to travel to another. In fact, this open world design is the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of my finishing the game. I had tried twice to get to my destination by boat. Both times I was run down by several other boats that would kill me before I could switch to the gunner's seat. The third time I decided to drive, meaning I had to go through the gauntlet of being attacked every 100 or so feet. When I was almost there, I got out of my vehicle and was immediately run over by one of the trucks pursuing me. I decided right then and there this game was no longer worth it.

Even if I had gotten to the destination, the mission would have been the same repetitive slog I'd played 2 dozen times before already. Go here, kill this guy or blow this thing up. That's it. That's literally every single mission. The side missions are just as repetitive. The only game-play loop I found somewhat fun and inventive was looking for the diamond cases. I also enjoyed the naturally spreading fire that added a lot of random elements to the game play and guns jamming. But these are all very small pros when weighed against all the enormous cons.

Presentation I can tell this game once had mind-blowing graphics and at times it still looks good. It never outright looks terrible. Driving through African landscape with the sun setting between the trees still looks fantastic, but some of the up-close character models and items looked very dated. Dated graphics are not a huge deal for me, though. This is a 2008 games so I won't knock it too much for that, even though there are several 2008 games that have held up better in terms of visuals.

After playing Far Cry 3, Far Cry 4 and Far Cry Primal, I used to think I was a huge Far Cry fan. Then Far Cry 5 massively disappointed me and this game is the worst yet. (I haven't play New Dawn because it's a direct sequel to 5, which had one of the dumbest narratives I've ever seen so I have no interest in it. Besides, direct sequels kind of defeat the purpose of Far Cry anyway). Now I think I'm just a fan of that short 4 year era of Far Cry. I replayed Far Cry 3 about a year ago and had a blast. I've been meaning to replay 4 and I think I will now just to get the taste of this game out of my mouth.

This game you can either love or hate. On a technical side it is great even 11 years later. It looks great, it has great fire effects and many objects in the world are affected by physics instead of being static. Since it is open-world, you can choose how to approach most situations, where to attack from and so on. There are weapons for a stealthy approach and for a loud one. But even with all this freedom it doesn't empower the player like most shooters nowadays. Far Cry 2 seems more like a semi-survival game. Every outpost has soldiers who will attack on sight, you have malaria that you need to treat, the guns degrade and break. It creates this feeling of constant uneasiness and pressure.

Ironically, the console version is harder because it has no quicksaves. I advise you to play it without quicksaving, rather using only savehouses to save the progress. It's risky since you can get killed and lose 10, 20, even 30 minutes of progress but it feels much more rewarding when you complete a mission and get to the precious savebox in the savehouse. I don't really remember any fps game having such an interesting and hostile atmosphere and it does feel unique.

The AI is a little silly but that was made to allow stealth, that's why enemies can have a hard time noticing the player when they are right in front of them. I've played this game 3 times gradually increasing the difficulty and i have to say that the hardest difficulty is THE Far Cry 2 experience. it takes a lot of time, it's very punishing but it's also very rewarding.

Great game, the developers tried to go in a little bit of a different direction both story- and gameplay-wise but unfortunately the general public doesn't like when games don't hold their hand all the time so you see this game being bombarded by negative reviews. What's the most puzzling about their points of view is that they criticize the AI in Far Cry 2 but praise FC1 which has literally an even worse enemy AI and an awful second half of the game where you fight brain dead monsters.

-------------Story spoilers start-------------------------------------------------------

Story in FC2 is not a very traditional one, it tries to show the conflict as a way for evil people to manipulate the folk to make money off of war but it's very subtle and i think it's great and not in-your-face social commentary or something like that.

------------------Story spoilers end-----------------------------------------------

Overall a very underappreciated FPS and truly one of the last games that tried doing something unique without childish 'LOL RANDOM INSANE' characters like in its sequels.

Okay I finished this game. I found the game gets a bit more enjoyable towards the end, although generally the quality is consistent throughout. I don't think the plot was particularly complex. The entire thing basically revolved around this one guy you have to kill. But that's fine by me, as long as the gameplay is enjoyable. The gunfights were pretty solid. I bought that huge-ass sniper rifle at the end of the game. It felt completely ridiculous walking around with a goddamn anti-materiel rifle, but when I was testing it out I saw a guy hide behind a stone pillar. I was like "no way this is gonna work", I fired a shot at the pillar, and bam, dude was dead. So yeah I decided to keep it.

Sniper is an enjoyable way to play this game. Towards the end I got pretty good at spotting trouble and ending it before anyone knew what was happening. Anyway the whole game is basically "go to X location, kill someone, go to Y location". One guy said that this is a game that should be played for an hour at a time, and I agree. All that driving around gets tiring. However the gameplay mechanics and everything made the game enjoyable for me, despite the repetitiveness. I mean one time I was on a roof shooting people and one of the guys literally said "he's on the roof", I was just like O_O. I wish devs would work on this kind of stuff a bit more.

