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"Deadnaut" refers to the unfortunate astronauts you command in this real-time squad tactics game, so named because your mission is to hunt through derelict spacecraft full of dead things, and also because their odds of survival are about that of a 2016 GOP presidential hopeful. Each randomly-generated campaign is four missions long, each mission being a crawl through a randomized ship with randomized enemies, layouts, and corpses to loot. Most missions either have you nabbing the ship's log from the bridge or clearing out all hostiles, and scanning the bodies you find earns you Knowledge which you can use to buy new gear between missions or clone dead 'nauts. What sets this particular roguelike tactics game apart, however, is the presentation. You command your squad from the safety of your ship through some 1960s Soviet submarine-looking monitors. The actual action is all wireframe and icons on a fuzzy radar screen, with rough readouts on health and sanity and radio chatter marred by glare. The real draw of this game is basically roleplaying Gorman from Aliens, commanding your troops on lovingly-rendered low-fi hardware and despairing helplessly as they get picked off one by one.

And they will get picked off, because there are very few limits on what the RNG will throw at you. For some reason, your Deadnauts and their alien foes have a ridiculous number of stats, including combat skills, sanity modifiers, specific weapon resistances, and more. I say 'for some reason' because despite the enormous depth to the characters, you cannot affect these stats and skills in any way. You have the option of customizing Deadnauts before you start a campaign, but once you begin everything is locked in. There's no training or buffing. Worse than this, however, is the enemy generation. Enemies can be anything from ghosts to mutants to cyborgs (all depicted as plain red dots, mind you) meaning their health, attack patterns, and resistances can be all over the place. But you don't know this going into a mission and you can't re-gear once deployed, so if you picked beam weapons and end up fighting things that resist beams, game over, man, game over. Diversifying your team between different weapon types and shields and such could mitigate this, except that (A) you won't get nearly enough Knowledge to effectively diversify and (B) you won't have the focused firepower to take down super beefy enemies.

The strangest limitation by far, however, is the lack of combat orders you can give your team. You can move your Deadnauts around as you want, order them to investigate points of interest. You can give hacking specialists orders to open doors or commandeer automated security systems, and you can have defensive units shield others or debuff enemies. But when it comes to actual fighting, and it ALWAYS comes to actual fighting, all you can really do is stand and shoot. You can't even effectively order 'nauts to attack a specific enemy because the game seems to factor in their sight lines, attention span, and sanity to decide if they're going to listen. There are no cover mechanics, no flanking, nothing. I wasn't kidding when I called it a Gorman simulator, because your orders will end up being as effective as his were.

It's such a strange and ultimately disappointing game, because the foundation for something amazing is all there. The presentation and atmosphere is spot on, and there's a huge variety of situations and systems to plan strategies around. But the game never actually gives you the tools to realize those strategies. Stats are meaningless if you can't do anything with them, and tons of weapon and damage types are actually a liability if you don't know what you'll be fighting next and can't afford to diversify. Even the systems that are really fleshed out have severe drawbacks. Your connection to your Deadnauts can crap out, forcing you to boost audio or video connections to stay in contact. It's a neat touch that does a lot for immersion, but it can also send your Deadnauts into a depressurized room to die en masse because the bad audio connection makes them mishear the order (yes, this happened). I've beaten the campaign once, and I can honestly say it was because I got a lucky combination of gear and easy enemies to use it on. In the final analysis, it's a strategy game where your strategy isn't going to determine whether you win or lose. With so many other great offerings like Invisible, Inc. and Darkest Dungeon, it's impossible to recommend.

I don’t normally stick to one game for long. Usually the longest I’ll keep at it is until I beat it, and in rare cases I’ll start a second run if I had a particularly good time. The thing about Darkest Dungeon is that I did beat it once, after a grueling 50 hours of marches through crumbling ruins and warrens, pitched battles with corrupted fiends, and crushing losses to recover from. I thought I was done, but over time the urge to return crept back, gnawing at the corners of my mind. This is one of the few titles I can’t ever fully quit, thanks to an unparalleled mix of challenging strategy, gratifying progression, and incredible aesthetics.

