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» » Far Cry 2 (2008)

Short summary

Choosing from nine different mercenary characters, you arrive in Africa in search of a notorious weapons dealer known only as 'The Jackal'. War ravages the land as the United Front for Liberation and Labor (UFLL) and the Alliance for Popular Resistance (APR) engage in a seemingly endless war perpetuated by The Jackal's dealings. It is up to you to work for both factions, befriend other mercenaries along the way and ultimately track down The Jackal.

Based on the novel Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad.

A theory suggests that Prosper Kouassi, Leader of the APR, is actually a young Longinus from Far Cry 4. In FC4, Longinus states that he was a warlord in the UAC (where FC2 takes place) and was shot in the head by a mercenary, before being taken in by a pastor named Father Maliya (whom you meet in FC2), before becoming a Christian and setting out to stop the conflict diamonds from spreading. Considering that you have to kill Kouassi near the end of the game, and the similarities between Kouassi and Longinus, this theory has become widely accepted, though Ubisoft has not confirmed or denied it.

An extremely popular theory suggests that The Jackal, the main antagonist of the game, is actually Jack Carver from Far Cry Classic, Instincts, Predator, and Evolution. Throughout FC2, The Jackal is seen handling conflict diamonds, similar to the ones Jack receives at the end of Far Cry: Evolution (the final game to feature Jack Carver). The theory states that, after getting the diamonds, Jack followed their trail to the UAC (Where FC2 takes place), and becomes an arms dealer. The CIA, knowing that they gave him the diamonds and led him on the path to becoming an arms dealer, sends an assassin (Your character in FC2) to kill him. At the end of the game, when The Jackal gives you the choice between blowing yourself up, or bribing the border guards to facilitate the Exodus, the player chooses to blow himself up. The theory then states that The Jackal bribes the guards with fake diamonds, and instead of killing himself like in his original plan, he leaves the UAC, and goes on to sell weapons to Vaas and Hoyt in Far Cry 3, and Pagan Min in Far Cry 4. This also explains the existence of Willis in FC3 and FC4, as he was sent by the CIA to investigate Vaas, Hoyt, and Pagan, as they had conducted business with the Jackal, his ultimate goal being to find the Jackal and kill him.

User reviews


  • comment
    • Author: Cia
    Fans of the FPS genre of gaming will probably have mixed feelings towards this game. In many respects, Far Cry 2 shows the true potential available to users of the current generation of console platforms, but at the same time, many of the functions break no new ground, and serve no great purpose.

    The game is mission-based, a la Grand Theft Auto, allowing the player to roam 50 square kilometres of land, ranging from Vietnamesque jungle, to the African savanna, and everything in-between. The player travels across the war-torn countryside on assassination missions, convoy-interceptions, and underground networking assistance. Vehicles include Jeeps, trucks, gun-wagons, buggies, 4WD vehicles, hang-gliders, and swamp boats. There is always more than one way to get somewhere, which adds to the depth of the game, and detracts from the boredom of repetition so inherent in the latest Grand Theft Auto installment. The downside to this way of playing the game is that the gamer has to do an incredible amount of travelling, and for a first-person-shooter, this can grate immensely.

    Currency in the game comes in the form of rough diamonds, which the gamer receives for accepting missions, but the gamer can also use trackers to find hidden diamonds. The gamer uses the diamonds to unlock weapons from arms dealers for use on future missions. The range of weaponry is incredible, and the varied use of multiple weapons can change the required approach to an enemy outpost (ie sneaking using silenced weapons and remote explosives, rather than going in with all guns blazing).

    On the groundbreaking side of things, hearing enemies communicating with one another adds realism and depth to the people the gamer needs to kill, which causes further immersion into the game. Fire can be started, but not controlled, and the science of it seems realistic enough to put a smile on anyone's face. Add to this the buddy system, where people whose lives you save end up saving yours, and you'll see that Far Cry 2 certainly offers something new to the seasoned gamer.

