tjohn86 said:
Ive tried and failed to play farcry2 twice now... does it get better after the first gun fight? haha
To sum up the 10 "It sucks"/"it's awesome" comments:
The game can be awesome fun, but you need to
make it fun.
FC2 tries to be a freeform FPS game that lets you go wherever and complete missions all over the map in an effort to get you to experiment with its mechanics. It tries a variety of things to spice up the core gameplay - the fire spreading mechanics, the fact that rockets will occasionally mis-fire and cause havoc, guns will jam and decay, malaria will strike at the worst times, wild animals wander the game's plains, and random security patrols will try to shoot you. It also provides you with an extensive variety of FPS weapons - rocket launchers, mortars, silenced pistols, flare guns, shotguns, grenade launchers, flamethrowers, etc. - and essentially asks you to go to town figuring out how to use these different tools to invent new and hilarious ways to kill guys. I have all sorts of hilarious stories about guns jamming at just the wrong moment, or that time a rocket mis-fired and then exploded my only escape vehicle, or that time the enemy missed me, hit a gas tank, and I was caught by the resulting flames. It's pretty enthralling when you use a variety of weapons and go out of your way to place yourself in wacky scenarios.
But that's also the game's biggest weakness. It won't meet you half-way. If you play lazily or expect the game to bring the fun to you, the game sucks. You can churn through it with just your machine gun and a magnum, get frustrated at having to stop at every stupid goddamned security depot, and find the missions crazy repetitive because you're just shooting the same faceless mercs over and over again, and find the gun-jamming mechanics or random patrols to just be absolute annoyances instead of giving the game some variety. Transportation is often a bit of a pain, the malaria mechanic is more of a plot device than a great tool to spice up gameplay, and finding diamonds in random ass places is sometimes a pain.
Regardless of which camp you fall into, though, the first hour or two of the game are really slow. Things open up later, and that's either when the game starts being more fun or starts sucking. I will also say that if you ARE the type to find your own fun with the game, it gets more and more fun as more and more weapon options open to you. Rusty pistols and assault rifles in the early game are boring and prone to break compared to, say, a guy equipped with a mortar and some landmines. How are you gonna complete the raid on their base with THAT loadout? That's the sort of fun you need to find.
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