FAR CRY 2
far cry (1) could peel skin off bone. crytek were the #1 employer of telepath mindsoldiers capable of zeroing bullets into your anything from the million yard line. straight into your miserable grape, again and again and again. hawaiian shirt stained with stump punch when your head goes KABLOOEY on repeat. hit em with the haneke rewind as many times as you like, it doesn't matter
it had a specific kind of deranged quality that only comes to surface when creators try to make something exceedingly normal only to be thwarted by the incompatible fact that they're german. there wasn't a lot I could confidently call good, but if you asked my opinion I'd go to bat for it every time. to this day I still say it's the only good far cry despite it being the only one I've played cos I love pointless mischief
I don't know much about far cry 2 other than there's sick fire propagation, some contentious design choices, and that my buddy SK vouched for it. his taste generally couldn't be any further from mine, but he once convinced half a house party he was a vietnam veteran despite being born in 1991 so I'm inclined to believe he's privy to a few things that I'm not
off the bat it's interesting to see the way its push for GRITTY REALISM contrasts with how abstracted so much of it is. real funny that the game emphasizes the condition of your weapons but then 4 Diamonds buys you a lifetime supply of G3-KA4s. there's a relationship system of sorts, but walking up to a guy mistakenly thinking he's got pills makes him your Second Best Buddy. there's effort put into making every map diegetic, but every road sign glows to show you where your quest is. there's some idea of fiat currency being worthless, but the economy revolves around conflict diamonds found in 221 collectathon briefcases like it's war crime banjo kazooie. somehow, none of this undermines the setting at all
helps that there's a lot of very strong cosmetic-mechanical consonance here. most of its weirder features aren't quite as punishing as I was led to believe, but there's gravity to digging a bullet out of your palm in the middle of a firefight, having your gun shit itself at the worst possible time, or being trapped in a traincar surrounded by an escalating brushfire. one of the things FC2 does best is ensuring all its variables feel dramatically more unpleasant and unpredictable than they actually are, allowing them to build and maintain stress while explicitly accounting for it within the pacing and dynamics of encounters. while it's not the friendliest game of all time, a good deal of what it accomplishes is due to expert showmanship more than any real contempt toward the player. malaria ain't real dog, do your quests
once everything clicked I started leaning into its weird affectless pressure cooker energy and turned the music off like it was some dogme 95 thing. just driving around in near silence using my trusty map to formulate the most efficient route to prevent kids from getting medicine. I have a lot more patience for empty wilderness than I do theme park clutter, so I actually liked that half the game (or more) is rolling or creeping thru a bunch of leafy greens. it's a gorgeous setting, even with the requisite combination 7th Gen & "Exotic Location" filter, and the landscape's a perfect expansion to the first game's broken sightlines and walls of foliage. as much as folks bitch about the respawning outposts they're really not all that difficult to avoid and there're enough moving parts for even repeat encounters to feel like discrete scenarios rather than marker clearing exercises. hunching behind cover beating up my rusty shotgun is 100% my kinda shit no matter how many times it happens and I probably could've handled even more downtime if it meant taking in those soundscapes some more
one thing I didn't expect was it calling to mind the formless killing fields of clear sky or job's-a-job wetwork of armored core, but it fits perfectly alongside them and wastes no effort trying to manicure or handwave any of the atrocities you commit. you do mission after mission without any fanfare, drama, or forward motion whatsoever, and then you do some more. clock in, clock out. eventually there's finally a major story beat(!) and the big payoff to the first half of the game is an anticlimax followed by the opportunity to go through the same dispiriting gruntwork all over again in a new map, further destabilizing the region for a rotating cast of warlords who don't even like you enough to tell their boys not to kill you on sight
it follows up its one somewhat redemptive moment by reassuring you it doesn't actually matter, didn't change anything, and that the world would be better off if you killed yourself. this game's perdition. spiritual beltsanding software. a big aromantic rebuttal to 7th gen didactic slime
the only good far cry