Far Cry 2 (PS3)

Far Cry 2 is easily one of the best looking games of 2008

We've seen Far Cry 2 numerous times since it was announced. In most cases seeing a game every few months lessens the impact somewhat, but that's simply not the case with Ubisoft's incredibly ambitious next-gen FPS. We still remember the stunning Games Convention 2007 demo like it was yesterday and the 20 minute demonstration shown last week hammered home the fact that we want this game to be released now. This is right at the top of our most wanted list.

As we've explained before, you play as one of 12 characters, with the objective being to hunt down and kill an arms dealer known as The Jackal. This all takes place in Africa in a map 50km² in size. It's pretty massive. You'll make friends (known as buddies in the game) as you progress, who'll help you out, dish out missions and even bring you back from the brink of death.

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Our GC08 demo started in a hut in town. Ubisoft's Clint Hocking, Creative Director on Far Cry 2, took a mission from some guys and then headed off into the vast openness of the game world. Far Cry 2 uses an in-game map, viewable in digestible 1km² bite-size portions or as the whole 50km². The map shows objectives as red circles and buddies waiting to be met as blue squares. Clint heads off towards the objective marker, unaware of the chaos that is about to ensue.

With the village seemingly quite empty he wanders up to a jeep, only for an enemy patrol car to appear over the crest of a hill. They spot him and it's time to take cover. Another patrol car appears and he's in serious trouble. He spots another jeep down the road and heads straight for it, but in his panic throws a Molotov cocktail instead of getting in the passenger seat. The jeep catches on fire, explodes and sets fire to the nearby trees and grass. Thankfully one of the patrol cars had been following and is caught up in the blast, leaving only one other car to deal with. Clint takes the gunner out with a well placed bullet to the head and then shoots the driver through the windscreen.

Things clearly didn't go to plan, as Clint's strong language testified, but it served to demonstrate the dynamic situations that can occur when you're dealing with clever AI in a highly interactive game world. Those patrol cars aren't going to appear for every player, and had the jeep not exploded the pursuers wouldn't have been taken out, making for an altogether more difficult fire-fight.

The PC version will have a slight graphical edge on top-end hardware, but the console versions look great too.

Feeling cocky Clint heads off towards the objective, but runs into trouble once again. He quickly switches to the gunner's seat in the jeep, taking out one enemy, but falls foul to another's bullets. All isn't lost however. Earlier in the game he'd made friends with a buddy, who arrives on the scene to offer a helping hand and get you to safety. You lose your weapons, but you're revived in a safe place and with a hand gun. According to Clint the buddies you meet will differ to those other players meet, and they're completely autonomous and alive in the game world. You could meet a player who your mate played with for the majority of his game, only to see him die at the hands of some enemies minutes later. The core storyline will play out similarly across the board, but your actual experiences will differ substantially.

On its release later this year there's no question that Far Cry 2 will be among the most impressive looking games ever released. We saw the game running on Xbox 360 and PC and both look brilliant. The good news is that the console games (it's also coming to PS3) are the same as the PC version (excect for some interface differences and the ability to save anywhere) and based on the 360 version the graphics are comparable too. On PC the game had a sharper appearance, but the frame rate in the 360 game held up surprisingly well even during chaotic moments such as the explosive jeep forest fire. The way fire spreads, the lighting effects and the realistic weather system need to be seen to be appreciated.

About half of the Far Cry 2 presentation we saw (PC and Xbox 360) was dedicated to the included map maker. This will ship with the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game and looks to be a real cut above what we've seen in the past. This isn't a tool to make levels in the Quake mould of old. You won't be building rooms linked by corridors, but massive outdoor areas set in deserts and swamps. The console versions will feature a more streamlined interface but the functionality is the same as the mouse-driven PC tool.

To begin with a level designer from Ubisoft laid down some hills using a bump tool. These looked like artificially made mountains, but a quick blast with the erosion tool gave them an impressive professional finish. After selecting a rock texture this was then applied to the hills, and it'll be possible to set parameters so paint is only applied to certain areas, making texturing both simple and natural looking. Planting trees is also incredibly simple. Instead of placing each tree individually the game plants them procedurally based on researched tree formation data for each land type in the game, be it desert or swamp.

Explosions happen in big way in Far Cry 2

Everything about the level maker is designed for ease of use and creative freedom. The devs at Ubisoft know that it's not realistic to have a hut floating in the air, but if you want to do it you can. If you want to have your buildings on their side, that's fine too. By giving you the freedom to do what you want it should allow for some truly unique creations, and the user ranking system should filter out the quality from the dross. The ability to instantly hop from the design view to running around inside your level is a great feature and allows you to very quickly test out subtle design changes. Certain things aren't possible (such as spawn points in the ground) and the game will tell you about these, but where it can the game will work around you, such as removing trees if you draw a road trough the middle of a forested area.

Of course, your imagination isn't quite your limit, with the game having to set a budget for memory and performance usage (even next-gen consoles can only cope with so much), but you're still looking at pretty massive levels. Ubisoft claims that you'll be able to knock up respectable designs in a few hours and demonstrated this with some levels they'd created earlier. Of course, they looked mightily impressive, but we'll just have to wait and see what the community comes up with.

The VideoGamer.com team saw just about every game worth seeing at Games Convention 2008, and Far Cry 2 came up in discussion on a nightly basis - with other members of the team sneaking in for demonstrations throughout the week. That says all you need to know really. Even with the likes of Killzone 2, LittleBigPlanet, Mirror's Edge, Heavy Rain and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts vying for our attention, Ubisoft's open-world FPS somehow managed to muscle its way into conversations.