Normally when you talk about Far Cry 2, you will always hear about the malaria mechanic and how it ruins the game.
But malaria overshadows its other issue, its infamous difficulty and how insanely hard it can get.
Far Cry 2’s hardest difficulty isn’t called “infamous” for nothing, it’s more challenging to stay alive than to worry about your malaria infection, and I’ll explain some of the things you will experience if you choose to play on infamous difficulty.
Malaria Isn’t The Reason Why It’s Called Infamous
Far Cry 2 is famous for its immersion, realism, and unfortunately, its malaria mechanic. It’s annoying, but at least the devs learned their lesson from this and never did it again.
But let me get this out of the way: The malaria mechanic is the least of your concerns on infamous.
On infamous difficulty, your malaria pill popping is still manageable as long as you take care of it ASAP. Doing the underground missions once it pops up is definitely the way to go if you’re not currently doing a main mission.
No need to worry about that annoying malaria when you have a full bottle of medicine on you at all times.
So what makes infamous, so “infamous”?
Far Cry 2’s Enemies Become Bullet Sponges
Enemies can kill you in five shots or less. But for you? Your assault rifles will barely hurt them, and you won’t have enough ammo to take on a whole camp full of them.
I found out the hard way that shotguns and sniper rifles are the only way to go since they can down someone in one hit.
Don’t forget about stealth. Stealth is the only option you have when there’s too many of them. But if you miss one headshot with your silenced gun, the whole camp will know where you are, and you’re going to have to face all of them at once.
Since these guys won’t go down easily, you’ll be planning out attacks rather than just firing at them in the open. Aiming for the head is better than unloading a whole clip on one soldier.
Enemy Jeeps Make It Hard To Drive Peacefully
I don’t know how many times I’ve died on the road because of enemy patrol jeeps. You can’t fire from the driver’s seat; you still have to get out of the car or switch to the turret to fire back at them.
But even before you can get out of the car, you’re either at half health or dead. It gets frustrating to instantly die from just being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
The jeep with the mounted grenade launcher? Good luck trying to avoid them because they will instantly kill you on sight, though there’s a chance they’ll blow themselves up on accident.
With all of the jeeps trying to kill you, your best option is to find other routes. Going off-road to avoid them is one way to make driving more peaceful.
These guys make travelling even harder than usual. My advice is to consistently save before and while driving. Because if you die along the way with no saving, you’ll have to restart and waste your time driving again, and that happens a lot.
Save, Die, Load, Repeat.
Because you die in seconds, you’re going to keep wishing you saved sooner. There are no checkpoints to hold your hand, no reminders to save the game, and you will be punished by going back to where you last saved and doing it all over again.
Since I played Far Cry 2 on a regular hard drive, the loading times became a pain in the neck. And since I kept dying every ten minutes or so, I went insane over how many times I’ve seen the loading screen.
Infamous difficulty reinforces saving frequently because of all the things that can go wrong in an instant. Have that auto save shortcut ready because you’ll be using it a lot.
Is Infamous Difficulty Fair?
It feels fair, for the most part at least.
Like I said earlier, your enemies are bullet sponges, and also you die in your jeep a lot with only a few options to deal with it.
What this difficulty teaches you is how to approach things. You can always avoid unnecessary battles by taking another route, or you can pick them off with a sniper, maybe even go for stealth with silenced guns.
Infamous difficulty felt like it was trying to balance both difficulty and realism, but in the end leaned towards making your gameplay more difficult by just making things harder to kill.
Summary
In summary, playing Far Cry 2 on infamous is hard even for experienced FPS players. Realism and buffed up enemies isn’t the best mix, but the silver lining at least is that we get to play around these faults and find creative ways to approach the game.
While it felt unfair with all the times I died from grenade launcher jeeps, and enemies that can take a full rifle clip to the chest, it forced me to approach the game in different angles, making my gameplay unique in each battle. It made me experiment with different weapon loadouts and tactics just to see what would be the best way to enter an enemy outpost.
If you want a challenge, try playing Far Cry 2 on infamous difficulty and you’ll be surprised how easy it is to die after a single mistake.
If malaria won’t kill you, everything else will. Don’t forget to save.