Far Cry 2
Scythe
Join Date: 2002-01-25 Member: 46NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Constellation, Reinforced - Silver
Join Date: 2002-01-25 Member: 46NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Constellation, Reinforced - Silver
<div class="IPBDescription">It's GTA in Africa, but good.</div>So I picked this up off Steam yesterday, let it download overnight.
First impression? Ugh. Second, third and subsequent impressions? Whee!
The game takes place in some fictional African state seemingly overrun with foreign mercenaries. There's two factions that don't like each-other much and a few minor players that you can cut deals with for medicine, weapons and help in a pinch. The basic gameplay revolves around getting a mission, driving to a location, shooting a tonne of guys in the head, blowing up some stuff and then returning for your reward. It's a solid formula and FC2 pulls it off pretty well.
The driving is polished and forgiving enough to be fun. There's a few different types of car, each handling slightly differently. Some have guns on the top for crazed Fishburnian machine-gunning, another is a home-built, low-to-the-ground dirt buggy. There's also fanboats around the place to traverse the waterways that crisscross the map. One thing that did niggle me, after recently having played through Crysis again, was the very simplistic damage models on the vehicles. They've got three states: Working, not working and exploded. There's no shooting tires or other damage, it's either a leaky radiator or complete incineration. It's slightly disappointing, but forgivable given it takes some of the pressure out of ambushes, not having to avoid hitting the tires.
The shooting is, in a word, weird. It's a strange amalgam of hardcore FPS and arcadey hop'n'pop. I'm playing sans crosshairs on the "hardcore" difficulty level, but shooting unzoomed tends to produce suspiciously good results. Holding the RMB brings up iron sights for precise aiming, but with the default ironsights it doesn't seem any better than shooting from the hip. I only begun to notice a difference when using an aimpoint or scope. The guns you acquire from fallen enemies jam with depressing frequency and you must reload and wait a few seconds to unjam them. This was an annoyance for me when first starting out, but becomes less of an issue later on once you start to buy your own guns. All the guns feel nice, with a solid punch to the sound and good first person animations. Hitting an enemy produces an impressive spurt of blood, making the act of shooting someone in the god-damned face a pleasurable one.
There's a kind of mild RPG element to how you acquire guns. Once you get to the gun shop and purchase something, that thing, be it a gun or a piece of equipment, will always be available at the nearby armoury. You'll never have to buy the same gun twice. Performing missions for the gun dealer unlocks different guns for purchase. These missions typically involve going to a location and blowing up a convoy of assuredly inferior firearms. However upon inspection of the trucks supposedly carrying these sub-standard shootans they appear to be either totally invisible or non-existent. In any case, the gun dealer thanks you for blowing up an empty truck by unlocking the next tier of weaponry for purchase. In addition to guns you can buy upgrades to accuracy and reliability for each weapon, along with bandoliers for extra ammo and storage crates at your safehouses.
These safehouses are scattered about the place. They're usually guarded by two or three baddies. Once they're dead you can then use this house to rest, resupply and rearm. There are various upgrades available for your safehouses. I've unlocked the vehicle upgrade which assures me that there'll be a vehicle to be found at every safehouse I visit. I suspect that further on there'll be unlocks to add medpacks and weapons, but I'll have to play further through.
One of the game's bullet points is fact that you must find medicine to survive. This is more or less true, every so often your view will go fuzzy around the edges and you'll need to pop an anti-malarial tablet to fix yourself up. This is, on the surface, a fairly insubstantial gimmick but it does remind you that your guy is naught but a human, not some ubersuit-equipped strongman. The medicine is obtained from the local church in exchange for blackmail material against the local men in power.
People always complain about how these "vidya games" are teaching our kids to become mass murderers. I'm more concerned about FC2 teaching our kids to be <b>really bad automobile mechanics</b>. Whenever your vehicle becomes damaged by anything, gunfire, bushfire, flipping off a rock and rolling seven times, you repair it by tightening a nut on the engine with a ratchet. That's it. On some cars the magic nut is mysteriously the radiator cap, on other cars it's a spark plug. As far as a game mechanic goes it's fine; even if it gives the 'ole suspension-of-disbelief gland a serious workout.