    As already mentioned, the mission-based large-map way of completing the game may impress some, but it is fully understandable why other gamers, who played the first Far Cry may be disappointed, and may see this as a nod to GTA.

    By far the most disappointing aspect of this game is the online mode. It is not a terrible addition to the game, but once a gamer has played the Halo series online, or indeed the immaculate Call of Duty 4, it becomes obvious that the developers threw the online mode together, with seemingly no interest in maintaining an online fanbase.

    Overall, Far Cry 2 breaks new ground in realism (watching fire spread is a joy to behold), but at the same time it is clear that the developers have taken ideas (not necessarily good ones) from other titles, in an attempt to please the masses. Whether the ideas work or not is merely a matter of opinion. The gamer can expect a lot of travelling, almost endless carnage, and online play fit for few.
  • comment
    • Author: SiIеnt
    If you play all your games in 3D like I do then you will love this game. Rarely has an experience immersed me so deeply in the atmosphere that I have actually wanted to go out and buy a ticket to visit Africa. The story keeps you involved and you play in real time, meaning that you will be playing during nightime hours and daylight hours although you can sleep at anytime at a safe house until your preferred time of day. IE: I would sleep until dawn then play until it started to get dark and find a safehouse etc etc. Any seasoned FPS player must play this game. Your weapon can become damaged during a firefight, jam and leave you vulnerable so you must be prepared at all times. You will hear African drums and wildlife are in abundance. Very enjoyable and replayable. Well made and even wildfires if you please! Worth every cent so as Molly Meldrum would say, "Do yourself a favour and buy this game!
  • comment
    • Author: Burgas
    Okay...in Far Cry 1 you are a Hawaiian shirt wearing wise cracking cynical 'Rambo' by the name of Jack. In Far Cry 3, you play an average white jock who awakens his inner savage and embraces his new psychotic self. In Far Cry 2...you are a psychotic merc with malaria. You are sent to Africa to assassinate an arms dealer by the name of the Jackal. The Jackal finds you passed out from the effects of your condition...realizes that you were sent there to kill him and tells you not to do try doing that anymore. Pretty charitable of him ...considering.

    You go around from mission to mission. If you play on hard...death happens...a lot. Kill Him. Blow up that. Right or Wrong? It doesn't matter. The target is the target; that's all. The most interesting way of doing missions are given to you from your buddies. You don't get any extra pay from doing them the 'Buddy way' and it takes you generally 3 times longer. There is also usually some way that the buddy is benefiting by having you do it their way. As you gain 'History' (as it is referred to) with the buddies...your safe houses become upgraded. However...The upgrades to the safe houses reset between acts. Doing more tasks increases your 'Reputation'... which is supposed to frighten enemies into doing stupid things. This, apparently, has been not actually activated in the scripts AI. So that's pointless as well. Aaaaand (**spoilers) all your buddies 'go missing' in the first act. You see them again at the end of the game when they try to kill you (that's gratitude for you). In the second act, the amount of work you have to do to even minimally upgrade the safe houses is, at best, a waste of time. So why do it? Well...this is the game. You play it or you don't. With 5 fast travel points that link to each other only on a VERY large map, you find yourself fighting up to an entire platoon between each leg of your journey...and that doesn't include the people you are supposed to fight. If you like A TON of tactical level combat then this game won't disappoint. You get to appreciate the epic size of this map...over and over again. I wouldn't mind travelling across the map once or twice ...say if your mission was to drive some supplies to a camp somewhere. All the time, though realistic, kills the fun for those who want more than constant gun fights with some stupid little outpost somewhere. You would think that killing a garrison means that you can go back that way when you want to return...nope. Go around the corner and come back and the garrison is back to full strength again...not fun OR realistic. After a while the constant gun battles and travelling just seem to blur together and you find yourself bored.

