Ubisoft manages such lethally unpredictable combat by giving the player a safety net in the form of buddies – fellow foreign mercenaries who you can meet in a place called Mike’s Bar or, when asked, rescue from captivity. They will return the favour: get shot down and one of your buddies will drag you to safety, plugging a few of your would-be killers along the way. They also provide sub-missions, as whenever you take employment from one of the factions a buddy will call to ask if you’ll do an extra job along the way, usually multiplying the difficulty and length of the task. It’s odd to ask the player to trade narrative progression against content in this way, particularly since each mission ends with some calamity befalling your buddy, requiring you to roll your eyes, sigh and run to their aid. Our first comrade, Josip, wasn’t terribly good at staying upright, and in the end we had to euthanise him at the expense of our stash of syrettes. We didn’t have any left for Warren when he hit the dirt – he became a sunbeam in the sky by way of our trusty sidearm. About the time we accidentally set Marty on fire we decided we should probably ride alone in the future.

All this would be terribly moving if your interaction with your buddies continued in any significant way outside of issuing quests. This is perhaps the major problem with the game – its narrative is saddled to a strict mission progression outside of which the world is largely meaningless. A colonial fort will be occupied by soldiers, but there won’t be any reason to assault it until the story-significant NPC is spawned upon activation of a quest. You can blow away countless mercenaries, but there is little to make your actions feel weighty or persistent. Even the much-vaunted dynamic storyline is impotent – you can pick from a number of avatars, each with different buddies available from the start, but they all offer the same submissions. With the moments of real, ground-shaking change reserved for widely spaced plot-beats, the game is slow to reward and the need to obtain medicine or buy guns sometimes feels more like a deferral of progress than additional world texture.



Despite this, Far Cry 2 belatedly takes you in a direction that is bolder and more surreal than the initial premise suggests. While heavy-handed in its literary aspirations, the plot climax is smartly intertwined with play – shocking and lunatic in equal measure. Throughout, the game’s gunplay is honed to eke out the perfect balance of tension and empowerment, and its world so beautifully drawn that simply being in it is a pleasure. You may wonder whether the heart of darkness should really be this appealing.

8/10