Another of the purported game-changers in FC2 is fire. They say you can light a fire and watch it sweep through an enemy camp, doing your job for you in a spectacular blaze. This is actually pretty much the case. Fire looks incredible and can be very destructive if you use it properly. It doesn't quite live up to the claim of being the greatest innovation in gaming since the invention of the first person perspective but it's still mighty impressive. Once a fire has swept through a location the ground is blackened with burned grass, however some buildings seem to be mysteriously unaffected by having been on fire mere seconds before. A puzzler to be sure.
The currency of the game is diamonds. These're acquired by either doing missions or finding them randomly about the map. There's a green light on your gps-######-magic-diamond-finder that blinks whenever there's a diamond in the vicinity. Hop out of your car and hunt it down for an extra unit or two of currency. I haven't completed many missions thusfar, but the ones I have finished returned a reward to the tune of ten diamond-bucks, worth roughly one starter mid-range unlock.
Health in the game is handled by a partitioned health bar. Your health will regenerate up to one of these partitions after a few seconds of not being shot, but to be healed properly you'll need a syringe of magic healing fluid. If you're bumped down to below the bottom partition you'll need to perform a first aid action. This involves pressing "h" on your keyboard while your character does something amazingly badass to himself with a knife, a pair of pliers and a bundle of matches. This takes about five seconds and gives you two bars of health back. If you don't perform first aid, you bleed out and you're down.
There's a kind of buddy system in the game. It boils down to a kind of extra lives thing. If you get shot down in a firefight one of your buddies will appear and drag you out of it, giving you a few notches of health and some ammo to get back in and finish the fight, or run the hell away. Once your buddy has saved you it'll be a little while before your buddy can save you again. I'm not 100% sure of the timing of the mechanic, but it's basically a get-out-of-death free card that you can only play once every so often.
The graphics are, to be clear, utterly astounding. While it may not quite tick all the boxes that Crysis did, it still comes out on top in overall graphical quality. The rolling Savannah whispering under the breeze, sun rays peeking through the fronds of a gently waving tree, glowing cinders being blown ahead of the raging grassfire... it really is one of the most beautiful games I've ever seen. On occasion I've done a double take and thought "My, games <b>have</b> come a long way, haven't they?" Initially I was annoyed by the hyperactive HDR, not unlike other games, but I soon grew accustomed to it. Immersion is given a boost when you step out of the hot African sun into the shade of a hut and have to wait a second for your eyes to adjust to the gloom.
Sound quality is somewhat poopy. I've got an Asus Xonar D2X with an external DTS 5.1 decoder. Crysis sounds like a pair of supermodels whispering sweet nothings in your ears. FC2 sounds like a mediocre stripper nasally complaining about the lack of tips. It's functional, but after Crysis' audio ecstasy it doesn't quite cut the mustard. If you're inside a building all sound outside the building have a strange muffled filter applied to them. This is fine if you're deep inside the house, but if you're just inside the threshold looking at a guy hiding behind a barrel a metre away and it sounds like he's yelling through a pillow, immersion is shattered. Character voices are too quiet to comfortably hear, making subtitles a necessity. For most of the characters the voice acting is passable. They speak words that can be parsed by those proficient in english. That's about it. The exception is the voice of the main antagonist, The Jackal. He's voiced exceptionally well.
The biggest beef I've got with the game is the enemies incredible perceptive abilities. They're able to see straight through grass, trees and sometimes corrugated iron. They'll be shooting you and you've no option but to blindly shoot in the direction of their muzzleflash or run away. It's a mild annoyance, but something that a clever modder will sort out in the near future, if Ubisoft doesn't fix it themselves. It's not a game-breaker, it just makes you play the game a bit more cautiously.
Another annoyance is the road checkpoints. At roughly half the intersections on the map there's a camp of three or four guys that take pot-shots at you as you drive along. Clearing them out gets you a little congratulatory message, but come back ten minutes later and they'll've all respawned again. A redeeming fact is that they'll always have a car there, so if you're without wheels you can always hump to the nearest intersection, kill a few guys and pick up a vehicle.
tl;dl: If you've got the hardware, and like the sound of GTA in the African plains, buy it.
