One of the great things I love about Far Cry 2 is that it's an open world that I'm able to pop into, take a job blowing something up, and be satisfied that I can walk away with something accomplished. Along the way I'll have wandered through an amazing virtual landscape having felt like I had actually been transported to the savannah, I'll have blasted my way through some intense firefights, and I'll undoubted have set fire to several acres of dense jungle foliage. It's 45 minutes you can feel good about.
That's where I am tonight. I pop in while my wife is giving my son a bath, I've taken the dog out, I know I've got a few minutes to myself. Lights off, 7.1 headphones on. I'm in the middle of Pala, the main town almost exactly in the middle of the 20 square mile stretch of Africa that acts as the setting for the game. I'm a gun for hire, and I've just accepted a mission from one of the local warlords to assassinate his rival, who is hiding in a secret location up in the mountains pretty far to the north. He pays in diamonds... what can I say?
With my targets noted on my in-game GPS and map, I'm able to plan any number of routes and strategies through this huge play area to complete my objectives, trying to make best use of terrain while avoiding concentrations of hostiles. That's the real crux of this game in a nutshell -- the idea of a "
self-constructing narrative" that is so rarely done well (if ever). For me, I think it's freakin awesome, and it's got me hooked.

For this mission, my target is holed up on top of a mountain and I'll take a boat up a winding river, through multiple enemy checkpoints en route. I know it's going to be like riding through a shooting gallery on a dingy driven by a lawnmower engine, so after I've stocked up on ammunition and medicine, I make my way to a safehouse nearby. Here is where FC2 also makes really fun use of night/day cycles and dynamic weather conditions: I have my character sleep through the rest of the day so I can try my run up the river under the cover of dark. At night, the guards will be much less attentive.
I wake up to find a massive MONSOON has blown in. I don't know if this really happens in Africa, but in the few hours I spent sleeping to pass the daylight, it went from beautiful sunny day to violent wind and torrential rain... and the FC2 engine does weather like nothing I've ever seen before -- the trees are bent over, leaves are flying, rain is pouring, mist and humidity in the air makes a fog that kills visibility.
As far as my mission is concerned, this isn't so good for me. While I've got increased cover for making my way up the river, I can't really see. That means increased chances of bumping right into hostiles at close range, something that I can't combat very well with a silenced pistol and sniper rifle. Re-arming would be difficult at this point, so I decide to give it a try as is.
As I commandeer a small boat and start up the engine, I love the fact that I can barely hear it running through the overwhelming volume of the storm. And as I make my way into the canyon that will lead me to my target, I find myself more protected from the storm. That means the fog has collected heavily, making it ever more difficult to see. I think to myself whether the engine could actually be that good, or if my imagination is just running wild in such an immersive game-world.

After just a few minutes of jetting my dingy upriver, I come upon an enemy checkpoint that I don't see until it's too late. The 3 or 4 men posted there unload with shotguns and machine guns at close range, and I'm caught. I'm literally startled, and end up just bailing out of the boat, swimming underwater to a point a few yards back where I can get on land.
I'm a sitting duck here with no good weapons for a frontal assault, severely injured, and it'll be seconds before the hostiles figure out where I've gone to. Here in the canyon, I can only go forward, so I improvise a "diversion"... with my bazooka. I take aim at a vehicle near the center of their post, and let it fly. As the jeep explodes in a brilliant blast, I get a glimpse of FC2's cutting-edge physics engine. A small hut next to the jeep splinters in all directions, at least one unfortunately soul standing close by gets catapulted in a perfect arc into the river, and several others are knocked out. It all looks just so good, and while I stand there gawking at the fact that the fire is spreading over the rooftops of other adjacent huts, I realize that I'm being burned from a fire behind me that was started from the flashout from the rear of the bazooka... Yeah. Far Cry 2 does fire pretty freaking good.
I take advantage of my very effective distraction to take a moment to perform some impromptu surgery, which is Far Cry 2's way of "healing". I see my character pull out a pair of pliers and yank a bullet from his leg, then inject himself with painkillers. This is just one of those details that adds up to make a great experience. Depending on the situation, I may have seen him patting a fire out on his leg, removing shards of wood or metal from his body, or applying bandages to his tattooed arm.
With nowhere to go but forward, I make my way to a nearby docked boat. I dispatch the few hostiles that are left at close range with my machete, just for style points, and get moving. The fire will die down fast because of the rain, and more baddies are on their way.
Back on a strangely similar dingy, I continue my journey upriver. As I near the mountain hideout where my target is holed up, I come upon a brilliant waterfall that marks the end of the navigable part of the river. There's a dock near a small path off to side, and I take out the few posted hostiles with some sneaky pistol-work through tall grass. As I wind my way up the cliffside and out of the canyon, the fog lifts. I'm able to spot a group of huts clustered on the other side of a gorge, accessible only by a long rope bridge.
Chokepoint, you say? Suicide? Trap?

Nope, bazooka/sniper = done. See, now that visibility has cleared, I open up the festivities by setting their houses on fire. That flushes out a small army which has one way to get to me -- across a single file bridge. They are the sitting ducks now, and I spend a few minutes running from one covered position to the next, keeping mobile while I take out anyone that tries to come across. When I'm satisfied their ranks have been thinned sufficiently, I charge across the bridge, grab an automatic weapon from one of my unlucky victims, and do a room-to-room search for my target. When I meet him, there's no drama. I crack a Molotov over his head (again, for style) and make a run for it, because the baddies are still after me and I still have to make it out alive. At close range indoors, I can easily get wasted if I make one mistake.
Back across the bridge, I run into some hostiles that have been drawn to the commotion from outside the complex. As long as I stay moving, I'll be fine -- they'll chase after me, but they're cautious. The will to live and fear of death is built into the AI. I use that to my advantage when I'm making an escape.
Back on the river, I'm able to safely make it through the enemy checkpoints now that I know where they are and the storm has calmed down. Pretty soon, I'm back in town, replenished and re-stocked, ready for my next job as a Contract Terrorist in Africa. Good times.
What's so great about this, is that nobody else that has played Far Cry 2 will have had the same exact experience as me, even at this exact same point in the game. None of this stuff is scripted. Someone else may have taken different weapons or a different route, or one hostile may have been at a different point in his patrol rounds and could have screwed everything up by being in the wrong place for me. Someone else might like to use mounted guns on vehicles more than me, or might decide to fly in on a handglider instead of walking. Heck, maybe someone can get lucky from 2 miles away with a mortar and take that guy out without even being anywhere close.
I'm not a big "sandbox" guy, either. What I mean is, I don't get a real big kick out of just "existing" in a game world. Buying real estate and playing darts in GTA4 isn't up my alley, but the fact that Far Cry 2 gives me this overarcing, purposeful mission - kill the Jackal -- breaks through my anti-sandboxism. It's sooooo sweet -- did I say that yet?
I'm really happy for Ubisoft Montreal and what they've done here. I absolutely
hated Assassin's Creed from these guys, but I can see where they've taken some of the concepts from that game, and improved on them exponentially. They've been able to do something with the Far Cry franchise that Crytek (original Far Cry dev) hasn't been able to hold a candle to with
Crysis. It's not perfect -- I've seen quite a bit of AI screwups and geometry/texture pop-in which takes away from the immersiveness, but when a game does everything else right, stuff like that is
easily forgiven. Game first, graphics are sugar.