How painfully boring do you have to be to think that having to make your own fun is a downside?

The game is either gonna flow beautifully from one mission to the next with quality pacing like say Half Life 2 or Halo 3, OR it’s gonna have a stilted, laborious pace where you spend a great deal of your time wandering around aimlessly, checking maps in driving into rivers. Plus I’m sure all those trigger happy NPC’s are gonna make getting lost a barrel of laughs.

The game looks amazing I’d say and apart from the Crysis island I’ve seen nothing that looks as good. I haven’t read the PC gamer review yet either, but does he mention any of the sandbox trappings of hours of wasted time being lost, pointless side-quests and lots of time spent travelling to the fun? My first impressions make me think these these things.

I’m fairly sure I’m completely alone here, but I’ve always thought that while the quality of Far Cry did drop a bit after the Trigens are first introduced, the best moments and setpieces were all after that point. The James Bond-esque speedboat chase and the entire ‘Rebellion’ level (the gigantic branching three-way firefight) in particular.

It seems that most people just quit the moment they encountered a new enemy type that was tougher to kill than the mercs.

Oh I didn’t quit. I’ve played through it all at least twice, and there are incredible bits after the trigens appear. In particular that level with all the rope bridges, and also the car chase through the swamps I thought was very good.

When I talk about the trigens / mutants ruining it, I’m referring to the story. It started out as a sort of Commando rip off, and I think it would have been so much better if it stayed with that idea. Maybe some sort of a bond villain plot involving private armies and nuclear weapons – something cheesy. I just think the best things about Far Cry were the tropical island setting, and the sneaking around and finding ways to take out groups of mercenaries. Once those mercenaries became gigantic monsters shooting rockets out of their arms and jumping twenty feet into the air, it tore the arse out of the realism, and the sneaking around was pointless.

But how is that different to choosing whether to use a pistol, or a shotgun. One lets you kill from a far the other being an assault weapon. You still don’t pick what to do, just how to do it. Far Cry 2 on the other hand has an adaptive storyline, the ability to choose missions and picking which filthy mercenary to take with you.

In short I’m saying this looks closer to S.T.A.L.K.E.R which was a true sandbox in my opinion rather than a fat corridor shooter.

Why do I even bother to posit that as a question? Of course it would be.

“I just hope it’s gonna go the way sandbox games should be (like the way that Crysis did objectives). I only played the Crysis Demo, but one of the things that really stood out was how open it was. There was one objective in the demo to take out a base on a sort of peninsula, and you could take a boat and shoot it up, drive a truck over there, sneak in on foot, or take the Koreans out from a distance. This felt sooooo good in comparison to GTA, where the whole game felt like a tutorial for the real fun that never came. In GTA you had to do everything exactly the way they wanted, going into every red circle and it playing a cut scene. It never said “We’re gonna rob this band, figure it out!”. Instead it walked you through and took away a lot of the fun.”

The way you played through a map in Crysis was nothing like HL2. Crysis gave you the primary objective, a few sub-objectives (take out the radar, check out this place for intel), and then left it up to you to get to the end. HL2 was basically a narrow hallway connecting event after event to one another. Play both back to back and you’ll see what I’m talking about. I want FREEDOM to choose how to tackle a mission, exactly in the way the trailers are showing for FC2. I could use a jeep and blast my way in, or snipe everyone from a hill, or set fire to the grass and burn the place down, or use a grenade launcher to blow the place up, etc, etc. It’s up to ME how I want to assault a place, I make my own fun, I choose when and where to fight. Games like HL2, Bioshock, COD4 don’t give me that freedom: In those games, I HAVE to go through this alley to get to the next area, I can’t go over this wall/fence and flank the enemy, etc, etc.

Really I think its just as linear as Half Life 2 but with bigger rooms.

Also the highlight of Tim’s review is describing how this game coldly executes the whole genre. He says it’s essentially killed all other shootems as they just can’t compete. Also the chick sucking on a gun in Tim’s review actually gave me a quiet moment. A review made me feel melancholic and question the nature of war. A review made me do that. A review. Thats a new one.

I’ve already pre-ordered the collectors edition from game and I was pretty skeptical until I read the review.

It seems that most people just quit the moment they encountered a new enemy type that was tougher to kill than the mercs.