--Scythe--
P.S. My specs:
E8600 dual-core 3.33GHz
HD4870X2
4GB DDR3
Asus Xonar D2X
WinXPSP2 64bit
P.P.S.S. Forgot to mention: Your assault rifles are all full-auto. No single shot or burst fire. Wtf, srsly.
First impression? Ugh. Second, third and subsequent impressions? Whee!
The game takes place in some fictional African state seemingly overrun with foreign mercenaries. There's two factions that don't like each-other much and a few minor players that you can cut deals with for medicine, weapons and help in a pinch. The basic gameplay revolves around getting a mission, driving to a location, shooting a tonne of guys in the head, blowing up some stuff and then returning for your reward. It's a solid formula and FC2 pulls it off pretty well.
The driving is polished and forgiving enough to be fun. There's a few different types of car, each handling slightly differently. Some have guns on the top for crazed Fishburnian machine-gunning, another is a home-built, low-to-the-ground dirt buggy. There's also fanboats around the place to traverse the waterways that crisscross the map. One thing that did niggle me, after recently having played through Crysis again, was the very simplistic damage models on the vehicles. They've got three states: Working, not working and exploded. There's no shooting tires or other damage, it's either a leaky radiator or complete incineration. It's slightly disappointing, but forgivable given it takes some of the pressure out of ambushes, not having to avoid hitting the tires.
The shooting is, in a word, weird. It's a strange amalgam of hardcore FPS and arcadey hop'n'pop. I'm playing sans crosshairs on the "hardcore" difficulty level, but shooting unzoomed tends to produce suspiciously good results. Holding the RMB brings up iron sights for precise aiming, but with the default ironsights it doesn't seem any better than shooting from the hip. I only begun to notice a difference when using an aimpoint or scope. The guns you acquire from fallen enemies jam with depressing frequency and you must reload and wait a few seconds to unjam them. This was an annoyance for me when first starting out, but becomes less of an issue later on once you start to buy your own guns. All the guns feel nice, with a solid punch to the sound and good first person animations. Hitting an enemy produces an impressive spurt of blood, making the act of shooting someone in the god-damned face a pleasurable one.
There's a kind of mild RPG element to how you acquire guns. Once you get to the gun shop and purchase something, that thing, be it a gun or a piece of equipment, will always be available at the nearby armoury. You'll never have to buy the same gun twice. Performing missions for the gun dealer unlocks different guns for purchase. These missions typically involve going to a location and blowing up a convoy of assuredly inferior firearms. However upon inspection of the trucks supposedly carrying these sub-standard shootans they appear to be either totally invisible or non-existent. In any case, the gun dealer thanks you for blowing up an empty truck by unlocking the next tier of weaponry for purchase. In addition to guns you can buy upgrades to accuracy and reliability for each weapon, along with bandoliers for extra ammo and storage crates at your safehouses.
These safehouses are scattered about the place. They're usually guarded by two or three baddies. Once they're dead you can then use this house to rest, resupply and rearm. There are various upgrades available for your safehouses. I've unlocked the vehicle upgrade which assures me that there'll be a vehicle to be found at every safehouse I visit. I suspect that further on there'll be unlocks to add medpacks and weapons, but I'll have to play further through.
One of the game's bullet points is fact that you must find medicine to survive. This is more or less true, every so often your view will go fuzzy around the edges and you'll need to pop an anti-malarial tablet to fix yourself up. This is, on the surface, a fairly insubstantial gimmick but it does remind you that your guy is naught but a human, not some ubersuit-equipped strongman. The medicine is obtained from the local church in exchange for blackmail material against the local men in power.
People always complain about how these "vidya games" are teaching our kids to become mass murderers. I'm more concerned about FC2 teaching our kids to be <b>really bad automobile mechanics</b>. Whenever your vehicle becomes damaged by anything, gunfire, bushfire, flipping off a rock and rolling seven times, you repair it by tightening a nut on the engine with a ratchet. That's it. On some cars the magic nut is mysteriously the radiator cap, on other cars it's a spark plug. As far as a game mechanic goes it's fine; even if it gives the 'ole suspension-of-disbelief gland a serious workout.
