Farcry 2: The UGS Final Review

The not much story, story mode:

After playing through the story for the second time, I have concluded the following. The story from the old FCIP had a lot more story to it than FC2. The main missions even the side missions that come with your buddies, the malaria meds and the bonus missions; all of them involve you going to a person who tells you to kill some dudes and or deliver something critical to the mission. Which is nice except that I find it difficult to connect with the story especially when my character doesn't say a damn thing to the other characters. After a while between killing the enemy AI and doing the various missions I start wondering where this is going. The ending is the only time you actually figure out what's happening and when you get to it, it's so simple and has no colorful cutscene, you may feel the need to throw your controller at the tv. On top of that, there really isn't a difference in story between the 8 or 9 different characters you can choose from to play the game.

The developers said that FC2 is bigger than Oblivion and more open; that is false, much of the area involves mountains and or cliffs that you can't get up to and only make traveling that much more tedious. And yes you have to do a lot of driving or 10x more walking to get to every where you want to get to. In your spare time if you're not plagued by that damn malaria and thus have to seek meds fast- you are probably wandering around looking for those safe houses and or diamonds in order to get your achievements. The safe houses really don't serve any purpose other than you can save your game in a random portion of the map and really don't need to be unlocked. The secret diamonds that have been scattered all over the map are only helpful to unlock weapons which is nice except you have to do a lot of work for some of the diamonds and when you do you usually end up with only 1-3 diamonds for your troubles. The hang gliders which were so praised by the developers during those teaser trailers are actually very rare and hard to find. There are almost no missions in which you can use one of those hang gliders for an aerial assault plus you can't get any more elevation on a hang glider its all down hill. So you are probably wondering what the purpose of the hang glider is; its purpose is to reach some diamonds that are otherwise inaccessible. The enemy AI also gets to be overwhelming after a while as they tend to respawn 5 seconds after you leave the area.

Glitches, glitches and more glitches. The developers made a lot of careless mistakes, its almost like it was a machine that made the whole game down to the last tree. There are a lot of floating objects and vegetation including vegetation that pops in and out of rocks depending on the breeze as well as vegetation in buildings and other areas it should not have been. Its kinda funny when you think about it, that they put the map editor in and everyone who bought the game can use their map editor better than they could. Also the river banks were not properly smoothed thus the player cannot climb out of the water in a lot of areas. A lot of the paths have too many obstructions in the way and are also very narrow which makes driving hell. There have also been times where my xbox will freeze up in the middle of playing and even times when I have tried to save the game I was rudely interupted by a game freeze. Did a group of people really make this game or was a computer program written that randomly placed shit in places that looked good? Where were the ubisoft game testers and if the game was tested, how long was it tested- 2min??? I also found it very annoying that I had to pay an extra $5 for some bonus content code that works for every FC2 game in the world.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the game glitched on me and I was unable to get the pulitzer material achievement because the glitch made the other half of the jackel tapes not register.

The map editor and multiplayer are the only really good things worth mentioning, however; the multiplayer shares a resemblance to COD4. The map editor is a vast improvement over the old FCIP and is highly unique and fun to use as all of you know so well.

Story mode: 2 out of 10- for a big WTF story and environment. And another WTF for the game freezes.
Multiplayer: 9 out of 10- for improved graphics and an advanced map editor. Why was the FCIP multiplayer game modes and gameplay taken out for an unoriginal COD4 copy?

Who's ready for Crisis 2?

Nice review hero. I would have givin the multiplayer a 7 though for not including more or customized game modes.