Your verbose but ultimately moronic ancestor dug too deep beneath the family estate and triggered a sort of eldritch Chernobyl, corrupting acres of countryside and dooming the few inhabitants dim enough to remain. Returning to right what he severely wronged, you must assemble teams of incredibly suspect mercenaries to battle back the tide of evil and recover funds to restore the hamlet you operate out of. These expeditions have steep costs, in terms of gold, sanity, and lives, but are necessary for growing your forces to strike at the heart of the infection. In the hamlet you manage these poor, foolish souls, training them, outfitting them, and treating the different neuroses they pick up from their journeys.

The core of the game is the struggle to balance your assaults on the forces of darkness against the toll it takes on your characters. During missions your people have both health and stress to manage, but health only needs to last to completion while stress stays with them upon return. Adventurers also pick up positive and negative quirks from their travails, everything from keen tactics and sharp eyes to kleptomania and sex addictions. While the management side in the hamlet loosely resembles XCOM in how you recruit, train, and outfit your characters, another huge part of it is managing their stress and quirks by sending them to the sanitarium or abbey or bar to face their demons (and possibly pick up new ones).

Darkest Dungeon is a game rich in storytelling, and not just from the absurdly purple prose of the ancestor who narrates your grim journey. Your mercenaries take on lives of their own as they delve into dungeons, get stabbed and poisoned and vomited on by eldritch horrors, then return to pray away the darkness and lose themselves in rapturous visions. Random events color every aspect of the game, from the crusader who refuses to leave the brothel to the plague doctor who gambles away their secret formula over dice. These are not stable people you’re dealing with, and you’ll be reminded of that every time their stress hits critical levels and they break down, becoming abusive or fearful or hopeless to the severe detriment of your mission.

Once you’re done corralling your madmen in the hamlet, it’s time to venture forth. The base game of Darkest Dungeon features four areas to explore through randomly-generated missions of varying lengths, and a fifth area that forms the final missions. To have even a shadow of a chance in this final dungeon you need more than a dozen characters at max level and fully-equipped, and the meat of the game is leveling up this army without letting any of them die. Once a merc is dead they’re dead for good, so mounting casualties represent very real losses of time and effort. And it’s going to happen now and then, because eldritch horrors are not known for their mercy or predictability.

Combat is the real star of the game, a simple turn-based system expanded with complex skills and interactions, along with frightfully challenging enemies. Both parties are in lines of 4, and skills are dependent largely on position for both use and targeting. Each class has 8 skills, 4 of which you can have equipped at a time. They always have a ton of features, like status effects or interactions with other systems like your torchlight, meaning there’s really no basic “hit with sword” attack. You’ll need to use the full range of stuns, blights, bleeds, and shuffles to prevail against your foes, which can be anything from armored skeletons to fungal zombies to mutant pigmen to shambling horrors from the zenith of existence. Even with ideal strategies battles can swing wildly thanks to a vicious RNG and balancing around a mechanic called Death’s Door, where characters don’t die when they hit zero health but have about a one in three chance of perishing if struck again.

It’s a difficult game, to put it mildly, both in strategy and scope. Your enemies will always be able to outpace you in damage if you don’t use all the tools at your disposal, but mitigating too much damage will leave you open to stress attacks. Ultimately the strategy is solvable but starting out you’ll be dozens (if not hundreds) of hours away from that point, and the random element ensures you’ll never be completely free of death’s grasp. The game also threatens to become repetitive once you’ve worked through a few of the difficulty levels, as the battles you fight in the first few hours are essentially the same as the ones you’ll fight a hundred hours in, just tuned tighter. The developers have included a faster game mode, Radiant, and added features since launch to mitigate the grind, but it can still become a grind if you’re not in love with the combat.

