Far Cry 2 “Full” review

My friends complaint my review was given too fast without enough playtime. Hey, it was a “mini” review, supposed to be like that. Well, having played it for almost 10 hours, here’s my “full review”, which doesn’t change that much honestly, though i’ll point out more things.

Story – The story is that you are some person with military experience, I put it this way because you can select between several characters at the start to use, however I believe the story stays the same. This person has been sent to Africa to eliminate a person known as “The Jackal”, who has basically been fueling the war between two factions by selling them weapons. However things don’t go as planned, and you end up losing track of him, and have to start hunting for him again by working for the two factions, and hopefully discovering some connections to The Jackal at the same time. A typical storyline, but works for me nonetheless. I’ve still yet to experience the whole story of course, but for now it seems alright to me, fair for a FPS.

Graphics – The graphics in this game look quite good to me. For a game based with a slight sandbox theme (which I discuss later in gameplay), the graphics are looking pretty good. The effects of fire burning are one of the main attractions really, it’s fun burning stuff around randomly and watching the fire spread. But otherwise, a good score from the graphics department. NB: technical-wise, this game apparently has issues (at this point I’m writing this) with people using certain gfx cards and drivers, including random crashes to desktop and BSODs. Hopefully you aren’t one of them, but I happen to be a victim actually.

Sound – Somewhat of a mixed opinion for me. The downside is the music. I find it very boring and plain, and within half an hour of playing, I’m already hearing the same music over and over again, the nothing is happening track, the theres fighting going on track, and the loading track. That’s all I can remember.  But the upside is the sound effects, of say weaponry. Each weapons sounds unique, and explosions and all that sound good too. Speech is somewhat mixed, with some people sounding alright, and some sounding like text to speech converters. Overall, a slightly above average score from sound.

Gameplay – Okay here’s the main part. I have a mate who described this game as “GTA V: Africa”. Not a bad description actually, just take away all the random activities and stuff you know you won’t get in a FPS. You take missions and execute them just like in GTA. Drive to where the person giving the mission is, travel to the location, do it, end. This is actually a bit of a letdown to me in this game. With guard posts along the road every 30 seconds or so, which have respawning guards once you travel away form it a certain distance, can be an extreme pain. You end up having to take out random enemies repetitively until you reach your destination. Oh, and you vehicle is GUARANTEED to get shot up as well while travelling, which either forces you to repair your car or hop into another one. Another frustrating thing to do thanks to the guard posts. This just breaks the action flow in a FPS. Sure, there’s bus rides, but there are only stops available at the 4 corners and the center of the map, not too much use when the map is so damn big if you ask me. Also, enemy AI is stupid. They shoot in the wrong direction, stare at you without shooting, and the typical silly AI bugs you can get in a FPS are all here. However if you can get used to the reptitiveness mentioned above, then you may actually enjoy the rest of the game. The main missions can be quite fun once you reach the action part of things. Theres side missions and side things to do as well, to keep you occupied for quite a while should you need some extra activities to be done. Overall, another mixed opinion from gameplay I suppose.

Overall – I’m afraid it will be too hard to go into every feature of gameplay, you can always read a full written review on a gaming site. But I suppose having given the game a chance and played more, and experiencing the fun parts of it, I’ll still be able to give this around an average of 8.

Max Payne – where’s the bullet time?

Today I went to watch Max Payne, as having played the game which revolutionized the use of slow-motion in games, I had to check out the movie. Unfortunately it was not as great as expected, but a friend of mine who never played the games thought it was actually alright.

And that is actually true from the story point of view. The movie had slightly “remixed” the story, moving characters around into slightly different positions, though the theme is the same: Payne’s dead family, the mystery behind it, and the drug Valkyr. Honestly the remix was not too bad, just that it may have been delivered better. Sometimes I think the problem with games-turned movies is that they don’t put enough effort into delivering the story, or end up using some lousy director, which is why most mess up. Also, just one slight issue. For those who have seen the trailers, you may have noticed the weird winged demons. These were created from the hallucinations of the drug. I thought it was rather extreme, but given the remix style of the story, it was alright. I must warn however, there are some rather “corny” scenes with the usage of the drug e.g. “ultimate rise from the dead style usage.” You’ll see what I mean if you decide to check the movie out.

But the major problem was the action. I believe most people who want to watch this have some pretty high expectations of the action, and I’m afraid to say it was a letdown. Not enough weapons, probably not even enough shooting scenes, and NOT ENOUGH BULLET TIME. There was practically no bullet time, with possibly only TWO extremely short slow motion shots, which were not even in an epic form of firefight.

Overall, I’ll probably give this only a 6/10. It can actually be rather confusing and harder to follow if you didn’t play the game, so even my viewpoint may be biased. If I myself didn’t play the game, I may have seen this as some random weird movie and might even score it on a 4/10, tops 5/10.