If you don't like the game; change the rules

Recently I've been playing a lot of Far Cry 2 on the 360.

At first I couldn't tell if I liked, or hated it.

The game is an open world first person shooter set in 50 square kilometers of Africa that includes desert, savanna, and jungle terrain. While I doubt any part of Africa has all of those elements packed into such a small size relative to the continent it works wonderfully in the game by providing an interesting, and varied world in which to kill people, and blow shit up. The missions are admittedly repetitive. All of them boil down to being assassination, sabotage, or retrieval jobs, but the way you go about them is entirely up to you, and you are given the tools to facilitate different approaches.

There are checkpoints spread throughout the map on all of the major roads, and I don't mean checkpoints in the traditional game sense. I mean guard posts. The guards at these posts respawn almost as soon as you turn your back, and early in the game driving through these became tedious as I just wanted to get to my next mission. It didn't help that many missions required reporting back to whomever you were working for. You can try to just blaze through these guard posts in a vehicle, but when your vehicle gets shot up it slows down as the condition degrades to the point black smoke is billowing out of the engine compartment, and the guards almost always give chase in a vehicle that is faster than your own. So I usually rolled into the middle of a post, hopped on the .50 caliber machine gun mounted to my truck, and mowed people down. This was amusing the first few times, but as I said it became tedious quickly, and was seriously detracting from my enjoyment of the game. So what to do?

I found a bit of wisdom on GameFAQs of all places. In a forum no less. Anyone familiar with GameFAQS forums knows why this might be surprising. For every thoughtful contributor who has written up a dozen walkthroughs there are a hundred histrionic fanboys screaming at each other, but I digress. Someone started a thread about walking from mission to mission instead of driving. At first I was skeptical. After all this was a huge game world to navigate, and my main frustration was not being able to get to my missions quickly enough, but I gave it a try, and it changed the entire experience.

In Far Cry 2 you can carry three weapons at a time. I had been rolling with an assault rifle, RPG, and side arm. This was good for charging into places, and shooting everything that moved, but even with this high profile loadout I never charged the front once I reached my mission objective. So I invested in some weapons that offered a more subtle approach; a sniper rifle, a silenced pistol, and remote explosives.

By walking I could now sneak past enemy guard posts, and carry on towards my mission, but I also discovered each post could be scouted. All of them had supplies, and once scouted my map would show me which posts had ammo, health, or explosives I could loot. I now sniped guards from distance, left remote explosives in my old position, and took up a new one where I could watch the search party come looking for me so I could blow them up when they found the spot I had just left. Not only did negotiating guard posts become easier, but also it became more fun. By varying my tactics, and weapons I changed the game from a standard action FPS to something of a stealth game. I now wanted to scout each guard post rather than bypass them.

I didn't like the game until I changed the rules.