    With paying missions, you can buy better equipment and weapons. The voice acting can be described as quick, monotonic, mumble...which works for a character that talks that way naturally. The problem is: they ALL talk that way! What really bugs me is having to do a buddy mission. Travel across the planet shooting everyone in your way...do the mission...travel back...shooting the same people (because of nasty re spawn rates) just to hear some monotonic 'Thanks'. Couldn't I just call the buddy to tell them it's done??? That's just sloppy. You get the feeling very early on that your buddies are just there to abuse your services...which, I guess, must have been the point. Though I'm sure, with most people, a sledgehammer was a slightly too large tool for the insertion of that point.

    There are some fun moments in the game; Ambushing the commander that set you up was one of them. Defending the barge...another. It's a very long (and often tedious) game that could have been pruned down to it's tastier points. I can't complain too much. The team that made this did come up with Far Cry 3...so they did learn from this.

    You character starts off as just some kill-for-money goon and goes through the 99.9% of the game as that same character. At the very end, both your character and the Jackal realize they are both scum and decide to do one last good act before (or while) ending their own life. Here's the rub, though; If you are scum and you know it...and you are on the other side of the border with a ton of diamonds...to give away those diamonds for the greater good means that you are no longer the scum you were for the entire story.

    You kill yourself doing something for the greater good...and because you are scum. But if you are scum you wouldn't do something for the greater good. Ironic.
  • comment
    • Author: Duzshura
    This game gives me the real feeling of far cry. Away from home, nobody there to back you up. I don't care what people says but this is the best FPS experience of my life. Attached to reality and very indulging.Many didn't like the jamming animations and weapon explosions but it makes sense when you have to traverse through rivers, desert, savannah, etc etc. You may caught up with malaria and stuffs and weapons get rusty too over time. Those are pain in game-play but make sense guys. This game has flaws but no game is perfect. But this was close to undeniable world phenomenon. Big thumbs up for the director (Clint Hocking).

    Real as in -

    1. You have to drive all the way to the target point or if you don't want any enemy confrontation take bus to the nearest stop. 2. You cannot run insanely forever at same energy. 3. Liberated Outposts can be easily taken back by the enemy as there is no one to guard it. 4. You have the most wanted head in their territory. Why won't they pounce on your back the second they sees you.(They=everyone=enemy).

    Far Cry 3 & 4 are just fun play. Nothing new as compared to any other FPS with just some funny character in it. Loved the way background score lined up with the situation. Trust me guys just give this gem one more shot. You will certainly find it different and awesome.
  • comment
    • Author: Άνουβις
    Sometimes fun but mainly boring, frustrating, stupid. Just some words which I would use to describe FC2.

    Why? Well, lets examine the above in more detail.

    Sometimes fun: Weapons are fun to use and there's lots to choose from. Battles are generally fun. The graphics are quite impressive. The vehicles handle well. Many characters to choose from. The environmental sound is good.

    Boring: Driving, driving, driving and more driving or other transportation. Running through outposts, monotonously killing NPC's every time you have a mission is ridiculous. Music is above average but very repetitive. I noticed that if I fire my weapon, even when there's no enemies around, the music changes from "ambient" to "battle" - not terribly smart? Frustrating: There are good mixed points with the bad and it's hard to understand why the game irritates. At times I couldn't wait to finish it just to be done with it (I didn't even bother finishing it the first time). Other times I because quite engrossed with the gun fights, especially towards the end. Random save points around the area don't make sense as "quick save" can be used unless they server as a "reminder" to save. Voice dialogue is rushed and flat. I actually believe that I could do better.

