The title of Far Cry 2 is something of a misnomer, in that the game has absolutely nothing to do with the existing Far Cry series; it’s not developed by Crytek, there’s no Jack Carver, and no stupid mutants. Why they decided to keep the name is something we might never know – what we do know is that Far Cry 2 is a really cool take on the standard first person shooter, meshing it with a massive open world and a mission structure that owes a lot to Grand Theft Auto.

Far Cry 2 dumps you in the African savannah in the middle of a civil war, where the United Front for Liberation and Labour and the Alliance for Popular Resistance fight for control over the remnants of a failed Central African nation. Your goal is to kill the Jackal, a renegade arms dealer who is supplying both armies with weapons and equipment. The proverbial hits the fan when you get contract malaria shortly after landing, which results in a brief visit from the Jackal, who explains his raison d’être. The next thirty odd hours are spent roaming the jungle, performing various missions to undermine the two armies, ruin the Jackal’s operations, and get medicine to treat your illness.

You get to select the game’s protagonist from one of nine different mercenaries; the remaining eight plus a couple of non-player characters will be scattered throughout the storyline. Helping these folks get their stuff sorted out will let you build up a rapport with them, and they’ll support you in missions and save your arse when a situation gets too hot. The downside of that is that the plot is purposely kept fairly simple to ensure any character can be slotted into the role of the main protagonist. Given the great setting and story setup, it’s a little disappointing that the potential for character development is virtually ignored.

Action pretty much overshadows what little story is left in Far Cry 2. The game is set out pretty similarly to a typical open world action title like Grand Theft Auto or Mercenaries; there’s about 50 square kilometres of territory to cover, all matter of weapons and vehicles to acquire, and you’re free to decide how you approach each mission. The types of missions you do yield different rewards; taking out conveys will unlock new weapons for purchase, delivery of packages will get you your malaria medication and hired hits earn you cold hard diamonds, which are used in lieu of non-hyper inflated currency in the Far Cry 2 world. There are various safe houses scattered across the world, usually guarded by a few cronies – deal with them, and the house is yours.

Approaching missions in Far Cry 2 is a lot different to most free roaming action games as you’re allowed substantially more freedom in how you get the job done. Say for example you’re on a hired hit mission. You could simply make your way to the location with a big machine gun and take the guy out, at the risk of sustaining more damage and using more ammo when his buddies show up. Alternatively, you could hide out at a safe house until night time, sneak into his base of operations and carve him up with your machete. For the more sadistic players, you can always draw him out by setting the surrounding landscape on fire, then picking him off. Your buddies will often suggest alternative ways of tackling the story missions, which will sometimes have an effect on the eventual outcome.

To have any hope of surviving in the harsh African environment, you’re going to need to get your hands on some supplies. At the start of the game, you’re pretty much totally reliant on recovering guns from the enemy mercenaries. These guys aren’t exactly experts in gun cleaning and weapon care though – guns are inaccurate, dirty and have a tendency to jam in the middle of a fight. As you get further into the game, you begin to build up your arsenal with clean weapons and extra upgrades purchased from the weapon dealer, along with storage units you can keep in your safe houses.

It seems like Far Cry 2 has it made on paper, but there are a number of factors that drag the game down. The size of the game map is huge, and it takes forever to travel between two destinations. There are bus stops which allow for fast travel, but they’re relatively sparse. Travel is dangerous; military checkpoints are scattered liberally along the roads and filled with angry soldiers that’ll tear your ride/hide to shreds. You can take these soldiers out pretty easily, but they respawn, which is pretty frustrating. Renegade jeeps along the roads have a tendency to run you down too. Because there are no auto-saves (or quick saves in the console version), out of mission deaths will require you to reload your save and run back through the same steps over again.

Far Cry 2’s selective realism can be pretty annoying too. The game tries to stray away from the regenerative health system popular in the modern first person shooter by emulating Resistance’s segmented health bar. Ubisoft pushes for gore and grittiness with the player having to dig out bullets, reset broken fingers and relocate dislocated limbs when they’re left on their final health segment, but being shot in one of these sequences causes it to cease. Once you’ve got your first segment back, you can just jab yourself with a syringe and get the rest of the bar back. Fixing vehicles seems pretty silly too – you can smack your ride around until it’s smoking, but a simple turning of a bolt on the engine fixes it.

On the other hand, realistic aspects of the Far Cry 2 experience really help the game along. The game world itself looks fantastic. There are a variety of environments – dense jungles, shanty towns, barren deserts and grassy plains, with dynamic weather changes, fantastic lighting and active wildlife adding an extra layer of atmosphere. There are some really cool effects too, particularly the game’s fire system, where you can start some fairly big and dangerous grass fires to help in your tactics. A lot of the game’s technical strengths are overshadowed by some pretty ugly glitches, though. Players shouldn’t have to live in fear of save file corruption and character disappearances which will require them to start the game from scratch.

When you’re done with the lengthy single-player side of Far Cry 2, you can jump into the game’s 16-player online mode. The highlight of multiplayer in the game isn’t the gameplay though; it’s the fully featured map editor. The editor gives you everything you need to create wide open jungle plains and shanty towns for serious play, as well as tons of explosives to just see what sort of crazy stuff the Dunia engine is capable of. Maps can be shared online too. It would have been cool if Ubisoft saw it fit to expand the multiplayer to be more than just the standard smattering of game modes to match the sheer variety of the maps on offer. It’s serviceable, but could have been a lot more.

Far Cry 2 is a tremendously immersive game that will eat up a lot of your time. The game allows the player to approach any situation the way they want, an element that is seemingly lost in many so called sandbox action games. The technology driving the game is also really impressive. It does have a lot of major problems holding it back, though – the world map is a little too big, making travelling tedious, realism is selective and often-times absurd, and there are too many technical issues and glitches that should have been squashed during QA. Far Cry 2 has everything it needs to be a great game, but drops the ball in some vital areas.