Neither of these points disturb my enjoyment of the game, but one aspect that does is the element of the unknown. When you first start out there’s a steep learning curve to the combat and strategy, and you’re bound to lose a few souls working out the basics. That’s fine, because low-level characters are a dime a dozen. But further into the game your time investment is at stake, and you likely won’t want to risk it to work out new unknowns. A lot of the game’s difficulty is wrapped up in simply not knowing what to expect, and the final dungeon is the worst offender in this regard. The four missions that form the finale are very challenging even when you know what to do, but unless you spoil them for yourself you won’t know, and will risk losing characters not out of poor strategy but simple ignorance.

Fortunately that’s a hurdle easily overcome, and the intense, breathtaking journey to salvation is absolutely worth taking. The presentation of Darkest Dungeon is spectacular, with a beautifully-animated art style of thick lines and limited colors that hearkens back to the works of Mike Mignola. The music is bold and oppressive, and the sound effects are rich and impactful. And I can’t pass up the chance to talk about the narrator, whose every word is the most overwrought, over-dramatic thing you could imagine, bordering on parody but working so, so well with the pitch-black airs of the game. It looks great, sounds great, feels great to play, and challenges you to stick with it even when the chips are down. If you want to send hapless adventurers into nightmarish hellholes to bring you back ancient treasures at the cost of their sanity unto eternity, this is the title for you.



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Invisible is a turn-based stealth strategy game. It has often been compared to XCOM, but really these games take entirely different approaches to squad-based tactics. Here, your spy agency has been raided by the dystopian megacorps and you're on the run. You've escaped with two agents, minimal gear, and your hacker AI that's on 72 hours of emergency power. That means you have three days to bust out more agents, steal new gear, and prepare for a decisive strike back at the corporations. Every agent is precious, and if you want to succeed you have to use every resource that you can get your hands on.

The game is essentially a roguelike strategy game. A run through the campaign takes about 5-6 hours, and win or lose you gain experience towards unlocking new starting options like additional agents or hacking programs. Each mission is a procedurally generated network of rooms filled with safes to crack, terminals to hack, and plenty of guards, robots, cameras, and other defenses. A straight fight with armed guards is out of the question, so you have to peek through doors and stealth around security as much as you can. The behaviors of the guards are simple but must be managed carefully to prevent situations getting out of control. Guards are normally stationary or on a two-point patrol path, but if they see something suspicious, they check it out (using scanners and other tools if they have them!). Fully alerted guards break from their patterns and search for you relentlessly, so stealth is ALWAYS the best option. You can knock out guards with tasers or darts, but when they come to they'll be on full alert. Killing is an option but an expensive one; lethal weapons are expensive, generally need ammunition, and advance the alarm tracker.

The alarm tracker, by the way, is a brilliant little feature that makes sure you don't take a million years waiting out guard patrols and extended hacks. When you start a mission, the corporations know SOMETHING is going on, but not WHAT. So every turn, the alarm tracker advances a step. Every 5 steps, the alarm level advances and a new security feature comes online. It might be more cameras, it might be tougher firewalls, or it might be additional guards. Certain actions you take can additionally advance the tracker, like being spotted by guards or tripping a hacking Daemon. Your strategy needs to be balanced between caution and speed, and riding that line makes every mission tense and challenging.

And that's just the basics! Robotic drones have their own properties and tactics, which ties into the whole hacking side of the game. Your AI can hack any of the networked features of the level to give you access to security cameras, safes, and even take over drones and turrets. This costs power, which you can hack out consoles, generate using your agent skills, or supply with programs purchased for your AI. And this is really the beauty of Invisible, that everything has so many solutions. Just with guards alone, you can create a natural distraction (opening a door) to stealth past them, you can stun them, you can kill them, you can set traps using special items, you can steal keys from them to open up alternate paths, you can hack turrets or drones to take them down with, or you can use special distraction programs to lure them away. Unlike XCOM, the random element isn't in whether or not a dice roll will make your strategy work, it's in what resources you will find to form a strategy around. You're not always going to find personal cloaks or AP-restoring stims, so you have to work with whatever you've got. It's guerrilla espionage, and it's thrilling when you make a plan work.

