Far Cry 2 - 27th Sept

I've just recently finished the game Far Cry 2. It took me about a couple of weeks to finish with on and off playing spread over the few weeks. Well. it is about a mercenary in Africa, doing missions for various parties to gain money, and to stop the character, "Jackal" from providing arsenals to the warlords fighting in the country of Africa.. The thing is about this game is that is what I thought the story is about. There was no clear indication of the story and up to now, there are a couple of questions unanswered such as:-

1> Why did the main character come to Africa in the first place?
2> How did the main character get to know about "Jackal"?
3> Who is the "Jackal" and why is he providing guns to the warlords?
4> What happens to the main character in the end?
5> What happened that lead to the war?

Maybe I didn't get all "Jackal"'s tapes which might provide some story that answers the questions but I'm not so sure about that. I've discovered some of the tapes but from what I can discern, it's all gibberish and nonsense which doesn't make much sense.This and several other factors lead me to give a low score for the story. In fact, if anyone tries to play it, try to grasp the story, it seems like it doesn't even exist. All you do is just kill and more killing without even understanding why.

In terms of game-play, there's nothing more than killing and more killing besides the occasional blowing up stuffs.  Although, the explosion effects look great and the fire propagation is somewhat quite interesting. The reputation aspect sounds quite interesting but somewhat, to me, it doesn't add any form of extras to the gameplay. The reputation description says that people would run in my presence, but in gameplay wise, all I know, they're still shooting at me as they would in the lowest reputation. The AI is rather erratic, sometimes really smart by flanking you in directions which you're not aware of and sometimes not even reacting to shots form far-distances. They don't use grenades which is a good thing. Although, I'm not sure why some of them survives a shot from a .50 caliber sniper rifle (which is used to be able to shoot through tanks). Oh, and I wonder why, they have so many vehicles around and all of them , even a lowly buggy has a GPS? They must be really rich to leave all these lying around. The check-points are one of the more annoying aspects of the game, I mean, after some distances, you'll have to stop, come down from your vehicle, start shooting the crap out of everyone in which after that you continue on either until you find another check-point or you reach your destination. Where's the fun in that you keep doing that for a single mission? Sounds like they're delaying you from finishing the game too fast.

Graphics wise, my computer isn't the best of the best so, putting all settings medium is  playable, with a minimum of 20+ FPS at certain points, including scenes with fire. In-game depiction of Africa looks somewhat like Africa. It awes you due to the sheer scale of it at first but playing the game for a couple of hours takes of that awe as most places look the same after a while. I really like the day / night cycle action and the occasional rain which is quite realistically done.

Overall, I would say that this is a playable game although not too much of my favorite choice as the missions are too much repetitive. They would be nice to also add some motorcycles in the game. And the particularly "suprising" part towards the end of the story sure makes a good twist, and it's really unexpected, so try the game to see for yourself. So, the scores for the game:-

Story:- 2/10 (Where's the story?)
Graphics:- 8/10 (Although I can't enjoy it to the full)
Gameplay:- 6/10 (Interesting, but gets old after a while with all the repeating)

Overall:- 7/10