Another of the purported game-changers in FC2 is fire. They say you can light a fire and watch it sweep through an enemy camp, doing your job for you in a spectacular blaze. This is actually pretty much the case. Fire looks incredible and can be very destructive if you use it properly. It doesn't quite live up to the claim of being the greatest innovation in gaming since the invention of the first person perspective but it's still mighty impressive. Once a fire has swept through a location the ground is blackened with burned grass, however some buildings seem to be mysteriously unaffected by having been on fire mere seconds before. A puzzler to be sure.
The currency of the game is diamonds. These're acquired by either doing missions or finding them randomly about the map. There's a green light on your gps-######-magic-diamond-finder that blinks whenever there's a diamond in the vicinity. Hop out of your car and hunt it down for an extra unit or two of currency. I haven't completed many missions thusfar, but the ones I have finished returned a reward to the tune of ten diamond-bucks, worth roughly one starter mid-range unlock.
Health in the game is handled by a partitioned health bar. Your health will regenerate up to one of these partitions after a few seconds of not being shot, but to be healed properly you'll need a syringe of magic healing fluid. If you're bumped down to below the bottom partition you'll need to perform a first aid action. This involves pressing "h" on your keyboard while your character does something amazingly badass to himself with a knife, a pair of pliers and a bundle of matches. This takes about five seconds and gives you two bars of health back. If you don't perform first aid, you bleed out and you're down.
There's a kind of buddy system in the game. It boils down to a kind of extra lives thing. If you get shot down in a firefight one of your buddies will appear and drag you out of it, giving you a few notches of health and some ammo to get back in and finish the fight, or run the hell away. Once your buddy has saved you it'll be a little while before your buddy can save you again. I'm not 100% sure of the timing of the mechanic, but it's basically a get-out-of-death free card that you can only play once every so often.
The graphics are, to be clear, utterly astounding. While it may not quite tick all the boxes that Crysis did, it still comes out on top in overall graphical quality. The rolling Savannah whispering under the breeze, sun rays peeking through the fronds of a gently waving tree, glowing cinders being blown ahead of the raging grassfire... it really is one of the most beautiful games I've ever seen. On occasion I've done a double take and thought "My, games <b>have</b> come a long way, haven't they?" Initially I was annoyed by the hyperactive HDR, not unlike other games, but I soon grew accustomed to it. Immersion is given a boost when you step out of the hot African sun into the shade of a hut and have to wait a second for your eyes to adjust to the gloom.
Sound quality is somewhat poopy. I've got an Asus Xonar D2X with an external DTS 5.1 decoder. Crysis sounds like a pair of supermodels whispering sweet nothings in your ears. FC2 sounds like a mediocre stripper nasally complaining about the lack of tips. It's functional, but after Crysis' audio ecstasy it doesn't quite cut the mustard. If you're inside a building all sound outside the building have a strange muffled filter applied to them. This is fine if you're deep inside the house, but if you're just inside the threshold looking at a guy hiding behind a barrel a metre away and it sounds like he's yelling through a pillow, immersion is shattered. Character voices are too quiet to comfortably hear, making subtitles a necessity. For most of the characters the voice acting is passable. They speak words that can be parsed by those proficient in english. That's about it. The exception is the voice of the main antagonist, The Jackal. He's voiced exceptionally well.
The biggest beef I've got with the game is the enemies incredible perceptive abilities. They're able to see straight through grass, trees and sometimes corrugated iron. They'll be shooting you and you've no option but to blindly shoot in the direction of their muzzleflash or run away. It's a mild annoyance, but something that a clever modder will sort out in the near future, if Ubisoft doesn't fix it themselves. It's not a game-breaker, it just makes you play the game a bit more cautiously.
Another annoyance is the road checkpoints. At roughly half the intersections on the map there's a camp of three or four guys that take pot-shots at you as you drive along. Clearing them out gets you a little congratulatory message, but come back ten minutes later and they'll've all respawned again. A redeeming fact is that they'll always have a car there, so if you're without wheels you can always hump to the nearest intersection, kill a few guys and pick up a vehicle.
tl;dl: If you've got the hardware, and like the sound of GTA in the African plains, buy it.