Missions will earn you credits to buy new gear and upgrade your agents' basic abilities (max AP, inventory slots, etc.), augments to give them new abilities, programs for hacking, and chances to free new agents (up to 4 total). Even the selection of missions is randomized, as well as the travel time between them, so your overarching strategy for each game is going to vary wildly. It's a game made to be played multiple times and the INCREDIBLE wealth of difficulty options ensure that you can play at a level you enjoy. Beginner difficulty lets you rewind up to 5 turns per mission and even restart the entire mission once, allowing you to learn and experiment as much as you want. Experienced loses the restart option and cuts your rewinds down to 3, forming a good middle-ground between Beginner and Expert, the "base" difficulty which only allows one rewind. There are additional modes like Endless where you survive as many days as you can and Time Attack where you only have 2 minutes to take your turn. You can even expand difficulty options in any mode to tailor specific features exactly how you want them.

Invisible has very quickly become the gold standard of strategy for me. The balance of stealth and strategy is perfect, there are tons of items and skills to work with, there are no unwinnable situations, and there's an amazing amount of replayability between the different modes and difficulties. The Klei art style is perfect for this as well, and it does the dark, slick oppression of megacorps really well as you skulk around. There is a story to the campaign but it's a very thin one and hardly the reason to dive deep into this game. It's consistently one of the most rewarding gaming experiences, and more people absolutely need to be playing it.

At this point, you’re probably more familiar with this incarnation of Shadow Warrior than the ancient title that spawned it. That’s for the best, really, even though the original was part of the holy BUILD Engine trio with Duke Nukem 3D and Blood. OG Shadow Warrior suffered from some punishing difficulty and unfunny racism, both elements that this newcomer has resolved. There’s really not a lot to hold against this one, in fact, aside from some meandering levels and underpowered weapons, which are more than made up for with a sharp story and enthralling combat.

Lo Wang is living the dream as a nerd-turned badass, selling his potent sword and banter skills to the highest bidder. In this case he’s been employed by the corporate magnate Zilla to deliver a legendary sword, a job that gets terribly complicated by betrayal and the appearance of terrible demons. Caught on the cusp of a trans-dimensional war, Lo Wang teams up with a smartassed demon named Hoji to bone up on his ninja skills and take the fight to the bastards tearing up his town. That journey will take him to scenic villages, corporate high-rises, massive tankers, and the worlds beyond our own in a bloody and often hilarious adventure.

If you remember anything about the original Shadow Warrior, it’s probably the absolutely terrible puns and cringe-worthy Engrish jokes. The modern Lo Wang is a far snappier, robust character that always has something clever to say no matter how dire the straits. His partner Hoji often tops him in pure snark, and the interplay between the two is some of the funniest, most charming buddy comedy in gaming. It’s striking how well the writers here got the characters, how they found ways to make them badass and funny and self-deprecating all at once, and it’s at the forefront of the game from the terribly clever opening to the surprisingly emotional conclusion.

I doubt you’re really here for the feels though, but thrill-seekers will not be disappointed either. Shadow Warrior smartly puts disproportionate emphasis on your sword, maintaining it as a potent and gratifying weapon throughout the entire game. Potent, in the many upgrades and magical sword techniques you can unlock for it, and gratifying in how it literally bisects, decapitates, and eviscerates even your largest foes. Relying solely on the blade for the entire game is going to cause problems with certain flying or armored foes, however, and for those situations you have a fine spread of pistols, uzis, flamethrowers, and rocket launchers to fall back on.

