Mistah Kurtz: He dead.
That may be the most tedious title ever to slip from my fingertips, but I needed some way to get those three titles on the screen in one sentence. I’ll confess: I’ve been addicted to a video game these past few months. I’m not much of a gamer anymore, it’s true, I have a real life and I love the ladies a little too much to live in the World of Warcrack or some other virtual world. This game looked too good to pass up, and it’s too good not to give a proper review, and what better place? I’ve promised some geek fodder in the past, so I better deliver. There are spoilers ahead, so feel free to pass on this review until after you’ve played the game. But for those who will not play it, or aren’t gamers, it may be an interesting subject anyway given the uniqueness of FarCry 2. Allow me to make this clear: if you have not played this game and are planning to do so, do not read any further! I will not apologize for reviewing it as I chose to.
You must understand, this is a difficult review to write. The game is an experience. It’s easy to review most video games: you can go over gameplay, the basic premise, and be done with it. But this game is something more: it’s somewhere between a virtual novel (but not like a role-playing game) and an interactive movie. Even for a seasoned gamer like me, someone who used to play every title he could get his hands on, someone who was weaned on an (already ancient) Atari 2600 and a 286 Computer. This game is like none other because it is so psychologically intense, so compelling, and so different from all other games. It looks like a run-of-the-mill shooter with incredible graphics, and I let that fool me. Yes, there’s a ton of action, yes, the goal is to make big explosions and kill anyone who gets in your way, but the way it’s put together is the future.
So FarCry 2 may be the only video game created to date which would qualify for a mention in your college Humanities department. If you know anything about Richard Wager, you may have heard the word “Gesamkunstwerk.” (For those who don’t know who he was, he was the German composer whose epic operas “The Ring of the Nibelung” and “Parsifal” were taken and corrupted into a horrifically corrupt neo-pagan religion by Adolf Hitler.) Gesamkunstwerk means “complete art;” that is to say, it is an artistic piece which incorporates elements from all the Humanities: Music, Drama, Literature, and Visual Art. FarCry 2 may be the first game to truly qualify for this auspicious word. The author and blogger Vox Day was the first person I read to use Wagner’s term for video games in general, and the medium’s potential for fulfilling Wagner’s dream of “total artwork,” so I stand on the shoulders of giants: don’t blame me for associating games and Wagner.
Casual gamers may just enjoy it for the combat (the casual gamers pan the plot). People in love with plot may dislike the tedium of some aspects of the game. People who don’t appreciate literature find the story boring. You must have a certain understanding of how literary fiction works to truly appreciate it. Many games have retold classic themes in literature (after all, there are only 7 main plot themes): few have actually succeeded in making the player feel like he’s actually involved in the plot. If this game hasn’t done it perfectly, it certainly has raised the bar far higher than it was before.
Yes, there are some classic games I enjoyed better, but on artistic grounds, I can think of none comparable to this. Yes, the story has been told a thousand times, but how many times have you actually felt you were a part of it? Many games draw you in, but I contend none do so good a job as FarCry 2. The folks at Ubisoft Montreal deserve every damn award for this game, and if some more popular game like Fallout 3 gets Game of the Year, I will never forgive the Gaming Rags and the judges who dole out the awards.
The story itself is one with which we’re all familiar (and if you’re not, well, you are a philistine.) It’s a retelling of Joseph Conrad’s novel “The Heart of Darkness,” which was retold in the 1970s as Coppola’s finest film: Apocalypse, Now! FarCry 2 is the same basic plot. The nation is torn apart, there is a madman on the loose, and it is your job to kill him. In FarCry, the madman is an arms dealer named The Jackal, and he’s armed both sides of the conflict for reasons you later discover. You, Our Hero, are a mercenary who has been paid to bump him off.
Within the first ten minutes of the game, you learn your character has malaria and in dire need of medication (which drastically affects game-play), the Jackal taunts and quotes Nietzsche at you as you lie, debilitated, in bed, and you end up in a hopeless gunfight caught between both militias in the capitol. The opening is incredible: you have failed in your mission to kill the Jackal, there are no flights out of this hellhole. Your only choice at this point is to fight the militias and pray you can escape alive. You do escape the capitol: your body is picked up and thrown on a truck, and you are discovered by another mercenary working for the UFLL faction. He gives you a little more backstory, and in a well-done ingame tutorial, sends you on your first mission (as your main task—killing The Jackal—has failed, you have no real choice except to do jobs for whomever has one.)
There are four main factions in this game: the UFLL, the APR, The Underground, and the foreign mercenaries. The UFLL and APR are caricatures of any and every African liberation group. You are given no clues to their underlying ideologies, only that they want to kill each other and come out in control of the diamond-rich nation. Indeed, there is no ideological difference, only propaganda. To paraphrase Nicholas Cage’s character in Lord of War, these “freedom fighters” tend to be worse than the governments they seek to replace.
The Underground is led by the local (unspecified but obviously Catholic) priest. They are non-combatants, and supply you with medicine along the way as you complete missions of mercy for them (securing passports for civilians so they can leave the country as refugees.) Of course, completing these missions requires a tremendous amount of APR and UFLL blood, but you’re doing it to save civilian lives.