    Stupid: Everyone is out to kill you with the exception of truce zones which is silly. Outposts are respawned when you get a small distance from them. More time should have been spent integrating more flora and especially fauna into the maps. While this may have been a "decision" made by the director, it made the game feel awfully two dimensional. It makes no sense hear monkeys but never to see them. The story is just plain terrible. Basically it assumes one believes the following: "Africa is a mostly terrible place", then proceeds to treat the player like a moron with a story that actually bests "Half-Life full life consequences" (google / youtube it). While I understand that it's an FPS there's no elaboration on characters, people, places, history, future, psychology etc which is especially needed for non-linear games. It's so paper thin, it's transparent. Each scheme devised by an NPC is more hairbrained than the previous. The reputation, journal, jackal tapes etc become so peripheral to the game because of the lack of immersion, they become rarely checked. Buddy missions sometimes don't get you anything but increased history with a corpse - waste of time (apologies for the morbidity but where's the "fun"? Genearal: Because of the above, this game feels half finished. Two more years sorting it's negative points would have seen a much better game hit the shelves. This game is a big step up in many ways from "Boiling Point" - it even has some attributes such as guns jamming, weather changing etc. However, the missions in Boiling Point were better thought out from what I can remember as well as the story (and that's not saying much). It falls down in many of the same areas - boring repetitive gameplay, travelling everywhere with everyone out to kill you and all the time, while you play the game, you feel like time is being wasted - an eternal and unsated search for the "fun" in the game.

    Gameplay: There's something to be said for linear gameplay - the Half-Life series is a great example of how a linear game can have excellent gameplay (and with oodles of multiplayer potential). Regarding non-linear gameplay, Fallout is a very good example - giving players freedom but making the game so much fun with immersive environments - basically succeeding nearly everywhere FC2 failed). Now, I know the latter is more of an RPG game, but there is no excuse ignoring what makes a game fun - not just guns and explosions and why FC1 had less story, it was linear and managed to be much more fun, for reasons outside the scope of this review. Sadly, FC2 doesn't come close to the juggernauts that are Half-Life or Fallout. While FC2 probably wasn't in development as long, it certainly was worked on for at least two years. One has to ask themselves, where was all the time spent? Unfortunately, it feels like the time was spent prettifying dawn and dusk.

    Few games will actually make me sit up and write a review - this is surely one of them. If mediocre games like this are released and accepted, it's a sad day for the FPS. For the frustration it caused me and the feeling that I wasted time playing it, my verdict has to be spend the money elsewhere, and avoid another mindless GTA'esqe, albeit pretty game.
  • comment
    • Author: Rigiot
    Hey, I bought FarCry 2 used for nine bucks and I got a blast out of it for about 40 hours. It's hands down one of the best first person shooters I've ever played. I loved how gigantic the sandbox world is and I don't know why people complain about how far you have to go to get to missions (it is called FARcry you know) since there is so much to do on the way, like battling your way out of ambushes or searching for diamonds or taking side missions from cellphone towers or gun shops. There are a few weird things, like how you can swim forever without any problem but you can only sprint a few feet before you get tired and your eyesight gets all blurry, making you nauseous in real life. The entire bit about having malaria also turns your stomach as you play and not in a good way. But otherwise this game is simply crazy. Do yourself a favor, though, and play it on the easy level because otherwise you will be torn to shreds during most gunfights before you even know what hit you. Even on easy you'll end up dying several times before the gigantic story is over, so make sure you save at every last safe house that you pass otherwise you will be crying about losing your last half hour of play. Also beware that you are not a good guy or a hero in this game, in fact you are a full fledged terrorist blowing up pipelines, assassinating people and otherwise playing double agent to the two warring factions. If you think that will bother you, you should really skip it because your character has not morals whatsoever. As for me, I can't wait to play FarCry 3.
  • comment
    • Author: Scoreboard Bleeding
    Far Cry 2 has some gameplay mechanics that I think are better than Far Cry 3 or Far Cry 4. Foliage physics are better than either of those games, as plants and trees can be pushed aside, set on fire, and have shredding animation when shot. Having to unlock weapons via in game currency is a much better way of rewarding players for exploration than the FC3 and FC4 method of unlocking radio towers resulting in free weapons. The actual game world is very large and incredibly well designed.