Keep in mind that these really are fallback weapons, though, You can certainly upgrade them to impressive lethality with the game’s robust upgrade system but they’re not really designed to handle entire battles on their own. Shadow Warrior is less a first-person shooter and more a first-person slasher, with the option to throw bullets and explosives into the mix. It’s an approach that becomes intensely satisfying when you cleave three enemies and plug a fourth with your pistol, then scatter the next mob with a well-placed rocket. But it’s one you’ll need to adjust to, and be prepared to re-adjust if the battle isn’t going your way.

All this action plays out over an impressively lengthy campaign, spanning the aforementioned villages and tankers and such. Flying Wild Hog has clearly come a long way here from their Hard Reset days but hints of similar weaknesses are present, chief among them being the length of the levels. Shadow Warrior is a long game, mainly because every level feels about 15-20 minutes longer than it should be. In that time you’ll have plenty of chaotic, bloody fights, but some mixes of foes are sure to throw you off until you find a way around their armor or punishing attacks. It’s not the blistering difficulty of the original, but the challenge can still spike from time to time.

None of these complaints are enough to really detract from the ninja magic on display here. The graphics are still just as bright and detailed as ever, and the sound design will make you feel every slice and bullet impact as the demons fall before you. There’s a host of secrets to find as well that prop up the many-faceted upgrade system, so you’ll have plenty to hunt for in between the massive melees. Shadow Warrior is an excellent revival of the franchise, chiefly because it ratchets up the action to 11 and wraps it in a fantastically entertaining tale of badassery.



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It's almost funny to look back at the furor Gone Home kicked up when it released four years ago. Almost, because so much has changed over time that shows how much of that furor was baseless. "Walking simulators" are now their own accepted genre with subgenres within, visual novels have grown strong and popular with hardly a peep about their nature as games, and short narrative experiences have found a comfortable place in the market. Some of these developments wouldn't even be possible without Gone Home specifically because its expert storytelling and design left such an impact, and those are the elements worth focusing on here.

After a year abroad in Europe, Katie Greenbriar returns to her family's remote and sprawling house unannounced. No one is home, and an ominous note from her sister Sam is pinned to the front door for her. Within the many rooms and halls of the house are clues to the whereabouts of Sam and her parents, along with details of their lives that put them in a whole new light. As you guide Katie in picking through the secrets of her family, a story emerges that is both heart-wrenching and rarely matched in the gaming world.

Perhaps that's the most remarkable aspect of Gone Home, that even four years out few games have managed to match the emotional or narrative peaks that it did as an indie experiment. Every part of the house contains mundane objects like books, letters, photos, buttons, backpacks, and cereal boxes that tell parts of the story just by their presence. The house itself is arranged as a perfect microcosm of the family's existence, illustrating the struggles of each member to find fulfillment in the world and acceptance in each other. It's not just a story about the missing members or the great drama at the center of the tale, but about what it means to be a family and how hard it can be to simply coexist.

These are grandiose words about a game limited to wandering halls and picking up binders and cassettes, but that's the beauty of it. What other games accomplish through scripted cutscenes or professional voice work or extensive journal entries, Gone Home accomplishes by putting an invoice in a trash can. You don't need someone explaining the pathos of being a confused teenager, you get it by witnessing the place where those conflicts played out. It's environmental storytelling at its best, with virtually every postcard and pencil placed where it'll mean something to the overarching narrative. And this emphasis on having the right elements in the right places only makes the actual notes and journal entries that much more poignant.

As you discover key pieces of the central plot, your sister Sam will narrate in a terribly earnest and relatable way. I imagine the closer you are to being a teenager the more it will resonate, and for anyone who survived high school in the 90s this game will be like a time capsule for you. Much like Scott Pilgrim, Gone Home is aimed directly at a specific generation of kids who remember Trapper Keepers and Street Fighter II on the SNES. Being an American in your 30s and wistful for your youth isn't required to appreciate the game, of course, but some of the specific notions and insecurities of being a 90s kid immersed me in the experience more than sharp graphics or surround sound ever could.