--Scythe--
P.S. My specs:
E8600 dual-core 3.33GHz
HD4870X2
4GB DDR3
Asus Xonar D2X
WinXPSP2 64bit
P.P.S.S. Forgot to mention: Your assault rifles are all full-auto. No single shot or burst fire. Wtf, srsly.
Comments
1) You have to travel extremely far for pretty much any objective, especially the gun merchant ones.
2) Everyone who isn't you shoots at you constantly, and they'll follow you disturbing distances so even when you think you've killed the guy chasing you, 3 minutes later you'll be shot in the back by his friend who was following him. And there are people *everywhere*. Guard points / roadblocks are especially annoying because if you try to blow through them in a car, the AI gets in their car(s) and follow, meaning you have to get out and fight or if you're in a truck with a machine gun, hop in the back and kill them, then repair your car, and get on with it. The fact that you can't shoot out of your window, even blind firing, is a bit silly, considering you're an ultimate badass whose idea of first aid is to push a bullet in your forearm out through the other side and inject some morphine.
These two things, combined, make for some serious annoyance. To get to your mission objective, you'll have to pass through at least 2 checkpoints. This means either getting out of your car to clear them (which takes time), or blowing through them with a car and killing the chasers (takes time and you'll probably take a hit before you can get to the machine gun). The only other option is to avoid them completely, but you can't do that in a car, and it takes forever to sneak through a back path on foot.
This in itself wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for the fact that you have to drive stupidly long distances to get to any objective. Then it just becomes an annoying chore, and by the time you get to the objective, which is supposed to be the fun part, you're pretty much bored of shooting folk.
Driving long distances all the time? Not a problem. The game is nice to look at and driving is kinda fun.
Being attacked everywhere you go? Not a problem. That's something pretty much all FPS' do; it's what an FPS *is*.
Combining the two? Rage.
Wrong. One of the rifles (perhaps the latest unlocked actually) is burst.
Edit: That's why you use the busses stick! they're awesome.
Really.
am I right in thinking that certain publishers are so afraid of new IPs that they would actually slap another franchise a new game that is entirely unrelated and could probably stand quite well as its own IP?
Oh wait, what am I thinking? That question was answered years ago with Starfox Adventures, AKA Dinosaur planet.. at least they had the decency of copy/pasting staples the parasite franchise into the game <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":(" border="0" alt="sad-fix.gif" />
I mean, I'm interested in Far Cry 2, it looks great. But at the same time I'm wondering if its actually a Far Cry game, or if not, will we ever actually see another 'Far Cry' Far Cry game?
Edit: That's why you use the busses stick! they're awesome.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I do use the buses, that's why I said "at least two" rather than like "eight" or something. Even the *idea* of going from the very south of the map to the very north without using the buses is horrifying. I think I'd actually be out of ammo before I got to my mission.
Gnu vs Car Cry 2
Really, the only problem I have with it at all is how I can't drive anywhere without getting in a firefight. Now granted, these Firefights often end up being fun, but just make them happen less than every 30 seconds of driving, and I'd be totally cool with it.
I'm really enjoying just the world simulation of it, too- being out in the desert seems cold, nearly freezing so. During the day it feels like my character is gonna die any minute. The fact that a normal firefight can, and often will, result in a fire, is a lot of fun. Outsmarting the AI(Which so many places said was bad, and I'm finding it to be just-competent-enough) is fun and rewarding. The world is designed just absolutely amazingly. And the first-person-ness is handled very well.
I have initiated a project that, if successful, will result in me physically having sex with the weapon-jam animations. I cross my leg over the other, everytime i see those. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/nerd-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="::nerdy::" border="0" alt="nerd-fix.gif" />
The enemies' weapons not jamming is a tough design choice to swallow.
edit: having read a little about it, it seems that the golden ak will jam after what some guy said was 50+ clips.
I have initiated a project that, if successful, will result in me physically having sex with the weapon-jam animations. I cross my leg over the other, everytime i see those. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/nerd-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="::nerdy::" border="0" alt="nerd-fix.gif" />
The enemies' weapons not jamming is a tough design choice to swallow.
edit: having read a little about it, it seems that the golden ak will jam after what some guy said was 50+ clips.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I got a golden big-ass pistol from when Clyde died on me. ######er couldn't take 2 bullets after a mission.
