Game Reviews – My Blah

The Council – The Unhappily Conflicted Review

Given my grumpiness towards PUBG (see earlier post), it was perhaps not surprising that the game I took up during the holidays was, in many ways, just the opposite. It neither had guns (okay, maybe one), nor loot drops, nor – and most importantly – multiplayer. Instead, it was what some people call a walking simulator. You walk, talk to people in choreographed sequences and discover things. Sure, there are QTEs, but that is it. If you think this is boring, remember that Life is Strange was a walking simulator by this definition, and I’ve been hooked to them since. In between, I played another called Gone Home. And now, The Council. The Council is the first historical game of this genre that I’ve played, and I was equal parts excited and worried about how this would pan out. All I can say – and I shall justify myself below – that I was right in being equally excited and worried, since this game is both a step forward and backward for the genre.

Graphics

Given that this game came out in 2018, the graphics were always expected to be top-notch. In a majority of scenarios, this is indeed the case. The game takes place in the late 18th Century (January 1793) and we are treated to the mansion of a rich British aristocrat. The devs pulled out all stops when ensuring that the game looks and feels realistic. Once you are out of the rather dreary (Vampyr like) docks, you are treated to a breathtaking hall with large paintings that somehow aren’t just décor but have actual plot value. Right in front of you is a huge bronze statue sticking out of the wall. The pillars, floors and doors are all rendered in exquisite detail.

It only gets better from here. As you explore the mansion, you discover large salons with furniture that has been rendered down to the finest etchings, fireplaces that are as realistic as one can expect, and décor that deserves the newest rendering tech namely ray-tracing to reach its full potential. Shadows and reflections are especially notable, since the halls have smoothened and hence reflective floors.

Move outside, and the gardens are equally beautiful during both day and night. Statues in marble (or some other white stone) bask in the winter sunshine, their shadows carefully rendered and appearing completely natural. Move into the crypt, on the other hand, and the torches and stone walls make for an eerie experience.

Things only start going downwards when one moves to the character models. It is understood that walking simulators generally don’t have the budget to do live action recording of the people. Hence, unlike Far Cry for instance, the actions are rather woody. More problematic are the facial expressions. While no one expects the facial expressions to be as realistic as the background, it is very weird when the character’s eyes consistently look away when you’re talking to them. Lips move without any relation to the words being spoken, and the skin neither wrinkles nor stretches when the figures change “expressions”. This would have been fine had it been a top down or even third person game, but the dialogues are delivered “over the shoulder”, giving you an effectively first person view of the person you’re speaking to. This, combined with the deadpan expressions and wandering eyes, seriously made me wonder whether the plotline involved a lot of undead people living out the same experiences over and over again.

Last but not least, let’s not pretend there are no artifacts or glitches. None of them are game-breaking, or plot-breaking at any rate, but they are very much there. The protagonist spends more than a little time standing inside other characters, while their limbs gently disappear into walls. Lighting errors arise from time to time. But these are relatively minor, and never detract from the game so much as the deadpan expressions do.

Overall, the game could have invested a little more time and effort into the characters. This is especially tragic since the character models are actually quite good. The skin tones are accurate, the wrinkles (static as they are) appear natural and the proportions are just about right. One could argue that they overdid the breasts on the primary love interest (more on this later) but that too is forgivable. If only these characters didn’t look like wooden dolls with crooked eyes, one could earnestly say that this game truly brings the time to life in a way that others (AC Unity for instance) could not.

Rating – 4/5

Plot

You are Louis de Richet, son of Sarah de Richet, and member of the Golden Order. Your mother went to attend a secretive meeting on an island with a bunch of rich and important folk hosted by an old aristocrat called Lord Mortimer. Then she disappeared. Now Mortimer wants you to attend and help find her. So you turn up one cold January night of 1793 in search of answers.

With this premise, you start out your quest to find your mother. Soon you learn that you are meant to basically replace her until she is found, and in doing so, serve the mysterious Golden Order. There are other members of the order – notably Emily Hillsborough, a rich duchess who serves as a confidante of the British Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger. For plot purposes, she is the primary love interest (more on her in the next section). Others are all famous figures of the day, including George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Manuel Godoy, and others. Added to them are the mysterious Miss Adams, Mortimer himself and his friend Sir Holm.

Your task is to basically talk to each of these people and find out what happened prior to your mother’s disappearance. It becomes clear early on that she is still alive and very much on the island. It also becomes clear that she has already made some enemies, who interestingly, don’t consider you on her side. Instead, they actively solicit your help to obtain their own ends, or simply to avoid her.