Also props for making an interesting game set in Africa. I can't recall any other games I've played which have done that. The dev team apparently travelled to Africa and decided to completely redo their level design, and it shows. I've never been to Africa, but I've been to Cambodia, and the vibes from this game would sometimes take me back there, particularly the stalls set up along the roads lol.

As for replay value, not much honestly. There's no 100% in this game. I played the game, finished it, and pretty much will uninstall it and be done with it. However I look forward to some more Far Cry in the future. Anyway, here's a picturesque location I found near a safehouse which had a nice trail:

Been playing this one the past month or so. From what I understand, this is seen as the best game in the series. The others are apparently okay, but lack some cool stuff from 2. Anyways I actually played this a long time ago back when it was released on the PS3. The main problem with that is the claustrophobic FOV. The PC version doesn't have that problem. The default FOV seems a bit bad, but it at least adjusts for widescreen. I don't like having to spin my character to look at each individual corner of a room.

I've been playing on the hardest difficulty, and it is actually quite difficult. I eventually settled on a sniper/smg combo. Close combat on the hardest difficulty is quite difficult, but sniper rifles can still kill in one shot, and you can clear out checkpoints from a distance without anyone even seeing you. Ambushing convoys is fairly straightforward, sometimes you can wipe them out with just the IEDs. Any close combat turns into a reload-fest, however.

A lot of things in the game confuse me. I have no idea what the purpose of the buddy system is. Occasionally I will use it if I can't be assed loading a quicksave, but so far I'm 50% through the game without really needing my buddies. I don't know why I keep doing the extra missions for them. I think the PS3 version didn't have quicksave, which may have made buddies more useful. However I am glad to have the quicksave ability, especially on the hard difficulty.

The game does have a lot of small details which add to the game. The fire system, bullet penetration and destructible environments are good fun. The overall plot confuses me, but I understand the basic premise of it, which basically is that you try to do good things, but ultimately when everyone is trying to screw everyone else, it's kinda impossible, and you always end up in someone else's scheme. Even if the actual plot is not too memorable, I think it does a good job explaining how a society can end up in a cycle of poverty, at least on a basic level.

A lot of the game is driving from point A to B, and the checkpoints can make this a bit wearisome at times. However you can avoid the checkpoints sometimes, so it's not too bad. But attacking multiple checkpoints between every single mission can get annoying. Oh and getting attacked by vehicles randomly can also be annoying, especially when they have mounted grenade launchers that can one-hit your car.

The graphics hold up well in 2018. The vegetation is really well done, and it feels like the people who developed the game really put a lot of work into it. I haven't played another game which depicted jungle environments as well as Far Cry 2. Even the physics of plants and trees swaying in a firefight feels very polished, and it can really give you an idea of how confusing jungle combat can be. The visuals can be very busy in a firefight, with vegetation constantly moving, and it can become very difficult to distinguish the enemy from the background. Often you won't see an enemy until you are standing on him. This is something I imagine is very difficult to implement in a game, but Far Cry 2 does it amazingly well. The only thing I don't like is the strong HDR when you enter indoor environments, but you can reduce it by messing around with the settings.

Currently I'm about halfway through the game, and I'm hoping to finish it off soon. Then I'll post some final thoughts on the game.

The terrain is very nice

Also the draw distance is amazing. I was able to snipe this guy.

I really wanted to finish this game but the travel system ruins it for me. It's not the map, I love the map I think it's awesome and I have no problem navigating in terms of finding my way around.

The problems lie with the constant interceptions by the enemy factions. First of all the enemy outposts are literally in the middle of the roads, not on the side like in other far cry games (yes, some are in the road but not all), so there is no avoiding them. Secondly even if you clear the outposts it doesn't matter because they respawn on THE SAME DAY so that's not an option. Thirdly, for some reason cars go faster when NPCs drive them, this means that if you want to just drive through an outpost to save time, the enemies will ALWAYS catch up to you and shoot your car until it breaks and then you HAVE to stop to deal with them and then fix your car to keep going.

The result of all of this is that in between every location you have to go through this incredibly repetetive and dreaded proccess of stopping some distance away from every outpost you come across, clear them and then keep going + dealing with all the patrolling vehicles that will attack you on sight.

I love the realism(I love the gun jamming and the car repairing), I love the gun combat, I love the healing system, I love the atmosphere, I love playing as a mercenary who's just in it for the money BUT the travel system just prevents me from playing this game and enjoying myself.

it would've been a 4/5 if outposts took 4-5 days to respawn and if the player's car was just as fast as the enemy's.

I mean, it was better than Far Cry 1, but that could simply be attributed to the technology time.

I enjoyed the feeling of exploring a place unlike my home. The driving felt a little slow, .... and frequently too looooooong, but I got over it. Sometimes I'd be clearing an area out and an enemy would surprise me by popping out around a wall when I was searching for goodies, so that was fun.

I know it's a 'shooter', but the constant respawning checkpoints bothered me. After I cleared something out, I would have liked to drive through undeterred. At least for awhile. But this has been commented to death from other sources I've read (ah the trials of playing an old ass game, nothing you say hasn't been said a hundred times before).