I usually just blaze straight past them. I look behind me and see them get in the car but they only follow you for a hundred metres or so. Just keep on truckin' and they give up.
<!--quoteo(post=1691545:date=Oct 27 2008, 11:47 PM:name=Sonic)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Sonic @ Oct 27 2008, 11:47 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1691545"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Enemies guns never ever jam or explode in their hands but they turn into rusted pieces of ###### the second you pick them up. Yeah right.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Actually I've been in a firefight with a lone guy and I've heard him go "*click* *click* ######!" and he got out his sidearm. I dunno if he ran out of ammo or his gun jammed. Usually they reload if they run out.
<!--quoteo(post=1691551:date=Oct 28 2008, 12:46 AM:name=ANeM)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(ANeM @ Oct 28 2008, 12:46 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1691551"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->My only real question is: How is this in any way related to the first Far Cry at all?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
No. If you want a sequel to the original Far Cry, get Crysis. Crytek made FC1 and lost the IP to Ubisoft. Crytek went their own way and made Crysis.
<!--quoteo(post=1691555:date=Oct 28 2008, 02:29 AM:name=6john)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(6john @ Oct 28 2008, 02:29 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1691555"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->how is the multiplayer? what modes are there? is it something that would still be fun after a month?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Dunno, haven't tried MP yet.
--Scythe--
So, needless to say, it's worthless until the patch. And even then it doesn't really live up to my expectations, and my expectations weren't that high. I even prefer stalker:clear sky, tbh.
Its well known that using guns and using the internet are mutually exclusive abilities.
To be fair he sends out emails to doctors but doesn't seem to get any responses back.
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am a [mercenary] from [The Jackal's Territory] and need your help. I understand you are a savvy investor who knows the importance of acting quickly, and I will pay you a large sum of money in [diamonds and guns] for [malaria medication] if you can deliver it to my [safe house in the middle of Africa]. I promise this is not a scam and I will not [kill you/your family/your pets]. Please make your response post haste as others will want my [diamonds and guns] and this is a time senstitive offer.
I ought to give this sucker a whirl. I tried Dead Space and I can't get into it because it's too scary... like, it's not that I refuse to play it because I'm scared and I'm going to pee my pants or something - but being scared makes me play realllly slowly and conservatively, which then leads to boredom, because I'm creeping around wondering where the next freak is going to come from and it makes me take 2 years to get from point A to point B... so yeah, I should give Far Cry a chance instead.
I don't like it. Sorry, perhaps I'm being unfair, but I just don't see what's so amazing about it. I'm going to ramble here, so don't take these in any particular order, they're just how I came to them.
- Gun Degradation.
You know, jamming is kind of interesting; I like it. It, as Quanaut mentioned, forces you to consider your alternatives at any given time. However, apparently being FROM Africa gives you a magical aura where your gun jams only 2% of the time, whereas being IN Africa means your gun jams when you attempt to do something novel like fire bullets from it.
Seriously, as a game mechanic, at least make it consistent.
- Malaria.
I have absolutely zero idea why this is in the game, aside from a nod to 'Hey, let's make them grind, that works for MMO's!'. Why is it even there? It does absolutely nothing for the game. Oh, and whilst I'm at it, once I've got half a dozen malaria tablets, say, enough to survive for several millenia, how come I can't just go looking for the Jackal now, why do I need to do missions for you people? I mean, I'm not going to get sick anymore, and I'm pretty sure no matter how badass he is, a couple of 5.56mm NATO to the face will sort out anything that's a bipedal ape descendant.
- Factions.
Why does everyone hate me so much? Is it just natural in Africa to open fire on any human you don't recognise on sight? I've give an example. At the start of the game, having received my first mission to go and clear out a safe house, I thought 'Yeah right, I've been given a CAR and a GUN from this guy with no reason to come back and do his dirty work, how about I just, oooh, I don't know, leave?' (perhaps my Bushido code forces me to comply) and drove somewhere else, a Lumber Mill, to be exact. Upon arriving, I've not set foot out of my car (actually, I didn't even make it entirely TO the Lumber Mill) before coming under fire. Are these the most isolationist Lumberjacks ever, perhaps? Don't even think of going to the 'Chicken' *Shakes fist at swear filter* Fighting, it happened even faster there. Incidentally, Chickens 1. Don't mind you firing automatic weapons near them, and 2. Don't fight.
