So I picked up the first three Far Cry games a short while ago when they were on sale as a bundle. The first one was so bad, I gave up like 70% of the way through and skimmed over an LP instead of finishing it myself. I've never done that with a game before...
Just started Far Cry 2. My god, it's such a huge leap. I've got some UI gripes (feels a bit like consolitis), but I'm pretty impressed with the first couple hours.
[spoiler:Personal bugbears]
If you want to do most of the side missions it'll start to feel like a bit of a grind, and even then I'm still not totally sure which mission always advances the plot, your buddy that you get will inevitably die one way or another (For some reason they make your buddy unable to be revived past... 4 times? 3 for me, I think.) but you get replacements easily so that's fine, the grimy backgrounds kind of make it a bit hard to see enemies so you will get killed a lot by cheap shots by other enemies, your health goes down really quick in an firefight, and there seems to be a weird spike in difficulty facing off against enemies in larger groups than... 4, perhaps 5 people at once, I think, because I always got killed in less than a minute against groups bigger than that, even on normal, while smaller groups get their asses handed to them.
For some reason, killing an enemy silently with Melee will not silence their cries, and even without that, I normally descended into normal firefights even when I'm more a stealth guy, mostly because of the lack of indicators and the fact that most areas where fights take place in is open space, not to mention the enemy can see you far better than you them.[/spoiler]
Overall, I played Far Cry 2 about 15 hours before giving up, but who knows, perhaps you'll like it far more than me.