Massive Far Cry 2 Preview Feature and Developer Interview

Hands-on with Far Cry 2’s Single Player Campaign

I was given the opportunity to spend an hour in Far Cry 2’s campaign mode all by myself as well as have a walkthrough of the game with Clint Hocking and LP Pharand at rAge.

While I will leave most of the specifics to the final review, I will touch on most of the games elements.

The visuals in Far Cry 2 are fantastic to say the least. After minimal success in achieving their goals with different available engines, the team decided to hire roughly 55 engineers to build their own, named the Dunia Engine. The Dunia engine brings forth a wealth of technology such as fire propogation that moves according to the materials and wind as well as a dynamic weather system and complete day-night cycles which take roughly 6 realtime hours to go through an in-game 24 hour cycle. The game also features material penetration from bullets, as long as the material is thin enough for the bullets to go through.

Walking through dense jungle with light pouring through the trees while their branches, as well all the grass and bushes sway in the wind is something to behold. Shoot one of the branches off with pixel point accuracy and watch as the wind catches a hold of it and causes it to roll away (If the wind is blowing hard enough).

Characters look sharp and the animations are realistic. You will have complex areas of towns, huts, rivers, roads and people as well as open savannas with animals and plains. The framerate has taken a bit of a knock from it though as you will easily see that it doesn’t run very close to the 60fps mark but still keeps things smooth and playable.

The sound was one of the most impressive elements, with old brakes whining on the cars and the huge variety of ambient african noises. The voice acting is nothing but a laugh for us South Africans because while it is done very well, you can’t help but have a good laugh when someone shouts “Hey Wena!” or one of the mercenaries calls you some really bad things in Afrikaans during combat. As we reported in the past, all local dialogue was recorded in South Africa and you can tell. We would have laughed off the dialogue in a second had it not been recorded by our own locals.

The controls are sharp and thankfully use a very similar layout to that of Call of Duty, meaning that I was able to figure them out in a very short time. Other control ideas have been borrowed from games such as Gears of War, which have you using your directional buttons to select your weapons.

Obviously, if you are playing a game that is as long as this one, you don’t want to get stuck 40 hours in and realise that the game is too difficult or not challenging enough for you. With this in mind the developers have opted to give players the ability to change the difficulty level at any time that they like.

The game features a variety of weapons (30 – 40) to choose from but be warned, if you pick up a rusty old rifle you will need to prepare yourself for weapon jams that can happen at any time. While you may think that weapon jams can become frustration, the gameplay element works well and can can actually be completely avoided by only using weapons that are purchased new from in-game vendors.

The game also features a variety of vehicles to use and abuse. From Jeeps and Dune buggies to boats and hand-gliders, there are many ways to travel around the huge world. A bus service also becomes available and allows you to quick travel to certain locations.

The world is very easy to navigate though as the road signs that point to your destination will be coloured in the appropriate colour that relates to your mission. Not only that but with the in-game map system you can drive with your map on one of your hands. A very clever and very simple system that many other developers should abuse.

In the beginning of the game you will be asked to choose from one of the 9 available male characters. Those that you do not choose will interact with you (there are 4 female “buddies” that are not selectable) in the game using a buddy system and also ensure that the experience will be different for players who choose someone different to you.

Out of the people that you meet in the game, one will be your “Best Buddy” and another will be second best. Your main buddies will assist you in missions as well as come and pull you out of combat situations should you get killed by the enemy. An important factor to remember here is that any of the people can die and will then obviously not feature in the game any longer. Although the developers were rather cryptic about this, it seems that they were hinting that if you fail to rescue your buddy, you may have a new and very dangerous enemy on your hands later in the game.

Your character is suffering from maleria throughout the game so a lot of the story is also driven around your need to find and maintain a constant source of medication. Besides the Maleria you will be put through quite a lot of hell as the healing system in the game shows off some very disturbing first person animations that will have you relocating joints, pulling bullets out of your legs with a pair of pliers and removing pieces of shrapnel from various areas of your body, with the total number of different animations coming to a massive forty nine.

On the whole, the hour I spent with the game was impressive to say the least. This being a game with over 80 hours of gameplay, it will have to keep us wondering whether it will keep it’s flair to the end or just become repetitive and annoying once the technical wonders lose their novelty so keep an eye out for our final review.

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Hands-On With Far Cry 2’s Multiplayer

We had the chance to try out some of Far Cry 2’s multiplayer modes as well. 6 Xbox 360 consoles were hooked up and ready to go so that we could all have a good go at destroying each other with as many weapons as possible, add to that the fact that the developers joined us and it was something that was not to be missed.

We happily played away for most of the day on Saturday and late into the night and I am proud to report that of the 3 games that I joined in that had the developers playing, I came out on top in two of them and lost the third by only one point to Clint Hocking. So remember folks, Lazygamer.co.za does all in it’s power to show it’s muscle, even if it means teaching some developers a thing or two about their own game!

Ok, enough muscle flexing, back to the preview.

Far Cry 2 uses a simple leveling system that allows you to upgrade the set classes in the game, which then unlock better weapons for you to use. The system is very simple and accessible so those who weren’t too fond of creating custom classes in COD 4 shouldn’t have any issues here.

The game ships with 14 maps, six large, four medium and six small. This does however, mean absolutely nothing. While the maps are a lot of fun to play, the real fun is going to come in the shape of the map editor. Through the use of the map editor, gamers can look forward to an unlimited amount of user created maps to play and the developers themselves have already said that they can see that gamers are going to be doing crazy things with the tools like recreating their favorite maps from other games. Check the next section of the feature to find out more about the impressive map editor.

As mentioned earlier, the control scheme for Far Cry 2 borrows heavily from recent popular first person shooters such as Call of Duty, making it simple to get the hang of as I personally believe that it is the most logical layout for a controller.

The developers told us that the multiplayer element of Far Cry 2 was designed with team games in mind. With the integration of fire propagation into the multiplayer, one can not ignore the fun that can be had by setting your opponents on fire. Not only that but it adds a huge element of strategy as well. Need to protect a captured point? Flame the surrounding areas and watch the opposition stop dead in their tracks or flail around as they try and find a safe area to put out the flames with the healing function.

All in all it was a blast to play and with the inclusion of custom maps after release, I can see the multiplayer becoming a big favorite for many gamers out there.

Click Page 4 to read our impressions of the amazing Far Cry 2 Map Editor >>

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Last Updated: October 9, 2008