All this would have been fine enough, but fine isn’t what this game is about. Instead, it sparkles due to its historical setting. It is implied that Mortimer invites influential people to his place to propose world-changing treaties. These are debated and if approved by unanimous vote by all (Mortimer and Holm abstaining) it soon comes to pass. The current debate occurs on the transfer of Louisiana from Spain to France. Given that this was an actual historical event which preceded the Louisiana purchase from France by the USA, one could expect some historical depth to the whole narrative. Which there definitely is! The game refuses to go for simple us-vs-them situations. Instead, you are required to carefully draw out conclusions and persuade people using actual historical arguments.

For instance, you can persuade Godoy that Spain actually stands to gain from the transfer. Washington can be told that USA would eventually get the land, and this breaks his resistance to having a colonial (and currently unstable) power next to his own. In turn, characters would seek to persuade you to switch sides from Mortimer to Holm, or Holm to Mortimer. Since Mortimer proposes and Holm opposes, you have to carefully evaluate the validity of your arguments at each step. Making this a little easier are the character traits, which allow you to choose which weaknesses of characters to exploit, and which immunities to avoid. That said, the conversations aren’t fragmented skill exploits, but rather meaningful and add to the historicity of the whole game. One can only imagine how much research went into creating what appears on the surface to be a simple detective story.

All of this doesn’t imply, however, that you can simply play high politics and not focus on the real issue at hand. Developments across the spectrum of characters leads you to make choices, which in turn have consequences on the rest of the game. With no one cast in black or white, you are forced to eke out your own conclusions and follow them to their logical ending. On the way, you will take both honourable paths such as direct dialogue, and less honourable ones, involving snooping into people’s rooms and eavesdropping, to figure out the whereabouts of your mother and your own role therein.

If the game had built on this to reach a purely human, rational and historical conclusion to the game, I wouldn’t have been so conflicted (as evident from the title of this review). The problem with the game is that somewhere down the line, the budget began to thin out. All the erudition went out of the window, and in came – daemons. Yes, all the historical nuance and careful character development is thrown out once you find your mother and she (spoiler alert!) declares that Mortimer and Holm are in fact, daemons.

It would have still been fine if you’d fled at this point according to your mother’s plan. It would make for an awfully short game, but still leave it with some clothes on. Instead, the plot now becomes a daemon fest with everyone turning out to be a daemon. Emily? She’s a daemon and your sister! Mortimer ? Daemon, and your father! Holm ? Mortimer’s brother and your uncle and also a daemon! And you, dear Louis? Daemon-spawn!

The problem with the game is that it no longer tries to weave in the historical setting with the daemon business. Beyond some biblical bull about daemons always having been there and always having guided men, there is no grounding in the French Revolution, the Louisiana purchase or for that matter, anything else. Suddenly, everyone around you who is not a famous character turns out to be a daemon, and everyone is your relative. Your quest is to find your place in the daemon world now, dealing with some Father figure (who inhabits Miss Adams’ body) and using new daemon skills such as mind control and reading thoughts. All of which detract so wildly with the calm historical storyline hitherto developed that you feel like throwing your keyboard at Mortimer’s face.

It is to the credit of my patience that I persevered with this warped story, siding with one daemon and then another, and then again with another daemon, to finally kill Mortimer. The finale, if it can be called that, was the utter nadir of the whole affair. Suddenly everyone began throwing their arms as if to fight invisible forces, I limped up to Mortimer and stabbed him. To hell with the story, we need X-Men stuff and we need it now! Meh!

In the end, you dear reader can understand why I feel so conflicted. It feels almost as if the first part was developed by a sober group of people coming from different walks of life, who put in the effort to create a real historical game that would fit the historical narrative but still offer meaningful choices. The second half was developed by a bunch of dudes high on fentanylated heroin who could neither think straight, nor bother to develop what had already been taken to a high level of finesse. Instead, daemons appeared in their fevered hallucinations, and they wrapped it up with some superhero stuff. They’re probably off doing krokodil with whatever they could eke out of the dying budget.

Never have I played a game that was so good in half and bad in the other half. A truly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde affair.

