Far Cry 2 is a very good-looking game. The environments are lovely. It's set in Africa, and playing it made me homesick for the wide open spaces of home (I grew up in Durban). You'll spend one gaming session wading through a swamp, only to spend the next session stalking a target through semi-desert scrubland. Take a short-cut past an area of cliffs, and you'll come around a corner to discover a beautiful waterfall.

The sound design is a bit quirky, but is nice and detailed. There are multiple African, Asian and Western accents in the game - one of the main characters is the best-sounding Afrikaner I've ever heard in a game. The environments are full of sound, birds, insects, water and more. Combat is well done - there are games that handle shooting better, but this game does a good job of it. The game also has an interesting story.

In some ways Far Cry 2 is a completely different game to its predecessor. Most importantly, you have no special powers at all, and there are no aliens. This is a game about brutal reality. But the designers have added many touches that make this game stand out from the myriad of generic shooters. Weapons are one. You can buy high-quality guns from arms dealers, or you can pick up weapons dropped by enemies as you dispatch them. But, as in real life, weapons jam during fire-fights, and the weapons dropped by your opponents are dirty, old and badly-maintained. They jam a lot, so you realise pretty quickly that buying weapons from dealers is a way to go.

Another touch is malaria. It's a huge problem in Africa, killing nearly 900,000 people a year. One of the first things you do in Far Cry 2 is to catch a drug-resistant strain of malaria. You spend the rest of the game managing the condition - from time to time your vision will blur, you become weak, and you may fall to the ground. Luckily, you're able to get your hands on some drugs, and repeat doses help keep the symptoms at bay. It's a nice touch, and may help draw attention to the problem.

The world in Far Cry 2 is huge - over 50 miles across. As you progress across the map (normally driving) you'll come across safe houses (that you can liberate for you own use), towns and villages, check-points manned by militia and government soldiers, and a large number of in-game objectives. The world isn't an empty sand-box - it's filled with things to do.

Another nice idea are your partners. During the course of the game you'll make friends, who you can call on to help you with difficult missions. They help out in combat, but will even suggest alternative ways of accomplishing your missions, adding variety to an already-rich game.

Far Cry 2 is a beautiful game, filled with clever touches and features that make it stand out from other shooters. This could have been a great game, perhaps one of the games of 2009. Instead, it's a mess. An annoying, inconsistent, repetitive mess.

The AI is terrible. Sometimes enemies will ignore you, even as you shoot their friend in the face, other times they'll spot you from across the map while you're creeping through jungle. Your partners are worse than useless - they only make encounters harder because you spend much of your time trying to protect them. Trying to drive across the map becomes maddening, as every minute or two (literally) you'll run into a generic group of soldiers who try to kill you. Even though you executed every mother-fucker at that exact spot only five minutes before.

Malaria seems like a good idea until the first time you have a malaria attack while you're swimming. And then drown. And then have it happen half an hour later. And then again a couple of hours later. Guns that were working perfectly fine for your enemies jam as soon as you touch them. It's as if you're afflicted by a weapon-destroying virus. The map is big and the game is beautiful, but you'll come across whole towns and settings that have been copied and pasted across the map. Every building you come across looks the same. Every town looks similar. The whole world seems to be populated by about ten people and their identical clones. Whole bits of geography appear to have been copied and pasted several times across the map. Playing the game gives you a terrible case of deja vu.

If Hell is repetition and frustration, then Far Cry 2 is the best Hell simulator I have ever played. Rent it, as you'll get a few enjoyable hours out of it, but I wouldn't buy it, except from the discount bin.