    So, now that I got all of the positives out of the way, I want to go through the list of problems that this game has:

    1. Fast Traveling - As I said in the positives, the map in this game is huge. Open world sandbox games need a large map, but also require a decent fast travel system. Far Cry 2 may have the worst fast travel system I have ever used. You are not allowed to fast travel between safe houses or major towns. Instead, you can only fast travel between bus stations. The main problem is that these bus stations generally are not near main mission locations, and are few and far between. A nine square kilometer grid (the game has two of them) has only 5 or 6 bus stations.

    2. Game Saving - There is no auto save in this game. That is not inherently a problem, as there are many locations, including safe houses, ammo stores, and mission completions where a player can save. However, due to large amounts of traveling around the map, there are many opportunities to die repeatedly on the way to one objective. Enemies constantly respawn, and later in the game can kill you extremely fast. This makes getting across the map a chore, which just pisses you off more that there isn't a good fast travel system.

    3. Diamond Briefcases - There are too many of these. These can't really be considered collectibles, as diamonds are needed to buy weapons and weapon upgrades. The sheer size of the map makes finding all of these daunting, but to find 221 of them? Absolutely ridiculous. Only collecting the flags in the original Assassins Creed game is worse than this.

    4. Malaria - To be clear, I actually initially thought this was an interesting idea. Having to constantly keep medicated to keep symptoms at bay sounds like a decent added mechanic. Unfortunately it is an incredibly shallow tacked-on aspect of the game for plot purposes. Symptoms show up rapidly and do not go away until you press a button and pop a pill. In the middle of combat this is annoying, but acceptable. What is unacceptable is that you have unlimited pills as long as you do not do main storyline missions. I started the game looking for diamonds and doing contract killer missions, so my first bottle of malaria pills lasted over 15 hours of gameplay. I then hit all of the story missions in quick succession, and went through 2 bottles in 3 hours. This indicates that the pills themselves are merely a plot contrivance to make you do underground resistance missions.

    5. The Campaign Story - This story is hilariously shallow. Blatant references to Heart of Darkness indicate what the plot was going for, but it just sucks. The Jackal is not that interesting as a villain, or an antihero. The revolution missions are all the same. Blow stuff up and kill people, then do the same for a different faction. That is seriously 70 percent of the campaign. It directly rips off A Fistful of Dollars. Manipulate two opposing factions for money. In dull and repetitive missions.

    I think that this game has a couple of gameplay mechanics superior to the sequels, but Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 have much better overall playability and story than Far Cry 2.
  • comment
    • Author: Samugul
    Basic plot attempt to kill the jackal good missions ,and awesome missions and open world Africa the jackal is a good guy and save some prisoners.

    You will have fun with easy mode.
  • Cast overview, first billed only:
    Dwayne Hill Dwayne Hill - The Jackal (voice)
    Andy Marshall Andy Marshall - (voice) (as Andi Marshall)
    Bayo Akinfemi Bayo Akinfemi - (voice)
    Carlos Diaz Carlos Diaz - (voice)
    Chantal Quesnelle Chantal Quesnelle - (voice) (as Chantal Quesnel)
    Craig Warnock Craig Warnock - (voice)
    Cyrus Lane Cyrus Lane - (voice)
    Daniel Kash Daniel Kash - (voice)
    Daniel Matmor Daniel Matmor - (voice)
    Dusan Dukic Dusan Dukic - (voice)
    Francisca Zentilli Francisca Zentilli - (voice)
    Jeff Teravainen Jeff Teravainen - Walton Purefoy (voice)
    Jon-Paul Khouri Jon-Paul Khouri - (voice) (as Jon Paul Khourri)
    Onyekachi Ejim Onyekachi Ejim - (voice) (as Onyekachi 'Lucky' Ejim)
    Paul Berner Paul Berner - (voice)
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