Rating – 2.5/5

Characters –

Thankfully, the characters remain lively and appealing throughout. The most important of them is Mortimer, and while he is introduced a bit later, you are likely to have a ton of conversations with him. The voice acting is superb, and he really does come across as a man of firm convictions who wishes to see change in the world but on his own terms. He chafes against the control of the daemon family and wants unlimited control, yet is not a maniac. He has done terrible things, but only to further goals that one cannot entirely disagree with. His methods are Machiavellian, but they make him all the more difficult to refuse. Not surprising then that I ended up following him up to the very end, only realizing what the game wanted me to do at the very end.

Next in importance is your love interest and the only fulsome wench (to use 18th century terms) on the island. Having risen from obscure origins, Emily Hillsborough married a declining nobleman and now moves suavely in elite circles. She is here to represent the British crown, having become the secretary to William Pitt the Younger. She is one of the first characters you meet, and from the time she gives you her handkerchief, you know her sole purpose here is to be the female foil to the male protagonist.

That said, she isn’t there simply to be taken for granted. Play her character dialogues badly, and you could end up losing a valuable ally. She has useful information on most of the characters, is refreshingly honest with you regarding her locus standi and looks to your advice on critical issues. All of this allows you to confide in her and obtain useful reactions, instead of risking the same with the others. That said – and I reiterate – play her wrong and she will mess things up for you.

Play her right though, and the chemistry develops gradually but surely. This culminates in you being given the option to sleep with her on the second night itself. You could do so, or end up getting drunk with the unstable Miss Adams. It is unclear whether Adams has sex with you, but what is clear is that being with Adams is more important that taking the duchess to bed. This becomes clear when, on the very next night, you get to sleep with her again, regardless of the choices you make in the conversation prior. Given that you can spend two out of four nights in Emily’s warm embrace, it is safe to say that she presents a not very difficult but quite satisfying romantic angle to the whole plotline. When she goes onto kill your mother to avenge her sister (not knowing that she is still alive) the love story takes a tragic but not unexpected turn.

From here, one could expect the love to wither or blossom, based on how two individuals see each other’s actions in the larger context. Could they rise above their own familial emotions and find warmth in each other’s hearts ? Or would there be more tragedy in the offing ? Sadly, all this is lost on the meth addicts. Emily becomes a daemon and turn out to be your sister, so that even when she is wearing next to nothing in bed, you can’t join her there. Later, she – and her now reanimated sister – who is also your sister, join their brother, which is you, to take down Lord Mortimer, who is the father of all three. Did the sentence make sense ? No ? Don’t do drugs kids!

Let’s now come to Sarah. She is an ageing femme fatale who knows how to get the work done. She is the leader of the Golden Order and hence commands an important presence. She came to the island looking for the Al Azif, and then went into hiding. She has committed a number of heinous acts, including torturing a young Miss Adams, and killing Emily’s sister Emma. But what are her motivations? Daemons of course! And off you go with her into daemon world, unlocking crypts to find Longinus’ spear and then trying to escape only to be trapped in conversation with Lord Mortimer. By the time you get out (and I think you can get out earlier), you find Emily has shot her.

This should have been the tragic end of the whole affair. But….. she comes back in a suspended reality sequence where she beseeches you to save her from limbo. Funnily enough (meth!) Louis now addresses her as Sarah without providing any explanation as to why he has suddenly stopped calling her Mother. Even more funnily, Sarah is perfectly fine with this. In the end, all your promises to help her come to nothing and she is – this time finally – never heard of again.

Beyond these, there are the other characters. Holm is the arch-opponent and also close friend of Mortimer, who shows a distinct coldness towards Louis from the very beginning. He eventually turns out to be Mortimer’s brother and well, a daemon. Mortimer tries and succeeds in killing him, which is your cue to turn upon your father and kill him. Decent voice acting, but not a very important role.

This leaves us with the truly human, non-daemonic characters. Of these, Cardinal Piaggi comes across as the most convincing with his cracking voice, conservative yet wise opinion and lack of exaggeration. He is a friendly person who can be easily persuaded when needed, and next to Emily, can be a good ally. The others – Napoleon, von Wollner and Godoy, are more difficult, and can oppose you openly on occasion. They are also somewhat shallower, and hence less appealing than the characters mentioned above. Godoy for instance, appears vain without any mitigating qualities, and Napoleon appears ambitious and nothing else.

Finally, we have the servants. I had expected them to take off their masks and spring a surprise at any moment. Yet they remained faceless servants and never did do anything more than offer up some amber or a book or provide basic directions.

