Just finished blowing through Far Cry 2. My initial impressions were wrong. This game's a pain in the pants. Ya like cheap deaths? Far Cry 2. Sure, after you get the hang of it the pretty explosions (and they are gorgeous), running over mercs in a jeep, and turning mercs into ground beef with shotguns and machine guns is pretty exciting. Then, it's not, and the rest of the game is just one long, tedious chore after the other. There really isn't much to unlock. Most of the weapons are garbage. It does do some neat stuff with the first person perspective, which I tend to hate, but it was kind of different here and the perspective was tolerable.
But, you spend way too much time traveling from A to B and getting attacked every step of the way by merc patrols and road blocks which gets real annoying, real fast. The controls on the 360 are kind of a wreck. Nothing's in the right place on the controller. Your guy can't jump more than six inches and won't simply climb anything either. Heck, he can have trouble just stepping over tree roots. Yes, tree roots pose a serious navigational challenge. Driving is among the best I've ever played in an FPS though, but you'll only ever drive a few dozen yards before you literally run into the next merc patrol. And you can't run for more than a few seconds before having to wait as long to catch your breath. Lame.
Also, unless your being sloppy or careless, there is only one way to die between the beginning (once you've gotten the hang of it) and the end (when the difficulty spikes) and that is to have a Jeep crammed up your backside. This completely @#$% move is instantaneous and unavoidable. Given that you have to work for your saves, this can be a real pain in the @$$ (no pun intended).
Weapon quality also degrades over time and the weapons you can pick up off of dead mercs are the cruddiest quality in the game. Cruddy weapons do less damage, are less accurate, and are prone to jamming, which can really leave you in a tight spot all of a sudden. So to keep your weapons all nice and shiny you have to make frequent trips to a weapons vendor to swap out your cruddy guns with new and shiny ones. Which is free once you've purchased them, but just another pointless, tedious time consuming maintenance chore that you have to do constantly.
The story and characters are trite. If you can stomach the constant (near agonizing) irritations for the sake of a few spectacular explosions before they get boring, rent it. For the love of Nayru don't buy it.
