Far Cry 2 Hands-on Preview

First Impressions

As we soon found out, fire is one thing that Far Cry 2 does really well and though the game is undeniably beautiful nearly all the way through this was one effect which clearly stood out straight away. It manages to look both realistic and gorgeous at all times and interacts fully with the world around it.

In fact, fire may be one of the most powerful and amazing tools at the disposal of the player and we were frankly amazed as we watched our plan unfold in our second playthrough – starting a fire on one side of the hill and letting the wind carry it over and down into the huts below.

The enemies freaked as they became aware of our presence and it was quite simply wonderful to see their reactions. Some of them got caught in dead ends or stumbled into the flames. Others had their bodies littered with shrapnel when the flames licked at ammo depots or spread over propane tanks.

And every time something went ablaze, the game masterfully displayed it all in gorgeous graphics, with billowing smoke spewing forth cake-based lies from the mouth of a deranged robot overlord.


The sandbox the player has to play in and the different paths they can take is the other thing which stood out to us, as there really is nothing to stop you from mixing together different roads to victory. Over the course of several little skirmishes we tried lots of different things – strapping mines to cars and support structures as well as laying them in the ground, or blasting holes in walls with a shotgun to reach our objectives. The game never once prevented us.

In fact, the more we played, the more ways we found that the rules of the game had been created in such a way that they could be bent or broken if you understood them correctly – RPGs can be launched on a fuse so you can bounce them round corners, buildings burned to flush out the enemies within.

The relationships that players can build up throughout the game factor into this as well – as we found out when we rushed down into the burning shanty town and ended up taking a few too many shotgun rounds to the face. The room swam as we fell to the floor and the whole screen suddenly started to darken and blur until Warren burst on to the scene and saved our ass.

Pulling us to our feet, Warren too acted believably in the game world – clearing the room of enemies before moving out and healing us with syringes and lit flares once more. He handed us his sidearm and moved quickly off in to the fray while we backtracked and covered him from a distance with the rocket launcher and desert eagle.


Now admittedly we were a little disappointed that our plan to incinerate the ramshackle huts had failed so early on and that we had had to fall back and rely on Warren’s help, but the process actually helped to prove how great Far Cry 2 is when it comes to providing an emergent experience and an arena for players to experiment in and create their own stories.

This, if anything, would seem to be Far Cry 2s specialty – it just refuses to be consistent in any aspect of the game design. There are a few hard and fast rules which make the game world consistent with how we think the world should be – wind that blows, fire that spreads, wood that splinters – but that’s about it. The rest of the game is different every time you play it because the details are always changing.

Put simply, when it’s the case that the direction that the wind is blowing in can change your entire approach to a mission then you know you’re in for a hugely open and vastly replayable gaming experience.

Far Cry 2 may yet have problems we haven’t uncovered and granted that a single mission is no basis on which to judge an entire unreleased game – but if we were so foolish as to do judge in that way then Far Cry 2 is one game that we’d definitely get very excited about.