And we won't talk about the ending. Ugh.

So basically if you want to play an older game with good shooting, and people still making mods for, this is a good game to try. If you're wanting to so more exploring and less shooting, or playing for a storyline, pass this one up.

Being recently new to the Far Cry franchise, I was pleasantly surprised when starting Far Cry 2. While the first one wasn't bad, it didn't feel anything special and had some things about it -from enemies to plot to etc- that annoyed me. The sequel had some vast improvements and overall was just better and more fun to play, but it did have some things that made me feel it was held back from being the best that it could be.

The thing that first struck me about Far Cry 2 is how immersive it is. I liked how much detail was put into so much: the animations for reloading; weapons randomly jamming; the your vision getting blurry if you run for too long; the swimming animation; every explosive weapon, especially how rocket launchers can actually set foliage behind you on fire from the rocket's discharge. In short: I felt like a ton of love went into this game.

And I really just enjoyed feeling like a badass. Accepting assassination missions, shooting all the guns, and even the animations of being sick with malaria made the game feel like it was putting you as this action hero. It had the perfect balance of being powerful enough to blow up trucks with a rocket launcher or landmine while hiding in the bushes, but weak enough that you probably want to run afterwards lest you face the swarms of guys that heard the explosion.

The problems that I had with this game became evident after playing it for a few hours. Everything in the game is basically centered around you buying guns and abilities, which is ok, but it's not a good enough motivation to keep doing the same repetitive thing for every side mission. Side missions in a game can be pointless or boring, but not both.

I can sum this game up in 6 different elements: story missions, assassination missions, arms dealer missions, buddy missions, collecting diamonds & Jackal tapes, and scouting safehouses & guardposts. I really have no problem with the concepts behind any of these, for the most part, and I actually really liked how the game did some of them. The idea of "buddies" that could pull you out of a bind if you are downed was awesome and I wish they'd done more with it. I loved the feeling of finding the hidden briefcases with diamonds and successfully storming a safehouse. And I enjoyed doing each of the different types of missions....for a while. The problem is just that it's not varied enough; assassination and arms dealer missions were repetitive, unlocking safehouses and scouting guardposts don't actually give you any benefits whatsoever, and finding all the diamonds (200+ cases???) or Jackal tapes would take literally combing the entire map for next to 0 benefit.

And while these grievances were minor, they kind of helped to reveal the bigger problems I had with the game, which I can distill into two main points.
Far Cry 2: 'Drive, Stop, Kill Dudes, Drive, Repeat'. You end out spending most of the time not only driving, but stopping at every guardpost to get out and kill all the enemies because if you don't, they will shoot out your engine and prevent you from repairing it until you do. And I do not have a problem with this mechanic...until it becomes a chore. And this itself is indicative of smaller problems like how enemies will always chase you when you drive by them and how they have incredible aim; if either of these were remedied so that I could drive by guards even 50-60% of the time, I would be content. (Note: There's actually a mod for Far Cry 2 that includes the feature "Checkpoint guards now have a 60% chance to chase you after passing through, as opposed to 90%-100%". So I'm not alone in this.)
"Did you hear something?! THERE HE IS!" The enemy's insane knowledge of my whereabouts and accuracy was my biggest gripe in the original and while it was toned down a bit in the sequel, it's still there. Guards sense you if you are near. Not if you are in sight, are noisy, or whatever, just getting close. The moment I started a vehicle, every enemy nearby knew exactly where I was, and would turn and shoot before I even had my foot on the pedal. And too accurately, might I add. They could nail my vehicle in sniper rifle level distances using a machine gun and they could just see straight through foliage. I understand that this game was released a while ago so I'm not expecting particularly realistic AI, I just want something that doesn't break the immersion; it should feel like dealing with an enemy soldier, not a puppet attached to a master machine behind the scenes (the game).

While I eventually found this game tedious, I think I myself am partly to blame; I played longer than I could have since I did every side quest, but that's just how I am; I can't just not do a side quest. I think if I had played this game less I would have enjoyed it more instead of getting tired of it. But here's the thing though: I still really enjoyed it. I found myself coming back to it day after day, even though I was a little less enthused because the parts that I liked about it were so good. I still found myself stopping to get (nearly) every diamond even after I'd bought every weapon. Because while things like driving to the mission locations was boring, infiltrating a camp and destroying all the enemies/blowing up a thing/stealing a thing still felt satisfying and was just fun, because that part was what made this game great. Not the guardposts.

Overall I was still delightfully surprised. The difference of enjoyment that I had between Far Cry 2 and its predecessor was amazing and while it wasn't perfect, I'd still say it was good. The plot didn't grab me, I ran into some bugs, and by the end much of the gameplay felt like a chore, but if you take any one mission and look at it alone without the dozens of others sandwiching it in other play sessions, it's just a romping good time as long as you're into assassinations and diamonds and stuff.