I can’t get my head around the fact that this is set in Africa and features diamonds yet for some reason Leonardo DiCaprio is nowhere to be found. Ubisoft love little more than releasing lots of games onto the market and hardly a week goes by without the release of some title with that familiar logo.

I’ve been critical of Ubisoft in the past and I felt a distinct lack of ambition in the graphical sense which was evident as they settled for an ageing Unreal engine in their sequel to Rainbow Six: Vegas. This concern was shared by Ubisoft who set about creating their own engine from the ground up and the fruits of their labour can be witnessed in Far Cry 2 which at times is simply breathtaking. The map is enormous, weighing in at a very impressive 50km2 , and the developers have succeeded in recreating the beauty of the continent from expansive mountains to arid plains.

One of the most impressive aspects of the game is how sound is used to create a wonderful atmosphere. The music will change to reflect an element of danger which creates a cinematic feel to the game and helps put you in a suitable frame of mind to deal with the situation at hand. It is the sound of wild animals which steals the show as they come together perfectly to help create that feeling of wandering around a jungle.

So far so great but this is where I start to list some of the negative things about Far Cry 2. The enemy AI can range from ridiculously poor to outrageously good. Some enemies will stand around and let you shoot them multiple times while others will swarm around your position like well trained special forces.

The addition of friends is a great idea but it needs more work. The game tries hard to be realistic and yet your friends will constantly show up to rescue your ass when you black out from taking too much damage. This is an interesting concept but how in the hell can anyone possibly explain their creepy habit of knowing when you’re in danger, not to mention reaching you in an instant, spider senses? Another thing I find lacking in your friends is that they need to be more lifelike. One of them, Flora, keeps standing around pressing buttons on her cellphone as she attempts to get a signal or something. I feel like ripping the phone from her hand and smacking her over the head with it. Perhaps I’ll just let her die the next time she’s badly wounded and needs my help, that’ll teach her!

For all the plaudits I’ve given the sound I have to say that I find the voice-over work to be very uneven. All too often I’ve felt as though I was having a conversation with some kind of monotone robot, or Keanu Reeves. I find it very difficult to truly care about a character if I find their voice to be wooden and this is disappointing since the game attempts to get an emotional response from the player.

I understand that if you shoot someone and their buddies are standing nearby you will be left with some seriously pissed off people. What I find difficult to grasp is why everyone suddenly gets so angry with me when they couldn’t possibly know that I killed their associate. Perhaps it’s those spider senses again, there seems to be a lot of it about, or maybe they felt a disturbance in the force, either way it ruins a sense of realism which the game tries so hard to create.

As a cavalry horn sounds the multiplayer saves Far Cry 2 from being a beautiful yet mediocre game. The game modes are standard issue with the usual deathmatch options plus capturing diamonds instead of flags and the default maps on offer are pretty good. It’s in the very impressive map editor that the game suddenly comes alive. I think I’m pretty good with words and I can’t quite describe how much value the map editor adds to Far Cry 2. I put Halo 3′s Forge out of my mind a long time ago but for those who haven’t I can tell you that this is the closest a console game has come to recreating what PC mods have been doing for years. I have sampled a small selection of user created maps and I’m really impressed with what this editor is capable of.

As FPS games go this is an absolutely huge game which, if you take the time to cover the whole map and finish all the side missions, will take between 60 and 100 hours to complete. I recommend this to fans of FPS games and to those who feel like flexing their creativity with the substantial map editor but keep in mind that there are areas which will hopefully be improved on for Far Cry 3.

8/10

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