So I picked up Far Cry 2 last Wednesday and have had a solid 2 nights of play. (Mostly online play for now). How is it so far? It is pretty darn good. There are a few little things that bother me about the game but they are very little things.

Graphics
The graphics in the game are very good. The level of detail in the environment is awesome. Everything looks “African.” The jungle is dense with trees and foliage, the roads are dirty and dusty and there are actually living animals wandering around the landscape. The character models are also pretty good, but I think Call of Duty 4’s character modeling is better and more realistic. The animations are also better in CoD4. Other then that, the graphics are top notch.

Mutliplayer Gameplay
This is pretty much what I have been playing for the past 2 days. I have 3 friends who also have this game so we’ve been experimenting with the multiplayer modes. First things first, there are both ranked and unranked matches. You CANNOT play with your friends in ranked matches. It is just not possible unless you end up in the same room by some miracle of God. There is no way to invite your friends into the same room that you are in. This is kind of disappointing as I would have liked to climb through the ranks of team matches with my buddies. Instead, in order to play with your friends, you’ll have to start up a Player Match which are the non-ranked matches.

In a Player Match, one person hosts the game and picks all the variables associated with the game. It is very much like other games such as Halo 3 and Team Fortress. Far Cry 2 does use a ranking system similar to CoD4 as well as weapon upgrades. Everyone however starts off with base weapons in Player Matches so it keeps matches relatively fair at the beginning.

Far cry 2 has a relatively good selection of maps, however, a lot of the maps are fairly large so if you are just playing with a small group of friends, you’ll want to set some soft boundaries. You however are not limited to these maps. Far cry 2 has by far the best in game map editor I have ever seen on any console system. You can make pretty much any size map you want with any of the in game objects. This basically extends Far Cry 2’s base maps to and infinite amount of maps. You can even download and share maps that you have created.

Controls:
The control scheme should be familiar to anyone who plays CoD4. Buttons are almost all the same with the exception of stuff like the heal button and crouch button. Weapons are chosen with the d-pad so you don’t have to cycle through weapons, however this can make it a little hard if you are trying to switch between weapons quickly while on the run. There is also no dedicated melee button so using the machete is pretty much not going to happen often unless you actually pick it with the d-pad. That is one of the annoyances. There are other control types, but I have yet to check out the others yet.

Stay tuned for part 2.