I'm very disappointed with Ubisoft. Assassins Creed sucked, and the graphics sucked too. Also knowing Ubisoft, Far Cry 2 graphics won't look as good as the trailers. Not as Crysis did, which actually the game looks a lot better ingame than in the trailers.
Although Assassin's Creed got quite boring after 2-3 hours - the gameplay was repetitive - and the story was just a random mess of historical events and fiction, the atmosphere, mood and music of the game was just awesome. And it wasn't ugly at all.
Crysis is pretty, but isn't that much an "open-world" game, as it was advertised to be. The gameplay got repetitive fast, and the story was incredibly shallow and boring. A game with great graphics, and highly interactive environment, but lacking a good story, something to draw the player into the whole experience. Just like a hollywood movie with awesome special effects and an assload of CG, but poor story. I also played through Crysis: Warhead, hoping, that Crytek learned from the flaws of Crysis - but I was disappointed to see, that it has only gotten shorter without making the plot more interesting. Just another unnecessary sequel milking a title.
On the other hand, I just started playing Far Cry 2, and with 1,5 hours in, it looks much like what Crysis should have been. You can choose, in which order you complete your missions, or if you don't feel like advancing, you can just simply go and cruise or run around, and explore the environment.
I agree, it isn't as good-looking as Crysis with everything up on max, but I don't have a rig to run it on the highest settings, and I can tell you, it looks and runs way better with medium/high settings, than Crysis did on my config.