I've played this game more times than I can count, and it has never once got old for me. Every other Farcry I've only played once, but I keep coming back to 2.

Farcry 2 is, in my opinion, the purest Farcry experience ever made. Farcry is, ultimately, you as a protagonist acting as an agent of pure destruction; a one-man-army capable of nothing but tearing down things around you. The story, the gameplay, hell, the game-engine itself, all push you in this direction.

And in this game, you do nothing but destroy. You destroy guard posts, you destroy ceasefires, you destroy infrastructure, you destroy anything resembling peace and hope in this Unnamed African Country. For no real discernable reason.

Your character is (intentially, imo) given no characterisation, and is simply a mere agent of this chaos, but you are nothing short of an irredeemable monster. You were sent there by unknown employers to kill an arms dealer, but end up partaking in a civil war for... what reason, exactly? It's never made clear. Money? Bloodlust? An innate love for chaos? Who knows, but you're evil nonetheless.

You destroy medicine meant for sick children, you destroy water sources for civilians because one side of the war wants to prevent the other from taking the credit. You kill those in power and those below working for both sides and end up causing the populace to endure the fallout whilst facing none yourself.

Ultimately, if you get to the end of the game without thoroughly despising your character, then you weren't paying attention. Like, it doesn't matter if the malaria is terminal at this point, you are. Your kind is. If you were to escape, you'd spread that same destruction so innate to the game and your character to wherever you went like a cancer. And so you really do have to die, and you feel as a player that this is an appropriate end for the journey of abject evil you've been on. Can't think of many games that leave you feeling like that at the end.

Yeah, the ending's rushed. The Jackal is not developed nearly as much as he should be, because he becomes an ally out of nowhere. Much of the dialogue sounds weird and rushed, like they don't take a breath between sentences. And I don't really like how numerous guard posts are and how quickly guards respawn, even if I can see the potential narrative reason for this.

But man, the world this game manages to create is incredible. The immersion is unparalleled, the physical map, the guard chatter, the fire physics, the weapons.

You move through the story and everything is hopeless and pointless. Everything and everyone bar maybe Rueben is absolutely rotten to the core. The weapons are in terrible condition, everyone - even your friends - betray you at the drop of the hat. Cleared that guard post out? Doesn't matter, some more mercenaries'll be there as soon as you turn your back, was it even worth the horrific violence in the first place? And all those horrific acts you commit are for rough diamonds that can only be used to buy more useless crap to do it all over again. And yet you keep doing it. Like that "kid at the side of the road" the Jackal saw. Tired, and beaten by the end.

Please give it a try if you haven't. The tone is so wildly different to the comparatively more whacky entries that came later. It's really, really good if you can look past some of the rougher edges.