The verdict, then, must be the same as it was for the plotline. The most interesting characters become interesting because of the deep contours inherent in their psyches, that you must unravel one dialogue option at a time. But then they become boring simply because the meth addicts flatten everything with a rolling pin. Thankfully, the characters are not so much damaged by the heroin rampage as the core story itself, and you can still take away a few positives at the end.

Rating – 4/5

Gameplay –

Gameplay revolves around moving around and clicking things and people. If it is people, you get dialogue options. Once you choose a dialogue option, the person responds and you move to the next dialogue option. Embedded in these options are special ones that involve use of skills. Skills are social abilities that exploit specific vulnerabilities of the target character to figure out what the right answer would be. These vulnerabilities are discovered through hit and trial, but are also sometimes exposed directly. Either way, using them would allow you to bypass their defences. On the other hand, running up against immunities would trigger hostile reactions and push you back.

All of this gets much more intense during confrontations. While some truly are confrontations, others are merely forced conversations eg. The one with Miss Adams on the stairs. Either way, failing them has very serious consequences, including cutting off later dialogue options and vital information about the character and others as well. Failing one particular confrontation will even lead to physical injury for Louis, while failing another would kill off an important character. To make matters worse, you only have a limited number of attempts, and exhausting them would lead the confrontation to fail. At best, the character will storm off in a huff. At worst, you or someone else will be seriously injured.

All the skills are arranged in three trees, based on the character type you choose. The one you choose has all its skills unlocked at level 1, while the others are locked and have to be unlocked manually. Following each segment, you get a specific number of skills points. Add a specific number to unlock a skill, then upgrade to level two and three. Level 2 and 3 aren’t fundamentally different, except that they require lesser and lesser effort points. Based on your own actions and dialogue/confrontation successes, you would also get additional skill points deposited in specific skills. They would also net you more XP which would increase the chance of a level up and hence more skill points. Finally, you can get skills from reading books you pick up around the mansion (or borrow from individuals).

Beyond this RPG-esque maze, there are also Talents and Traits. Talents are unlocked when specific combinations of skills at specific levels are unlocked. Most of them require at least one skill at level 3, and hence aren’t the easiest to unlock. Traits on the other hand are given based on how you fare in the conversations and puzzles. Do them well, and you would only get positive traits. Do them poorly, and you would get negative traits. As you’d expect, positive ones reduce costs of certain skills while negative ones add to them. Again, very RPG-esque.

Like most walking simulators, there isn’t a health bar since there isn’t a real threat to your life. Instead, what you have are a number of effort points. Using skills costs effort points. These can be replenished using Honey/Royal Jelly, which can be found lying all around the place. Using too many will lead to negative effects, which can be cleared with another potion called Carmelite Water. There are two others, which are used to make a single skill use free of effort point cost, and reveal weaknesses for a limited time. In practice, the game only requires use of the first two, and I ended up with far more of the remaining two than I needed.

I also mentioned that you could click on objects. Such clicking can involve elaborate puzzles. Sometimes, as in the Medusa puzzle, the pieces are physical and therefore easy to piece together. However, there are far too many puzzles involving the bible (which I guess is why the erudite people were thrown out and the methheads brought in). For someone who has not read the bible, it was very difficult to piece together what would probably be simply deduction for Christians. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that the puzzles are nested i.e. there is a puzzle inside a puzzle, and all of them involve flipping through pages (actually book dialogue options). This has rightly been called tiresome by Steam reviewers, since it detracts from the real storyline and the pace of the plotline.

Finally a word on the daemon skills. There are basically two – mind reading and body control. Mind reading costs daemon skill points, which cannot be replenished by drinking any potions and must be obtained through clever use of dialogue options itself. By this time though, the ordinary skill use system would have become second nature and replenishing these points isn’t such a hassle. Body control, on the other hand, occurs in two strictly choreographed sequences with strictly fixed results if done right. Hence, it is not so much a real skill as a plot device.

I cannot say I’m dissatisfied with the gameplay. The use of skills and skills alone in conversation is an excellent way to maintain a façade of realism while forcing you to carefully evaluate individuals and information before committing to a course of action. This, like in real life, provides excellent incentive to think before acting, even when you have multiple skill options before you. Skill options are pretty unpredictable, and so investing only in a certain tree is not feasible. Instead, you have to be prepared to remain at level 1 with many skills and then move to level 2 with some. Even then, you would be caught with some skills which you may have but which would require a higher effort cost, forcing you to carefully balance the options. The coke addicts messed it up somewhat with their mind reading daemon skill, but by carefully not using it, I managed to retain the feel of the first part of the game. So if you’re a bit careful, the gameplay can be fun and riveting, barring some puzzles of course!

