1. Not only can you wander wherever the hell you want, the game doesn’t nag you to accept missions, or even to complete the ones you have accepted. The only real reason to do anything you’re asked to do is to get money or pills. Just like in real life.

2. There are tons of ways to kill people. Tons. A while back, I drove three different vehicles into a guard post one at a time, hoofing it back out to grab another one. After the last vehicle was parked – all of them near a big ass propane tank – I shot the tank … and everybody died. I never saw the dune buggy that landed on me. It was awesome.

Ohnoabear hit the proverbial nail on the head: if you’re getting bored blazing through one guard post after the another … don’t. Grab all the explosive ordinance you can find, wait for a patrol to roll in, and make every excessive and tactically unsound maneuver you can think of. That’s where FC2 shines over the suffocating scripting of a game like CoD5. There’s nothing in the guts of the game shouting: “That’s not how you’re supposed to do it! You’re messing up our grand cinematic vision, you pr*ck!”

I agree. I found the secret to Far Cry 2 was being creative. If you stick with one or two different sets of weapons and handle every checkpoint the same way, it’s a repetitive game. But the game gives you a lot of tools to handle the frustratingly frequent enemy encounters. So spend some time sniping above the enemy base before jumping down to shotgun them. Or set fires with the molotovs and flamethrower to herd your targets into one big area where you can pick them off with the machine gun. I remember equipping myself with nothing but grenade launchers in every slot, driving to the main city, then blowing the heck out of it. I holed myself up behind a wall and didn’t stop shooting until I ran out of ammo. It was great fun.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have other problems–the enemy AI is dumb as a rock, but they can take 20 shots to the chest without falling over, the environment is pretty but mostly devoid of non-shooting things to do, the voice actors all speak their lines absurdly quickly and with no inflection whatsoever–but I never found Far Cry 2 repetitive. The flamethrower itself is enough fun to last you many a checkpoint.

Drive around them. Or over them. Works for me (90% of the time).

P.

Specifically, King’s Bounty let me marry a zombie. I’m only human…

I don’t get it.

Falling asleep at the wheel. Because you drive so much. HAHAHAHAHAHA, oh man. I’m so funny.

Just wanted to add to the chorus of those expressing their appreciation of Far Cry 2. While I sympathise with those that don’t like it, I also find more than enough that’s good and great about the game to ‘get over it’ and carry on playing it anyway. I just finished my second go through (on hardcore now – I’ll beat you eventually, Infamous difficulty!) and can see myself picking it up again every few months and having a another bash through deepest darkest Africa.

Believe me, I wanted it NOT to be another run’n'gun game. To bad it is though. With a bit of traveling. And a completely dead and noninteractive world. And an inability lean or go prone, further promoting the run’n'gun aspect.

And a lot more, unfortunately. Technically though, I found it really stable and quite pretty. Shame ’bout the game…

(BEES, Michael!)

It’s just my tastes have flipped entirely opposite to the internet at large, it seems.

Oh, I know the feeling, don’t get me started on Fallout 3…

As for FC2, I think the flaws look small on paper, but… ahh, never mind, I linked to the last thread earlier. :P

I also liked Assassin’s Creed a lot. But then I’m fairly easy to please when it comes to games.