This isn't going to mean anything to folks unwilling to invest in the story, though, and I imagine that's where the most virulent objections to the game arose. Even taking your time picking through the house, you're unlikely to get more than two hours out of Gone Home and that's going to be exclusively walking, reading, and examining. There are no puzzles aside from three combination locks in the house, and the clues to overcoming those little roadblocks and the few locked doors there are can't really be missed. You really need to show up for the story and dig into it (which shouldn't be a problem 'cause like I said, it's really good) because this is a purely narrative experience.

Gone Home remains a significant accomplishment in gaming even now because few (if any) games have taken on such poignant, relevant material with the same level of quality. What SOMA did for conceptualizing the self and The Stanley Parable did for deconstructing games, Gone Home does for exploring American youth. It's a window into the way you used to think, or how your friends think, or how your children think, complete with context that gives life to the conflicts that simmer within every family. As a video game it's certainly not the longest or the most feature-rich, but the artistry of its narrative fills so much larger a space that it's an easy recommendation to anyone who appreciates good and meaningful storytelling.



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I'm a huge fan of classic DOOM and Quake, the latter particularly because of its unique atmosphere of eldritch horror. Not many games capture it quite as well, but Teleglitch gives it a terrifying run for its money. Between the gritty brown surfaces, the spilled gore, and the silent uncertainty of what lurks around every corner, this title takes that otherworldly horror and mixes it with hectic action and classic roguelike tension. Creepy, intense, and challenging, this is a worthy entry in both the roguelike and survival horror genres.

Posed like a top-down version of those classic shooters already mentioned, Teleglitch sends you through branching, randomized levels in search of escape. The science colony you're stationed on has gone completely to hell thanks to some questionable teleporter experiments (sound familiar?), leaving you as the only level-headed person alive among killer cyborgs, ravenous zombies, and worse. Along the way you'll find and assemble an arsenal of space-age weaponry as you learn more about the fate of the colony and the bizarre anomaly consuming it.

No matter how seasoned a space marine you might be, Teleglitch will have you forever dreading what's around the next corner. The top-down perspective is based on lines of sight, so anything not directly in view of you is blotted out by thick, sharp shadows. You start with naught but a pistol and knife, but over the course of the game you collect weapons, ammo, and other junk that can be combined into a huge assortment of gear to help you survive. The crafting system is robust, easy to navigate, and has a number of meaningful choices and secrets to work out. It's a refreshing addition to the game, as opposed to a lot of modern crafting systems unceremoniously bolted onto their games.

You'll need every tool at your disposal too, because nothing in Teleglitch holds back. You'll be facing waves of mutants, zombies, cyborgs, robots, and far more exotic things at every turn. While the first few levels pit you mostly against melee enemies, you'll soon start running afoul of gun-wielding foes that can drop you almost as fast as you can drop them. The limited sight lines become a real terror as you creep down the derelict corridors, tensed for the next shootout. It's one of those games that really, really makes you work to beat it, and it's intensely satisfying when you finally pull it off.

This is one of those rare pixel art games that's ugly as sin, but once you start counting bullets in your clip and learning how to construct quad-barreled nailguns, you won't even notice. The minimal graphic design does do it some favors, leaving effective elements of horror to your imagination. The sound design is incredibly on point, with ominous cues and snaps of static in just the right places. And if you like the combat, they even added a series of arenas to blast your way through. There's a lot of secrets to discover, a lot of monsters to fear, and a lot of ways to mow them down. All told, these features combine to form one of my all-time favorites on Steam, spanning the roguelike and horror genres.



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Far Cry took an important step in freeing first-person shooters from the confines of linear maps, but only the first. While it offered plenty of liberty in where to go and how to tackle challenges, it gave little to no incentives to exploring or deviating from your objective. Far Cry 2 was the second step the series needed, expanding the open maps of the previous game into a proper open world, and dotting it with towns, missions, and points of interest. In spite of this breadth of content it remains a very focused experience, offering missions that advance the plot, upgrades that enhance your lethality, and atmosphere that compliments the darkness of the narrative. So long as you can make peace with a few prickly design decisions, this one still stands as one of the best in the series.