Rating – 4.5/5

Conclusion

As would be clear by now, the game suffers from a personality disorder. Half of it is scintillating and promises so much more, while the other half breaks it all up in favour of a clunky, dysfunctional and childish daemon story. This damages the plot more than anything else, but can also have an impact on gameplay and characters. On the other hand, some aspects – such as the puzzles – demand too much erudition and hence go beyond the average non-Christian player. If the game could have avoided these extremes, it could well have heralded a new age in the genre of historical games. Instead, it remains an unfinished masterpiece, where one part is painstakingly drawn out, while the other appears nothing more than childish scribbles.

Overall Rating – 3/5

Far Cry 2 : The Outdated Review

It takes an idiot to play Far Cry 2 after Far Cry 3. It takes a special type of idiot to play Far Cry 2 after Far Cry 4, and then to write a review of the former! But here I am – sitting and writing on a (thankfully) cloudy June afternoon while installing Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. But let’s not deviate – the point is that I’m writing a review of Far Cry 2 after having finished it after a good day’s worth of play. Yep, a WHOLE DAY’s worth of play aka 24 hours! So what did I learn from the African jungles and the jamming guns ? Here’s the lowdown –

Graphics

Playing Far Cry 2 after a highly polished and totally awesome title like Far Cry 4 can bring back that “
oh no not again” sort of feeling. But blaming Far Cry 2 for not having graphics as good as the successor of its successor is like asking Einstein why he didn’t build the Hadron Collider. This so especially since Far Cry 2 was considered a visual masterpiece of its time, a time which in gaming terms is already in the distant past.

But at the end of the day it all boils down to how the gamer feels, and this gamer aka arrian91 aka Aritra the Gamer (woo hoo!) feels the graphics are quite good. Unlike Far Cry 4, which is set in a somewhat familiar environment, I have really no idea what Africa looks like. Or more specifically, what war-torn failed African countries look like. But from what I’ve read and what I’ve seen on TV, Far Cry 2 does a pretty good job.

So what does the good job constitute ? To begin with, the game contains oodles and oodles of tropical rainforest, topped off with decent amounts of savanna grasslands and at the very edges of the maps, deserts. While this may seem somewhat monotonous if you’re stuck in one part of the map, most missions require you to travel great distances (Coming to that) and for this reason, you’ll actually enjoy the scenery. In fact, some of the most beautiful parts of the game are ones where there are no human habitations. This, in my humble opinion, is at the core of the Far Cry experience, and again in my opinion, makes FC2 a true predecessor to the later games.

Of course, it isn’t entirely a FC3 or 4 experience. For one thing, there is no hunting involved. Animals are there – wild buffaloes, deer, zebras and so on – but all are herbivores and none actually attack you. The only AI they have forces them to constantly run away and that too, not very effectively. You could shoot them down or run them down with your car, but there are no rewards for that. In the end, I ended up avoiding most of the animals altogether.

Lack of hunting directly translates into lack of suspense when travelling in the wild. While a kilometre in FC3 or 4 would involve at least one predator attack, here you can walk for miles and miles and face none at all. This makes travelling on foot quite monotonous for those who have played the later games. Yet it’s perhaps not right to blame FC2 for this – games like Fallout 3 and New Vegas have similarly barren stretches with little to interest the gamer, and they too are considered cult classics.

Despite such monotony however, the game has its moments of sheer beauty, even when you have become accustomed to the scenery and no longer admire the trees, cliffs and of course, the dirt roads. Once I was driving to one end of the map to kill some folks at some place called Segolo (I think). The game was about 75-80% complete and I was thoroughly accustomed to the southern part of the map. Yet when I broke through the foliage and moved into the grasslands – I was treated to a breathtaking site of the sun rising above the barren lands and few treetops. Again, when I was boating along the rivers, the rugged cliffs around me gave a sense of adventure that had nothing to do with my mission or the overall logic of the game.

In contrast, the human settlements are downright drab and sad. Okay, so there is a war going on. Okay so it is Africa and a very impoverished country at that. And fine, the war and the poverty do come out starkly through the quality of the settlements. But all said, endless broken rusty cars, rusting tin sheds, tires for roadblocks and buildings bemoaning their former glory do not make for an experience that is visually breathtaking. Whether it is Pala or a Leboa-Seko or Segolo or any other settlement, ceasefire or no ceasefire, the place feels like it desperately needs a makeover.

