Big rant incoming:
So, I bought the 360 version. Played it for several hours, and I am going to exchange it for another game (a good advantage of many new potentially good games coming out in the same week). I am heavily disappointed in this game. In a few words, this is a mild version of Assassin's Creed for FPS gamers.
Having played Assassin's Creed, again, I am faced with a world that looks gorgeous and sounds gorgeous. It nails the theme of Africa in a visual and audible way. But having played the console version, it reminds me detestably of a technology demonstration. I must confess, my first impressions of this game were unanimously great early on, but faded somewhat closely nearing the release date. And now, it's just pathetic really. I am playing the game (on the hardest difficulty) and I don't like how the mechanics are either introduced or try to contribute to the overall experience. They're not cohesive or relevant to the game play. There is no thought to the game play. Most of the time, you just do something and you see how it works out. You fight against dozens of Africans and somehow, you're always victorious. A team mechanic would be much more interesting, rather than the lame holistic buddy system.
My main complaint is that the world is not content interactive. It's like a fashion model. Looks great on the outside, makes the right noises when I interact with her, but for that short moment, that's all she can. It looks like Africa, sounds like Africa, but doesn't feel like Africa.
My secondary complaints are controls and the combat. I never played the previous games either on PC or console, but I did try out the MP demo of Far Cry Instincts for the 360 and I detested its control scheme and the way the character behaved to user input. Way too flimsy and reactive. Since when is it normal to change the turning speed by quintupling it when the player has the right stick more than half-way pushed. BF: Bad Company did this too, but more effective. I think even Bioshock was using the same mechanic, but again, more effective. Far Cry 2's controls are pretty much the same compared to Far Cry Instincts and that pisses me off greatly. Decreasing the sensitivity, didn't really help either.
The combat is not to my likening. I need to shoot 5 rounds from my assault rifle aimed at the chest and head to surprise and kill an enemy. I have tried numerous times to do head shots, but somehow, I hit them in the neck and even that doesn't count as a lethal shot. The enemies simply don't react to their injuries at short ranges. You shoot endlessly until they're dead (I doubt that this is any different for lower difficulties). I did have one cool moment where I chopped my machete in the back of an enemy (I was playing at night, trying to be stealthy) and as he fell to the ground, choking, I stabbed the machete straight through his chest. As cool as the machete may be, remember what the machete is meant to do: to chop through dense jungle terrain. It's a heavy and sharp motherfucker that's meant to go straight through the toughest of leaves and the thickest of branches. The hilarity is, in this game, you can't chop leaves, branches or bush with the machete.
My tertiary complaints are the physics and vehicles in particular. It's fun shooting up a tree from a distance and see the branches drop like flies. But when you're up close and you shoot directly at any point of the tree, you will definitely not always break the branch in one or several shots. It's only on particular points of the tree that branches break off (not as advertised by the developers, and probably explains why the machete doesn't work on flora). Trees don't always lit up when you play like a pyromaniac and entire bush areas don't stay lit up in flames the whole time. I dislike the car handling. It's way too arcade, or in other words, not challenging. But at the same time, it's a huge part of the game play time. What the hell were they thinking? I think the weather system is actually the only physics aspect that was developed correctly. In the beginning, I set the time for night, and when I came out of the safehouse, there was a storm going on and the trees would act on the gushes of wind in an incredibly realistic style. It really gave the place a much more dynamic feel than when there is no wind gushing all over the place.
This game was marketed in a pretentious way, like many big budget games are. And once in a while, I fall for this kind of shit. Anyway, I can summarize this game as a failed attempt to make a shooter that immersed the player into Africa, because of several obvious things. By trying to make the character behave very realistic in a stylized way, but by keeping the rest arcade or niche, such as the controls, the vehicles, the combat, the buddy system, etc.., they failed to see the obvious flaws that sprout from this design choice. It doesn't feel cohesive. Its less than the sum of its individual parts.
I tried many times to immerse myself into this game, but was pulled out of it again and again by the horrible combat and the seeming emptiness of the world. The lack of animals, both herbivores and absolutely, the carnivores, is a major turn off. That may be realistic in a way, but not when I am in a jungle. I want to see animals, so I get the impression the place is alive and dynamic. It's the choice between the down-to-earth and stylized approaches for realizing concepts, that these designers completely missed the point off. And all of the features and content, that provide interaction for the player, seem to be present for the necessity of interaction, rather than, that it meets the requirement that it's fun or interesting to do the interactions in the first place. The game has most likely a commercially large enough audience, but overall, I would say, that it is not even worth 50% of its price, and its been in development for more than 2 years!
It's basically an Assassin's Creed, but not as terrible as one. I remember a video preview I watched several weeks ago on a Dutch videogame website, where the developers talked about how awesome it was in Africa, how they experienced many cool things in Africa, but then a journalist rebutted the enthusiasm of the developers and the audience by asking whether anything of that was actually in the game itself. This resulted in a rather sketchy argument between developers and audience, and it showed that the developers didn't really spend that much time investing their experiences into the game itself. That alone should have been regarded as a red flag, in retrospect.