- Graphics.
It just isn't all that. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty, very pretty. But no prettier than Crysis was, and on equivalent settings seems to run slower if you pop them side by side. Fire is cool and everything (although it sometimes mysteriously won't spread) but it's not THAT impressive. This might be my expecting improvments on what we saw in Crysis, but some things (I tossed a grenade into water for example, and it looks downright BAD) look genuinely worse.
Tyres should go bang, by the way.
- Timing / Mission Control.
Another early mission is to go visit a Bar to get further information. You're told by no less than 3 different NPC's to do this. "Visit Mike's Bar!" they drone. "Okay" I silently emote to myself as the nice little drone I am, because incidentally you never say no to anyone, it seems. However what nobody decided to mention is that if you go at the wrong time of day, there won't be anywhere there. There also won't be anyone in the gun store, which has a visible stockpile of every weapon in the game. However, despite the only thing standing between you & Texas Gun-Nut nirvana is a padlock on a mesh fence, we won't break in, because <i>that would be wrong</i>.
I did so delight in having to drive BACK to the Safe House to pass some time. Apparently I'm unable to look at my watch unless I'm in the presence of a nice cot. Some sort of phobia I have, I presume. Incidentally, where does everyone else sleep? Are they all ninjas?
- Oh, you crazy threatening NPC's.
The NPC's in the 'Neutral Town' are very hostile, but won't shoot you if you don't shoot them. Interestingly though, they DO threaten to '**** you up', if you continue to 'Get in their face'. However, much like most bullies, they actually don't. I merrily pushed one around with a car, and nobody seems to actually mind. All talk, I say.
- Animals
You hear a lot. Where are they? I'm yet to see a monkey, but I can hear one every 3 feet.
- Machete
matchet \matchet\ n.
a large heavy knife used in Central and South America as a
weapon or for cutting vegetation; usually called machete.
NOT MINE! Mine is mostly used for swinging at trees ineffectually whilst I'm waiting for the people to show up for work. Perhaps mine is a magical African machete.
It's like a flawed gem. There's a great idea in there, nice open world, go play. But it's just so full of niggles so far I don't think I'll actually give it the time of day. I'd probably give the 'demo' a try before buying it, put it that way.
It's like a flawed gem that contains a bunch of other, smaller flawed gems that you can track down with your magical GPS sensor! You'd think more people would buy one of those if it leads you to diamonds.
Unintentional racism is wrong and funny, all at once.
You know, the dude who gave me my first mission quite clearly stated that the suitcases the diamonds are in have GPS tracking chips or something in them. The GPS doesn't track diamonds, it tracks the cases.
That still doesn't explain why a rather expensive looking case, complete with what must be at least $100 worth of GPS tracking hardware in it, is doing sitting under a bush with a single, uncut diamond inside it, in the middle of nowhere.
Yeah, the Malaria thing kinda bugs me. As does being forced to obey weird rules. Why *can't* I just smash down the door in the weapons shop? Who's going to stop me? I just wiped out an entire camp of 30 people and killed their leader with a machete chop to the crotch. A single weapons merchant isn't much of a problem.
Oh, people might not like me if I did that? Man. I wouldn't want that. People might start randomly shooting at me in the wilderness. That would be *terrible*.
Haven't gotten my hands on it yet but soon. Isn't anyone playing around with the AI? There were some videos with quite impressive AI responses when you hurt a bad guy and then a second bad guy nearby slowly scans the area while creeping towards the hurt one, then try to carry him to safety, "What happens next is your moral choice to make".
Oh, so he's not human then?
Pedant. I haven't hit the obligatory 'aliens invade' section yet.
Svenpa, there is no such thing. There's Doom style 'Shoot at you until you die or they do' as far as I can tell. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" />
I died from malaria in the jungle, fell out my open car door. When I woke up, a doctor stood there, staring at my with the eyes of a mother whose son just fell down a tree: "You should know better, now now, everythingn's fine"
I don't have my pills, and the dealers just laugh at me when I invade their homes sporting a 12-gauge and a machete.