An unnamed African nation is in the throes of civil war, and mercenaries from around the globe have flocked to the carcass of a country like the vultures they are. Somewhere in this morass is the Jackal, an infamous arms dealer who’s been dragging the war out by selling to both sides. The CIA, never ones to miss out on ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with a sovereign nation, sends you to murder him, which you botch by coming down with malaria of all things. As a weakened outsider to the conflict, the only way you can get close to your mark is to wade into the war and follow the trail of bodies, which eventually puts you at odds with mercenaries, revolutionaries, and even your mission itself.

If you’re coming to this one from later in the Far Cry series, you might be a little surprised at how grim it is. No wise-cracking hicks or animal buddies here, just blood diamonds and betrayal all the way down. To close in on the Jackal you’ll need the trust of the warring factions, which requires you run missions for them to kill and destroy at their whims. You don’t really pick a team, mind you, you’ll have to flip back and forth and before long you’re likely to forget which side is which. I’m fairly confident this is by design because trust and loyalty are a big part of the story, evidenced by your alliances with the mercenaries and how that whole storyline and the fate of the Jackal play out.

Starting out you’ll be a long way from any of that, though. Far Cry 2 is a long, long journey of driving the savannas, scouting outposts, raiding strongholds, and hunting diamonds. This epic plays out across a sizable map, with a town and merc base near the center and dozens of key locations scattered around. Each mission will send you to some far-flung village or armory or stretch of road to kill someone or burn something, prompting you to do some planning on your route. Safe houses along the way can be unlocked by killing their (hostile) inhabitants, guard posts can be cleared for a short time, and weapon shops can provide permanent access to weapons in exchange for diamonds. It’s easy to get side-tracked on the way to your target, and the map won’t seem nearly so imposing once you’ve done a few meandering runs around unlocking things.

Your buddy will also provide you an alternative to every mission. During the intro segment you’ll make friends with a fellow merc, who will offer you an extra side objective that will change how the mission proper will play out. For example, you might have to blow up a motorcade to kill the chief of police. But your buddy would have you steal the chief’s ledger from his brother, which would make him panic and return to the station. Often the side objective will make the mission more complicated, but completing them gets you upgrades to your safe houses like ammo stocks and cases for storing extra weapons. You have another buddy who serves as your revive if you go down, getting you back on your feet and fighting alongside you to get you through tough times.

It’s this attention to detail that makes Far Cry 2 so remarkable. Every system in the game has a purpose and is fully-realized in its implementation. Your map is chief among them, an actual paper map and GPS that you pull out to consult for directions. It exists in the world, flapping around when you sprint and forcing you to take your eyes off the road if you open it while driving. But you might not have to, because the many signposts around the countryside will change color to indicate how best to reach your main or side objectives. Things like this do wonders for immersion and pair well with the detailed animations and rich sound effects that accompany everything you do.

I say that every system has a purpose, and it does, but not everyone agrees on what those systems add to the game. A long-standing gripe with Far Cry 2 is how enemies at checkpoints respawn almost as soon as you leave. I consider this one pretty overblown, as there’s generally little reason to ever go back the way you came and if you did, it’s another opportunity to experience the game’s excellent gunplay and surprisingly versatile AI. Patrolling vehicles are also much-maligned but they provide an additional challenge either for stealth or sharpshooting action, and a single grenade or IED will erase them anyway.

The problems that Far Cry 2 has now are mostly due to age and the uniqueness of its engine, as it can be extremely buggy on modern systems. For me it looks and plays as good as it ever did, except for some scripted NPCs going all Jacob’s Ladder and wiggling their heads or phasing out of existence. Aside from that the crisp graphics and tactical gunplay continues to rival even modern entries in the Far Cry series itself. It’s a long game, easily twice as long as you’re expecting, but if you appreciate all it offers in terms of action and exploration you won’t tire of your ethically-questionable adventures anytime soon.



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