At first, the entire setting brings home the sense of collapse and despondence associated with entering a country that is tearing itself apart for no good reason. It even makes you feel a little angry at the person called Jackal – “the bastard that armed both sides”, as the protagonist puts it. But after a while, the sheer monotony of the buildings –some clearly colonial, others poor post-colonial ones, make one feel that there is little joy to be had in exploring the inhabited areas.

Not that there’s much to explore. Apart from a few diamonds here and there, the cluster of buildings can be broken down into –

UFLL/APR headquarters
closed off buildings
Church
some random shanty like areas
an occasional ruined hotel or graveyard

You could probably explore the entire town – be it any town – in less than five minutes. And I’m talking about the ceasefire ones – the others (like Shantytown or one of the villages) are even smaller and make you feel like you’re wading through a pile of wood, tin and miscellaneous metal.

Talking of villages, these at least have some novelty. The houses are made of brick and their insides are honestly rendered. You have interesting hay ladders and low top floors – all of which add to the safari experience that is so central to any game that deals with sub-Saharan Africa.

All in all, the ambience is enjoyable at first but gradually loses steam. While you’re genuinely interested in exploring the various nooks and crannies of the map early on, the later stages really make you feel like going through the main missions as fast as possible. Matters are not helped by the fact that some areas – like the waterfalls and the fishing village – have been rendered with essentially the same strokes as the rest of the greenery – something outstanding here would have made some of the missions (like the mission to kill the UFLL chief of the north) much more interesting. Still, the game holds well, and if you manage to mix up things, you can at least get through the main missions without dreading the monotony of the FC2 world.

Navigation

A good part of what makes matters monotonous is the relentless need to travel. The initial missions take you literally to the edges of the map, and while the later ones are much more spread out in terms of the destinations, they still require substantial travel. There are no fast travel options aside from the bus stops. These bus stops are at the very edges of the maps and oftentimes require a good deal of driving from virtually any point (except the central one) to reach. Matters are not helped by the lack of anything – literally anything – near the bus stops, which makes travelling to bus stops a micro-mission in itself.

Now to begin with the basics, travelling can be done in three ways – car, boat and animal power. Animal power ? Yes, the power of your two legs. Sadly, you’ll have to use the latter more than the other two combined. Why ?

Some areas are located so far from roads that you’ll be bumping through sand dunes and over cliffs if you’re in a car. Better to walk.
Enemies will destroy your car even if they can’t put a bullet in you. Cars being the weakest of the movable objects in the game, you’ll often find your jeep or car or boat destroyed. You can jump onto the enemy’s boat but sometimes that blows up as well. Result – walk/swim.
Cars are far fewer than in the later games and unless you’re lucky enough to find an enemy driving at you (and not running you over), you’ll have to set off on foot from the towns quite often.
The maps are so convoluted that often a seemingly motorable road turns out to be so narrow or ridden with obstacles that you have to disembark and walk.
A good number of checkpoints and outposts will have at least one drum and tyre construct to stop you from driving through. Stop there and your car is trash. Often you’ll have to walk from there if there is no vehicle in the area.
Boats will get stuck on reefs and in marshes and no amount of pushing will help. Swim on, friend!

Now you’d think that at least the roads would be simple to navigate. They aren’t. Most of them are twisting snakes of gravel that will throw you off cliffs, take you to dead ends and to random areas with no utility whatsoever before you get to your destination. You do figure out the most important ones eventually, but you have to do a good amount of planning if you don’t want to end up at the other end of the country.

Road signs are there – but the only ones useful are the ones denoting a fork. In some junctions you can discover a long list of places and arrows directing you towards them. Sadly, the names in the game are so convoluted that you might be headed for Senkharanese and you might end up in Segolo.

The only thing that happens during a typical journey is endless encounter with enemies. They either come at you at guard posts or more often, in cars. Moments after they start shooting, your engine will start belching white smoke. You disembark, shoot them down, take their car, reverse and change direction and drive. And drive. And repeat. And drive. And repeat. And repeat.

I drove about 100km in the game and walked 130. Need I say more ?

Combat

Far Cry relies primarily on combat, and thankfully, FC2 doesn’t disappoint – almost. The guns are fine, the mechanics are cool and the enemies aren’t hard to kill (at least on the lower difficulties). Reload times are tolerable and indeed realistic. The guns look great and for once, they got the rust and dirt right so an old gun looks quite old and rusty, and not in a bad way.

