Far Cry 2 Impressions The first Five Hours

So I at first intended to play the game for just an hour and then report on my findings, then do a sort of interim thing and then a review when I'd finished it. Unfortunately I've played way more than an hour, so this is sort of a "The first Five hours" sort of thing. And I'm not sure I've even played that much, but anyway let's get started.

My first impressions of the game where as a sort of FPS RPG, but it's very light on the RPG. It reminded me of STALKER but much lighter. It is however an FPS RPG but just a streamlined simplified one with the BS taken out. You could say stuff like "there's no quests and there's no inventory" but that's not exactly true. Doing that discredits the minimalist thinking the developers have done. You can only carry a primary, secondary, melee, and special weapon, as well as five morphine ampoules (for health, but sometimes for starting the day right hyuk hyuk). You could describe this as an inventory, a limited inventory. And you don't get Quests, you get Missions.

Missions are actually quite interesting and do take alot of hints from RPGs, ecspecially more modern RPGs with different outcomes and paths. Each mission you get from a major faction has a vanilla go from point A to point B kill/protect/interact with C style set up but they have a wrinkle in that your buddies offer you optional outs. For instance you have to head to a desert location to kill some parachuting special forces guys. But you buddy offers you another solution. If you find their informant and change the drop location, you can kill them in a more tactically advantageous position. Everyones happy then, your buddies like you more and the factions always pay in advance.

Going back to buddies, this is the most interesting mechanic in the game. Instead of giving you lives, if you're out and about and get taken down (whether by shotgun or by barrelling jeep) your buddy will show up and toss you over their arm and carry you out, blasting people as they go. Sometimes though your buddy will get hurt and you have the choice of mercy offing them or using your meds to save them. It's a very interesting system and the animations for this stuff are pretty good.

Speaking of animations, if you get critically wounded you're treated to scenes of your character graphically removing bullets from themselves. This ranges from them pushing a bullet out with their finger to digging in with a knife and pliers. It's bloody, it's gross, and it almost makes it worth it to get hurt.

Now for things I don't like. You get a journal which is sufficiently well written, maybe a bit to verbose for a mercenaries war journal but it's an entertaining read. But on the Xbox 360 where i'm playing it you can't flip pages and look at previous entries. Also you can't track your standing with factions, just your buddies. Maybe this is because there are no faction standings, or maybe I'm not far enough into the game, but it's annoying.

Also, everyone, and I mean everyone, who isn't a mission giver, a buddy, or a weapons dealer, wants you dead. This is explained that you're a rogue element. Even if you're doing missions for a particular faction you're a no name nontrackable asset so the grunts of the faction you're working for don't know you. Needless to say this is annoying. It speaks of laziness on the part of the developers, to me anyway. I can understand not wanting to allow for allies, and even your life saving buddies are pretty useless after they rescue you, but it's still annoying. I don't need squad commands, I just want people not always shooting at me. I'd like to pass through a gaurd outpost without getting shot at. Is that to much to ask for, ubisoft?

As for my playthrough, I picked the chinese guy, Xianyong something. He's the same age as me so I thought it was meant to be. I've been favoring boats because of his Chinese smuggler origins. I also started with a machine gun, but hated how inaccurate it was so I switched to a shotgun. More later I suppose.