Far Cry 2: The Tourist’s Guide

It’s just too much. You know the feeling. You’ve fired up the latest open-world wundergamen, and you’re looking at a map bigger than the country you grew up in. Whether it’s the thousands of streets, alleys, beaches and buildings of Liberty City, or the endless wind-swept desolation of the Capitol Wasteland, you know, yet again, you’ve bought a game which has a world so large, complex and fascinating that you’re going to lose hours to it.

Far Cry 2 is such a game. By now you’ve probably read a few reviews lauding its enormous environment, superb graphics and picking apart its game mechanics, repeating missions and strange mixture of realism and overt FPS-isms like glowing health boxes. Many a gamer has picked it up and put it down a few hours later, feeling a strange sense that they’ve not quite got it yet. The hard casual gamer, in particular, faces an issue with Far Cry 2. This is a game that seems to invite lengthy, heavily involved play. It seems to have some RPG-lite elements that put it in the same hardcore field as games like Fallout 3, Oblivion and the recent final epic outing of the Metal Gear Solid franchise. In short, it doesn’t seem like something that would suit gamers with a job, a partner, a baby, about 3 hours spare in a week and a distinct lack of patience for games that waste their time.

But in assuming that, you’d be wrong. Far Cry 2 is the perfect casual game. In fact, you need to play it like a tourist.

First, let me explain what I mean by “playing like a tourist.” However much we like to kid ourselves, a two-week (or even two-month) trip away to foreign climes doesn’t make us a local. It doesn’t usually give us a good command of the language, or acquaint us with the deeply ingrained habits, rituals and assumptions of the people that live there.

In most RPGs and games with engrossing storylines, you spend a lot of time fully investing yourself in the game world. It takes a long time, and for the gamer with the time to spare and the mental inclination to tell personal stories through the medium of games, there is no better fun to be had. You’re Jim, Saviour of the Wastes. Or you’re Niko Bellic, trying to make the best decisions you can while events conspire to throw you into the brutal (if cartoonish) underworld of Liberty City.

Not Far Cry 2. The un-named land you are thrown into, weak and shaking from malaria, is a deeply hostile, chaotic, sweaty place. There is no real story. You are one of many, another foreign mercenary in a broken country. Nothing makes sense. People kill and create misery with clouded motives and usually mixed results. Your “buddies” are universally sociopathic stone cold killers, even if they help you out in a jam now and again. This game is a chaos simulator, not a civil war RPG.

The solution is tourist play. Hopping in for your couple of weeks (more like couple of hours) of vibrant experiences in this unnamed land, doing a couple of missions, blowing some stuff up, and hopping back out again. Play a few convoy missions and spend a happy half hour setting up IEDs and lining up sniper shots on the hapless fighters tumbling out of burning trucks. Or take some faction missions and alternate attempting to sneak into heavily armed and populated enemy camps with fighting your way in with an RPG and a bad attitude.

Whatever you do, don’t take it too seriously. The story will eventually pootle its way to a conclusion if you let it, but there’s nothing driving you there. Turn the music off, take your time on the long drives between objectives through the savannah, revel in the slap of wavelets on the hull of your motor canoe, kill everyone you see.

Far Cry 2 is a tourist’s game. Enormous fun in small doses, full of one-off, memorable experiences created by the game engine’s wacky dynamic storytelling and quite unlike what you’re used to. Have fun, and send a postcard.