The foreign mercenaries are your “buddies” with whom you interact and from whom you receive missions throughout the game. At the beginning of the game, you are given the option to select a character. Who you select doesn’t affect game-play, but all the characters you don’t select become potential buddies throughout the course of the game. In other words, you could have been any one of them, and this subtle psychological trick affects how many players relate to their buddies. The three factions each have their own interests, and you work with all of them throughout the game. After all, you are a mercenary trapped in a hellhole: you want to make it out alive with as much money as humanly possible. Or so the game leads you to believe.
FarCry 2 is different from most shooters, in that it sports “sandbox” style game-lay. You do have missions to complete, but you have an entire country to explore. It’s a huge virtual country — 50 square kilometers of terrain — and you can explore the entire landscape. It is a beautiful country, with deserts, plains, wetlands, mountains, and jungle terrain—all of which is almost indistinguishable from reality when the game is run on a monster gaming PC like mine. There is herbivorous wildlife such as zebra and antelope, and that addition contributes an occasional false serenity to parts of the game. You can explore to your heart’s content, but your enemies are everywhere. Even the faction you work for will try to kill you, so exploration always has the associated danger of being attacked by enemies on patrol.
This sandbox gameplay gives the player a false sense of free will. The entire game hinges on a nihilistic philosophy where free will is a mere illusion. It is this psychological trick on the player which sets the game apart from any other in its genre. The graphics draw you in, the sandbox play makes you “feel” in charge, but really, you are a slave to the world in which you live. Call it Fate or Destiny, but the plot always prevails.
The psychological manipulation inherent to the game is perhaps Ubisoft’s greatest innovation. The game makes you feel in control while you really are Fate’s slave. Then it plays on your own personal morality in a way which Orwell would find horrendous. There are missions which require you to do things which will ultimately harm the civilian population, but these missions, such as blowing up a truckload of anesthetics or destroying a stockpile of malaria medication. The missions always present incredible moral dilemmas. Of course, the game – manipulating you— gives you ways to complete the missions which aren’t directly harmful to innocents., but you are damned if you do or don’t: the civilians always suffer, even when you work in their best interests. This has a numbing effect throughout the course of the game. At first, you feel guilty when you hear how your plan backfired. Then you just get numb. Some reviewers argue this just means it’s a bad, repetitive story, I disagree: I believe making the player feel numb is the entire point.
The combat itself is numbing. There aren’t many large-scale battles, as it is a fourth-generation guerrilla war. Most of the time, you’ll face no more than 4 or 5 enemies at a time, but the combat is as intense as I’ve ever seen in a video game. Between the weapons jamming at the worst moment, the sudden onset of malaria symptoms, and the limited amount of punishment an unarmored human body can take from a machine gun, the combat is probably the closest thing to real life a video game can offer without being unplayable.
It is very easy to be cruel to enemies when they’re lying on the ground injured but not quite dead. It grows very tempting to throw a Molotov cocktail at someone who is shouting for help from his fellow revolutionaries after he almost killed you (or worse, your buddy.) It is even more tempting to walk away and leave the enemy to nature. It would be horrific if it weren’t just a game.
Your buddies call you to give you missions, hang out at the bar to give you missions (or a hard time), and occasionally, they’ll save your sorry ass when you’ve gotten in too deep and are almost dead. Your buddies can be injured and die, and you can attempt to resuscitate them if their injuries aren’t too grave. If their injuries are too grave, you can overdose them with the morphine syrettes you carry, or “mercy kill” them with a shot from your favorite pistol. Because your buddies are all people you could have been, you have a sort of attachment to them. They have their stories, they tell you a little about themselves as the game progresses. It is very easy to burn down everything in sight when a buddy has died in your arms.
After going through some 80 hours of this sort of exploration and guerrilla combat over the past three months, I find myself completely astounded. I’ve played through the game twice now, because I wanted to see if the outcome was ever any different. It isn’t. The game gives you so much illusory free will, but really, you have no choice or control.
The first half of the game gives you plenty of action, plenty of suspense, and—most importantly—plenty of clues about The Jackal. Towards the beginning, you meet a journalist named Reuben, who asks you to look for tapes of his interviews with The Jackal. In exchange, he offers information whenever he has it. These tapes are chilling, for example, the first tape has The Jackal pontificating:
Men have this idea we can fight with dignity, that there’s a proper way to kill someone. It’s absurd, anesthetic. We need to endure the bloody horror of murder: you must destroy that idea. Show them what a messy, terrible thing it is to kill a man. And then show them that you relish in it. Shoot to wound, then execute the wounded. Burn them, take them in close combat, destroy their preconceptions of what a man is and you become their personal monster. When they fear you, you become stronger, you become better. But let’s never forget, it’s a display, it’s a posture, like a lion’s roar or a gorilla thumping at his chest. If you lose yourself in the display, if you succumb to the horror, then you become a monster. Not more than a man, but less, and it can be fatal.
In the fourth tape, Reuben interviews The Jackal about gun-running with the question “why arms? Why not car parts, radios?”
