In a market watered down with first person shooters it is sometimes hard to wade through the bad to find the real gems. Luckily, Far Cry 2 delivers.

Set in a realistic African Savannah, Far Cry 2 drops the uninteresting main character of the earlier Xbox and Wii versions and takes up a realistic mercenary angle that leaves no room for the superpower mutants of the originals.

The player at the start of the game chooses one out of nine characters, as the series moves away the old protagonist from the old games. The player takes control of a Mercenary sent to an African Country in peril after the central government collapsed. Two rival factions are fighting for control. The player is assigned the role of assassinating an arms dealer named “the Jackal” who has been selling weapons to both sides of the conflict. The player is placed in a sandbox type environment where he needs to work his way up the ladder and earn the respect of the factions and other mercenaries.

This is a first person shooter done right. The AI is intelligent and needed in the harder parts of the game. By building alliances with the other mercenaries they join you in combat and heal you if you fall.

To keep with the realism, the game is set on a day and night cycle with random weather. The choices you make in the game affect the environment in the game, making some inaccessible.

Also this is probably the first game to give you malaria, adding an aspect in the game where every thirty minutes you have to take medicine. Getting the medicine is usually a very easy mission, but as your fame increases, you have to fight more and more people to get it.

An interesting aspect of this game is that weapons get damage; so the more you use a weapon the more worn it gets causing it to eventually jam and become useless.

One of the things Far Cry is known for is having a great multiplayer and part of that is due to its map editor. Once again the map editor makes its appearance and it is well done and really is easy to use for the aspiring level designer to use.

Right now there are many first person shooters that don’t get the time of day. Far Cry 2 is a first person done right; it keeps things fresh with an open world sandbox, great AI, and realistic feel that keeps things fresh.

--Submitted by Dave Maz , Media Manager