Another thing is their attention to the build of the guns. Each gun is meticulously designed and you can make out the exact design when reloading. Coupled with the realistic reloading and dirt/rust graphics, these make the guns true beauties that befit the environs.

But that’s about all that clicks. What doesn’t click – well there’ s quite a lot of that. Firstly, the realism is taken too far. The two most realistic mechanics are also the most annoying.

First, there is the recoil. Guns like ASR and PKM recoil so much that you’re essentially starting from the enemy’s feet and firing up to the heat, hoping that you get in enough bullets before you’re aiming at the heavens. The second and the most pathetic, yes THE most pathetic mechanic is jamming. This is the only game in which jamming has been given so much primacy that virtually every gun jams. And when it jams, you’re left to either switch weapons, which is surprisingly slow in such a situation, or to hit the reload key till the gun works again.

Some people find the jamming mechanic amusing eg. the top shield of the PKM flies open and has to be stuffed back. In the midst of combat though, it is plain irritating and can cause you to lose significant amounts of health.

Initially I thought it was the problem with some specific guns – better ones would have less problems. So I went and bought more guns from the irritatingly distant gun shops. Since there are no bell towers or outposts, you have to do special missions to unlock the guns (coming up). Now I did get better guns, but they STILL JAMMED. Hell yes, they jammed and jammed and then….then they heated up and had to be thrown away! Yes, this is the only game where you actually have to throw away guns, leaving you without your primary weapon in the middle of a fight.

Now the reason I say primary weapons is because there are 4 classes of weapons – knife (constant), primary, secondary and special. The division is rather arbitrary since sniper rifles fall into both primary and special categories. Most of the time though, the primary gun would be an assault rifle, the secondary an Uzi or Makarov and the special an LMG, sniper rifle or RPG.

Now the funny thing is that you get these guns from your enemies before you buy them – they drop the guns. However, guns from enemies are rusted and burn out faster, not to say jam like they are….arrrgghhhhhhh…..

Sorry my gun jammed again. Anyway, once you buy them you can buy accuracy upgrades to deal with recoil and reliability upgrades to handle jamming. Sadly, while this works for guns like AK47 and PKM and MP5, the ASR and the Uzi seem to have no pristine editions. They would jam no matter how many diamonds you’ve spilled on them.

Speaking of diamonds, the game rewards you with diamonds from briefcases located in every nook and cranny possible and of course, from missions. Unlike most games, payment is made before you actually begin the mission so you can pick up guns you want before actually undertaking the mission – theoretically. Practically, the gun shops are so far away that you’re simply left with whatever you have.

Despite all this, combat is simple and quite easy. Stealth sucks, and sucks big time because the moment you fire anything (except the single-shot dart rifle), everybody becomes alert and you’re left in a messy gunfight. Since you come across an outpost every few miles while travelling, you become so used to gunfights that the actual mission ones often seem quite easy.

The health system too is quite generous. You have five health bars from the start, and get 5 health syrettes to begin with. You can upgrade your health pack to raise the number to 7 eventually. Except early on, you will hardly ever run out of syrettes because health packs and stations are located in almost every habitation. You can’t draw syrettes from the same location in quick succession (Even when the station is still glowing) but that doesn’t really matter because barring mortars and the occasional sniper shot or RPG, you’ll never be seriously injured. Not even by LMGS.

Storyline

If you thought combat had hiccups, wait till I tell you about the storyline. You start off as a mercenary sent to kill the mysterious Jackal, an arms dealer that armed both sides and caused the civil war between APR (Alliance for Popular Resistance) and UFLL (United Federation for Liberty and Labour) to escalate. You are sent to kill the Jackal and the game’s load screen notes (similar to the ones by Artyom in the Metro series, but only these are static and change erratically between missions) do a lot to make you dislike the guy,

As it turns out, the Jackal is hard to dislike, because he’s not there. He’s not there in the towns, in the villages, in the missions, in the side missions, he’s nowhere. You will meet him at the start and then you will meet him next when you’re halfway through the game, lying injured. In fact, the Jackal comes out of nowhere and saves your ass when you’ve been thrown in the middle of the desert by your friend turned foes the APR (or UFLL perhaps if you play differently).

Next he will appear when you’ve to go get some stones from the APR chief. This time he’s a true villain, finishing the cut scene by stomping on your face and setting you up for the APR chief’s death. Next when you meet him, he’s again the good guy trying to get the refugees across by bribing the border guards and stopping the factions following them. So is the Jackal good or bad ? Doesn’t matter, because he comes so few times and for such short durations that it is meaningless.