What’s the difference? It’s the same job really, you get up, get on the phone, meet your clients, discuss a fair price, make a delivery, receive payment. Sounds boring, but it’s not—it’s just…simple. I’m doin’ what men have been doin’ for thousands of years, tradin’ one thing for another. If it’s you who wants to attach morality to it, make it evil? Insane. People who work in gun factories in Belgium or the United States, they’re unionized, right? Do you think kids makin’ radios in Bangladesh pull down 40 grand a year on a 40 hour week? You start thinkin’ too much about morality. That’s insane.
That’s the kind of guy you have to kill. The Jackal’s logic is the impenetrable logic of a psychopath. And if you’ve read me long, you probably can figure out where I stand on gun-running in and of itself; but the man’s attitude grows more and more insane with each of the tapes you find scattered around the country. The man is losing his mind. Unlike Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now!, who has already lost it, you get to watch this madman spiral into ever-more twisted “what difference would it make if we killed all the APR and UFLL?” logic.
At the end of the first half of the game, you must assassinate the local commander of the UFLL in his mountain villa. It is a setup: the APR then attacks the villa to kill you. Ruben calls your cell-phone and asks you to meet him, where he informs you of the APR’s planned assaults: they are going to kill the Underground members in the capitol and attack Mike’s Bar, where the mercenaries chill. You only have time to save one group or the other: do you help your buddies, or do you save civilians? Are you more loyal to your friends, or to the helpless priest and his parsonage? Regardless of what you do, people suffer, and you are nearly killed; you are picked up for dead and fall off the back of a flatbed piled high with human corpses. You awaken, delirious, in a sandstorm. The Jackal has been watching, and saves you from certain death in the harsh storm. He briefs you on a forthcoming speech by the commander of the APR militia, announcing victory in the north province. Since the APR commander set you up to kill the UFLL commander and then backstabbed you, it’s time for vengeance. The Jackal leaves you with guns—and he leaves in a hurry when he hears a jeep outside. The man who walks in from the jeep was a mercenary consultant to the UFLL: a British man with (not well written) Cockney inflections and the greatest name in video-game history. Hector Voorhees leaves you with a canteen of water and a jeep, and tells you the UFLL is consolidating in the South, and when you’re back up to snuff it’d be wise to come help them out.
The second act brings more innovative and difficult missions, but the bomb-incinerate-shoot aspect of the game remains constant. It grows tiresome, actually; not in an “I’m sick of this game” sort of way, but more an “I’m tired of fighting these guard posts and getting ambushed by enemies in jeeps. How the hell can I get around them?” The story progresses with increased backstabbing, until the climax: you kill off all the APR and UFLL leaders, their lieutenants, and everyone else you can find. The Jackal finds you after you do the deed, and rants and raves about how you destroyed any chance for peace. He has a twisted belief in peace through detente: now you’ve upset the balance of power, and anarchy reigns. After he knocks you out, you awaken in prison, and proceed to break out and descend into darkness. After you escape from this prison, you learn of The Jackal’s hideout’s location, and must proceed through the most intense combat of the game to reach him. The following plot twists, frankly, I should have seen coming: you are betrayed by all your buddies (including the one who you help free from prison), and are forced to kill them all while marching through to The Jackal’s hideout.
When you find The Jackal, he delivers his terms. You’ve made it this far. And since you made it this far, there’s so much blood on your hands you have no choice but to help him. You have one last choice: you can either take this car battery up that mountain to detonate the dynamite to knock those boulders down to stop the oncoming troops, or you can deliver a briefcase full of diamonds to the guards at the border of a neighboring nation to let the last of the civilian refugees through to the (relative) safety of U.N. Blue-hats across the border. Once across the border, you are to put a bullet from this Desert Eagle into your own brain. Whatever you don’t do, he’ll do.
The game delivers a heaping helping of nihilism, despair, and insanity. I found myself far more sympathetic to The Jackal at the end, which was the intent of the designers. Yet I was disgusted to feel such sympathy for this horrible character—also the intent. They wanted to see how close they could bring you to the insanity and horror of what happens daily in Africa without actually parachuting you into Sierra Leone, or some other hellhole. They succeeded.
The only character in the game who has a moral compass, who was consistent, who was truly good, is Reuben the journalist. He only cares about telling the story of his homeland to the world, and securing help and peace for his people. He’s the only person who could leave at any time. And the ending… Well, the ending pretty well shows that, except in as much as you helped Reuben—the good man who wished to save his people—all your other efforts were in vain. But even Reuben’s efforts are in vain: the world doesn’t see dead bodies, they see statistics.
How very Nietzsche.
Nietzsche’s philosophy may not be the best to live by, but sweet Baby Jane, it makes for good storytelling.
As for me, I’ve stared into the Abyss far too long writing this review of FarCry 2. Not because of the game itself, but because reviewing it has to be done on so many levels at once, and it’s kind of maddening. The game is a lot of fun, but it is dark and difficult. I could have included much more. I could have cut a fair bit. But this review reflects the madness of the game. How fitting, don’t you think?
Tags: @Revolt
WHAT TO DO NOW?