is it that monotonous and one-paced? i had been thinking of getting it after i'm done with Fallout 3, much like a bargain copy post x-mas.
The main story, introduced by the beginning sequence, is that you are chasing a weapons dealer known as the Jackal. To give you some perspective on the "amount of storytelling"; I have made only two encounters that progress this story after playing the game for 16 hours. You can discover "Jackal Tapes" with an interview that give you more depth on him, but they are optional and doesn't really provide any story progression. Since there are nothing else, the Jackal case doesn't feel important or mysterious.
Then there are your companions to whom you can do missions. Each one gives you two missions (24 in total) and I guess that some of them at least gives you a deeper reason why you do them ("for justice"), but having done the first 10 I didn't felt them to be unique or inspiring and they do not have any effect upon the game.
The bonus missions, assassination, helping weapon dealers, doing underground missions, are the same over and over again, have you done one you know how the next one will be.
The real progression is made by doing faction missions that will bring the story ahead. Those missions have some diversity but I wouldn't say that there's anything new, spectacular or epic about them. Most of the time you run to a waypoint, kill some stuff, then return back home to maybe receive a thanks.
What Far Cry 2 offers is a large area with lots of things to do in an advanced toybox engine. In the end however, it's the lack of quality and depth of it's story content that brings it down for me. That may be personal. Im just the kind of player who finds the story and the storytelling to be one of the most important aspects in a game.
Then there's also the problem with "wasting time on nothing". There are four busstations per map, so it's possible to cut down travel time a bit, and there are vehicles, but all the vehicles in the game and only four busstations cannot reduce the problem with being forced to go very long distances that simply suck up time without entertainment. Then there's the problem with the dreaded "respawning guardposts" which you might read about in most reviews. You cannot get far without ending up in a carchase and when that happens you have to get out of the car, risking an insta-death (being run over by a car), kill your opponents, repair a car and take it to continue your travel. Doing that over and over again like 2-3 times whenever you want to go somewhere gets old rather quickly.