Worse, the notes suggest that the protagonist is looking for the Jackal. Yet not one of the NPCs mention the Jackal directly to him. How does he find out ? He doesn’t. The Jackal comes when he wants to, and leaves when he wants to. The protagonist is left to become just another mercenary without purpose.

That’s what 90% of the game’s missions are – unrelated to the Jackal. You can hook up with either faction and influence the war. But there’s no solution because you end up killing everybody. In the end, once everybody is dead, you work with the Jackal and save the refugees. The end.

Does this make you feel sad ? Hell no, because the NPCs are so soulless that you are left wondering whether the APR chief is the UFLL chief is the doctor is whatever…..

The side missions are no better. The gun dealer missions require you to take down a convoy which conveniently goes around in circles! You position yourself on a gun in the middle of the road and start firing when they turn up. Then take down the big truck that is supposed to have the guns but is actually empty and you’re done. You unlock some guns in the process though, so for the first few times the missions are worth the trouble and ennui.

The other missions are the bell tower ones. Kill this guy in this location. Done ? Done.

Then there are the underground missions. These are basically courier missions involving a small gunfight at the end as you take down the loafers roaming around the underground locations. Then you deliver the passports (travel papers) and take the medicine. Done ? Done.

Then there are…oh wait, there aren’t any other missions. Ah well.

Characters

The worst though, are the characters. The protagonist (I took Quarbani Singh, it doesn’t matter who you take) is a person sent into the country to kill the Jackal. The first thing that happens to him ? Attack ? Backstabbing ? Desertion ? Nope, malaria. Yes, you have the only protagonist ever to go on fighting while having malaria. The result is that you are overcome with fever ever so often and have to pop a pill if you don’t want to pass out. Now imagine being in the thick of battle with a mortar guy, five gunmen and a sniper taking shots at you and the screen clouds up, a weird spooky track starts to play and the medicine icon appears. Take the malaria pill! You take it and everybody resume shooting at you. And where do you get the malaria pills ? From refugees of course. I mean why do only refugees have pills ? Ask Ubisoft!

Apart from his meaningless notes about tracing the Jackal and his malaria, the protagonist is soulless. There are no choices to make in the game and most NPCs behave as if you are just another mercenary. No warmth or coldness associated with what you do or don’t do. Out of nowhere they would accuse you of working for the other side but then give you a mission as before. Bleh!

Talking of NPCs, there are too many. There are the leaders and doctors, who have short conversations before giving you missions. There’s the priest in the Church. There are some mercenaries who would keep talking as you pass them by. The only one of these NPCs to have any life is a reporter called Reuben who is recording his own version of events. He seems to have a genuine desire to help people in his country even when his own life is at stake.

Finally, buddies. These are supposed to be your friends. They do two things – rescue you when you’re dying and give you alternative ways to finish missions. The first is awesome. The rescue is highly cinematized and you feel as if you’re in a Call of Duty cutscene where your comrade is dragging you to safety as he clears the path of soldiers.

But the second is meaningless. Most of the time the buddy will ask you to meet him somewhere else. Then ask you to go somewhere and do something. Finally, you go and complete the real mission – solo as originally intended. Then you go somewhere and help out your buddy who is cornered for some reason. What good does this all do ? I have no idea. In fact, if your buddy gets shot and blue smoke starts billowing from the spot, you would be in a spot trying to save your buddy on one hand and shooting the bad guys on the other. I once had to be rescued by my “best buddy” saviour while trying to rescue the mission buddy. Imagine.

Lastly, women don’t have an honourable mention in the game. Why ? Because they don’t get any mention. Period.

Conclusion

One cannot help but be harsh on a predecessor when one has played sequels and the sequels are as great as FC 3 or 4. Yet there are serious flaws in the game, and one realizes how Ubisoft went about fixing them. For one, the game mechanics aren’t 100% okay. People will shoot through tin walls and people will protrude out of rocks (this happens in FC4 too, does Ubisoft enjoy this mechanic ?). The ambience is decent, the combat is realistic but tad irritating, the storyline and characters are nothing to write home about. But at the end of the day, the game did hold me enough to make me spend 24 hours in it, and I won’t say I regret much. While I can’t recommend the game to those who are looking for a truly well made game, this is a must for true Far Cry lovers.