Joystiq E3 hands-on: Far Cry 2

Adding on to our hands-on with Far Cry 2 a couple months ago, our most recent experience at E3 gave us the same feeling that we'd only begun to scratch the surface of this title. For a general overview of what to expect in Far Cry 2, check out our previous hands-on with the game. Here we're going to get into a little bit more detail about our experience within the game.

For starters, the African Serengeti, the open-world venue for the game looks the same on both the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. The location has some great level design put into it with our 20-minute experience presenting us with several locales. After a battle in one particular village, we got on a boat and drove through a well-detailed ravine; while in another instance we drove to a location in a car along dirt roads. The driving in the game is surprisingly good, making sense depending on what terrain is being driven over, and we didn't find ourselves unnecessarily fighting with the controls at all. Now, let's discuss the surprising AI in the game.
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OK, we're going to preface this by saying that if the AI in the final product does similar things to what we saw in this demo, we're going to have an enjoyable time with Far Cry 2. Ubisoft Montreal has done a fine job with some reactions we didn't expect from the enemies.

For example, during a battle, one enemy we capped in the leg fell to the ground, little did we realize he was down, but not out. Sneaking around the side of a building and just watching, we saw one of his comrades come and drag him to safety behind some cover and prop him up. When the battle continued, we took out the helpful friend and when we came near the wounded soldier he was still on the ground and injured, but he started shooting at us with a pistol.

We also saw other examples of teamwork and just proper AI. None of this is exactly amazing, but it's nice to know that it's in the game. We avoided stealth due to our lack of time with the game and during one village attack just rammed a car into the middle of a bunch of soldier, running over one of them. His buddies jumped out of the way, ran behind cover and started shooting. We started running for cover ourselves, hitting the heal button in the process and throwing a grenade at the car. Once the car blew up, the soldier started looking for better cover as fire began to consumer the village.

Fire, wow, the fire. Although we didn't get to test this, we've been told fire could be used as a great distraction tool when trying to infiltrate a village. A small brush fire can be started right outside and, as it catches onto the thatched roof of a house, it'll be possible to do other stuff while the soldiers are distracted. One fire we started was consuming a village while a battle was going on. We didn't have any frame rate hiccups (we were testing on the Xbox 360) and the scene looked spectacular.

As for just general things we noticed. There's a main map showing the whole game and a secondary map that'll give general area information (where to go and safe houses), both were easy to read and understand. The guns control well and sound good when firing, switching weapons is easy in battle and explosions will cause weapons to fly away. So if the player shoots a bunch of soliders and then throws in a grenade, the weapons won't just be lying there where the guy got killed. Overall, the package seems solid and at no point in our time with the game did we have a strong "oh, that's just stupid" reaction.

Although Far Cry 2 hasn't been getting that much attention, that's really a shame, because after our time with it we've become believers that there's something here for FPS players. We can't speak for what the full game will be like and we've already been told there won't be a demo, but Far Cry 2 definitely deserves the courtesy of being tried out when it releases later this year.