God bless those ker-azy Frenchmen. The city of Paris is a beautiful locale that offers worldly travelers the chance to experience some truly unique things. Examples: frog’s legs and snails to eat, ‘Royale with Cheese’ McDonald’s burgers, and burlesque houses with more nipples on display than a dairy cow convention.
Paris is also where we recently sat down to try out a host of upcoming Ubisoft titles recently and the biggest game of the show was undoubtedly Far Cry 2, the unimaginatively titled sequel to Far Cry. Whereas the first game was set in a tropical paradise and infused you with crazy primal abilities; FC2 will transport us to Africa and has ditched the unnatural scifi abilities for natural born killer gameplay.
Like the previous game, FC2 is a game that occurs over a large environment and it is completely up to you how you want to tackle any given situation, but unlike Far Cry this sequel is completely unfettered by any loading screens. Selecting from one of nine playable characters you’re tasked with eliminating The Jackal, a mysterious enemy who is actively supplying two warring mercenary groups. Anyone familiar with the movie Yojimbo will know the score here; you play the mercenaries off against one another by causing mischief.
Given that the environment is so huge there was a greater emphasis on using our map and compass to effectively navigate through the 50 square kilometers of dangerous Africa. Judging by our onscreen map, the game world is littered with various safe houses where you can sleep to advance time, mysterious bus icons which suggest fast travel points, and our favourite destination – gun stores. Scouting this environment is a skill you will need to learn, and it pays to scan the enemy camps with a binocular to discover enemy positions, useful items, and stealable vehicles and ammo - all of which become represented on a smaller tactical map.
Rivers are like highways in the game. You can use them to move quickly around the map and reach your objectives, but you’re obviously quite exposed when you do it. When you’re on the river you can spot zebra whose ‘needs based’ AI has deemed that they should get a drink. It’s just a shame there are no predators in the game – we would’ve loved to see a crocodile whose ‘needs based’ AI has determined that they should eat a zebra. Or better yet, you. That would’ve been kinda cool. “Sorry we’re late honey, traffic on the river was a bitch, and a crocodile was all up in my face and stuff…”
