Original Post: November 1 2010
The following is an unpolished ‘critique’ of FarCry 2 in which I attempt to extract meaning from the combination of very strong, though sometimes hard to believe mechanics, with what narrative/aesthetic information is available. This will assume a lot of knowledge about FC2, and doesn’t provide any kind of introduction really. My basic premises around FC2 is that Clint Hocking was more concerned with the mechanics and experience than with the dramatic arc of the narrative, and on his limited time and budget, this is what got the treatment. While this may be true, there is still “stuff” there to interpret: though I find the narrative aspect fairly disappointing, what does the game say?
The game could be read, by combining the strong mechanics and setting with weak narrative, as a ‘the mundane horrors of war’ experience. Unlike a large-scale strategy game, FarCry 2 puts the player in the shoes of one burnt-out mercenary going after just one more assassination target—the fact that the Jackal is probably the arms dealer who supplies the player with weapons (through the local arms dealers) is seemingly irrelevant to the internal narrative. The game doesn’t allow the player to pursue the Jackal directly; instead he must participate in a bloody conflict with little or no distinguishing character of its own. The nameless African country is just that: an unrecognisable place that will be drawn off the map sooner or later. The factions are simply mirror images of each other existing only to provide conflict; their aims and objectives are never clearly defined or articulated either by the game system or the characters themselves. Further, the facelessness of the conflict is heightened by the homogeneity of the enemies out in the field. While the two factions occupy different buildings in each city centre, and have recognisable banners adorning those buildings, the foot soldiers the player regularly encounters in the field have no such distinguishing character. Regardless of who the player is currently working for, everyone in the country will always fire on the player, and it is unclear to which faction any particular enemy belongs to, if either.
So instead of a high-level, clearly defined goal such as those found in Call of Duty 4 or Command and Conquer, and characterised by an altogether evil enemy, the focus of the player’s mind is merely on survival. The banalities are brought into sharp focus: clever tactical manoeuvres are replaced by planning a jeep route through the constantly-respawning guard towers. Every shot fired could bring instant death from an unseen mortar soldier. Even simply walking across an open field could spell disaster. The degradation of weapons becomes a primary concern; a weapon sufficiently ‘used up’ will start to jam during a shoot-out. These must be replaced at one of several out-of-the-way arms merchants, yet more long road trips through the enemy infested territory.
In the end, the only character that presents clearly-defined principles is the Jackal himself. Exactly who he is, or when he had such a change of attitudes (if he was ever merely the bloodthirsty entrepreneur he was reported to be) is unclear. In any event, he expresses quite plainly that he is there to break the cycle of civil war, by annihilating both factions, and then himself and the player character. The player is co-opted into this strategy without any room for dissent, perhaps because the Jackal has demonstrated so many times that he could kill the player at will, or perhaps the malaria the player suffers is getting worse and will become fatal anyway, this is unclear. The player dutifully accepts this final mission after executing all his former allies either in a firefight or cold blood to further demonstrate the transience of factions and alliances. The final mission sees the player make one of two choices. The first: setting off a bomb to seal the warring country off from the outside world, just after a group of civilian refugees escape. This bomb must be detonated manually, though, and will inevitably kill the player. One is left to interpret this, because the notion of a bomb that cannot be detonated by wire seems laughable, even in this backwater country. (Surely the arms-dealing Jackal could have obtained a length of copper wire.) Is the final detonation a metaphor for the entire scenario? The player-character’s role may be necessary, a cleansing fire so to speak, but in shouldering that mantle, the p-c is ultimately sacrificing himself to become one of those that must be cleansed. Surely, the experience of constant, intense paranoia that the jungle induced would have had its effect. The hundreds if not thousands of nameless African soldiers mown down by the p-c would be stacked alongside those characters with which the p-c had become familiar. What kind of man would emerge from the bloodbath between former ‘buddies’? Like the country itself, is the only solution total annihilation?
The second choice is to escort the civilians safely out of the mountain pass, then turn a gun on oneself. This seems altogether ludicrous for the player-character, as the entire game experience is spent in desperate self-preservation. What great change has occurred to convince the p-c to actually pull the trigger? The alternate scenario at least provides a reason to take such action: saving the civilians and cutting off the army. This second voluntary suicide seems not to materially benefit anyone, other than the Jackal’s own convictions. As the player-character, electing to detonate the bomb causes the Jackal to take this second route, which seems plausible enough given those above mentioned convictions. However, the Jackal has always been one step ahead of the player. He has toyed with the player-character’s life more than once and always walked away unharmed. Tapes scattered around the savannah describe his brutality in dealing with other problematic people. Does this suddenly change, or does the Jackal lead the player down this path simply to tie up an unusually dangerous loose end? Does the Jackal turn the gun on himself? The player-character won’t ever know, he dies well before the Jackal would. The player, after the final scenes, is left to doubt as the epilogue says that though officials insist the Jackal was killed during the conflict, his body was never found.
Like the rather more graceful Bioshock, FarCry 2 presents the player with choice. As a videogame, it uses its mechanical nature to allow the player some agency, though in truth the choice is only between two deaths, neither one answering plot questions in a dramatically resolving way. Of course, this drama is not meant to be resolved in a comfortable manner. FarCry 2 is not a James Bond game, with a genre-driven good vs. evil story that will come to a satisfying conclusion. In that regard, FarCry 2 succeeds in its experiential goals. There are problems, of course, like that believability of the circumstances surrounding the bomb. One solution to this is that the Jackal simply lies to the player, telling him that they’ll escape; the bomb won’t kill him, but instead traps the player on the wrong side of the rockslide, standing alone against the UFLL and APR soldiers. The game wouldn’t need to actually kill the player with deus ex machina, instead the same mechanics that have been attempting to kill him throughout the entire experience will simply, eventually, overwhelm him: a jammed gun, low ammo, or just a rush of soldiers he can’t fight off.
The ponderous ending sequence aside, the game seems to make claims about the uselessness of this kind of war, about the harm outside agents do to the competing interests that exist within the country already. There are obvious statements made by some NPCs about the foreigners who enter the country, take what they can, and leave—exemplified by the player-character’s own collection of diamonds perhaps. But the mechanics demonstrate the ultimate futility of the player’s mission: regardless of how many are killed, more guards repopulate the sentry points and map locations. Those soldiers are interchangeable; their factional ideologies are based entirely on the extermination of the opposing faction. They can only exist as a violent counterweight to the other, and the player’s only purpose is to keep the exchange of death even. Though heavy-handed and awkward at times, a seed of poignancy does reside within this game, akin to that found in films such as Blackhawk Down or The Hurt Locker. The war is meaningless, the only thing that matters is when your gun jams, and in the case of FarCry 2, the player is the one holding that gun.
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