If I have to endure another level in which I must escape from a burning building on the verge of collapse, I'll set fire to my house. I'll collapse through the floor, tumble twelve feet onto my back, crawl at tedious pace through a low section, traverse a room that's entirely on fire apart from a narrow path of miraculously not-on-fire floorspace and then climb a series of conveniently collapsed roof beams to safety.

"Phew!" I'll think, "I'd have been in a spot of bother there if I hadn't played through pretty much the same section in Black Ops 2, Max Payne 3, Far Cry 3, Medal of Honor: Warfighter and twice in Assassin's Creed 3 this year."

It's not the fire that's annoying. Things tend to catch fire a lot in videogames. No, it's the feeling that there are mission designers worldwide calling their set-pieces from the same playbook. You could tear out the pages, laminate them and resell the package as an Action Adventure Videogame Construction Kit. Shuffle the cards and lay them out in a row for an instant framework.

Let's have a go with the modern military shooter edition: escape a burning building - sniper section - flee a helicopter - warehouse section - fire at pursuers from the back of a truck - breach and clear - press X to kill prominent antagonist.

This section felt particularly incongruous when it interrupted the terrific free-roaming violence of Far Cry 3, especially considering the fact that Far Cry 3 has a fantastic dynamic fire effects built into the engine. The "escape from burning building" sequences that emerge naturally from Far Cry 3's systems are much, much better than the scripted sequence written into their early story mission.

But not all games aspire to create a dynamic open world, and nor should they. But in a dedicated, scripted action game there's an even greater need for new set-pieces and fresh settings.

Take Bulletstorm, whose opening sections dramatically undersold its capacity for bonkers theatrics. Sure, it had a "fire at pursuers from the back of a truck" bit, but in Bulletstorm's case the pursuer was a colossal red doom-wheel that careered about the landscape blowing up pipelines and threatening to stomp the player into a smear at any moment. If action games are determined to be rollercoasters, we're sorely in need of some new twists.

Ever wonder what the PC games of 2012 would be like if they were text adventures? Of course not, no one in their right mind would ever wonder that. In related news: I wondered that! So, rip out your GeForce GTX 680, plug in your dusty 10" CRT monitor, and stuff your programmable eight-button mouse in a stocking, because this week we're going to imagine five of this year's games the way all PC games used to be: as text adventures.

This year, Assassin's Creed III took gamers to colonial Boston to unravel the ever-denser mystery of the Assassins and Templars, let us hunt, fight naval battles, and participate in American history, and exposed us to roughly 436 hours of cutscenes. Oh, it and occasionally let us assassinate someone! That was nice of it. Now, climb a church, stand on the steeple, and watch as massive expanses of words unfold around you in Assassin's Creed III: The Text Adventure!

It might be a good idea to check that you're running the latest batch of Nvidia drivers. The full version of the GeForce 310.70 WHQL set are available now, and it sounds like they'll add a fair few extra frames per second to some of this year's biggest games. Nvidia say they'll boost Far Cry 3 by 37%, Black Ops 2 by 26% at max settings, add an extra 17% to Assassin's Creed 3 performance (compared to a pre-release version, mind) and deliver smaller increases to Battlefield 3 and Skyrim.

"In October's GeForce 310.33 beta driver we improved performance by up to 15% in nine games, and this time we’re improving performance by up to 37% in twenty-one games," they say.

If you're running a GTX6 series you can experiment with TXAA antialiasing, which promises to do a better job of de-jaggifying edges than traditional anti-aliasing techniques. Also, because there are some letters of the alphabet we haven't capitalised yet, there's a new SGSSAA tool that'll make it easier to implement this top-tier form of luxury line-smoothing on high-end systems more easily.

The new drivers are a nice follow up on the recent release of the GeForce Experience system, designed to recommend optimal game settings based on your system requirements. Does it work? Dave gave it a try, find out what he thinks here. For more on the latest driver release, read all about it at the Nvidia site.

According to Ubisoft, the first DLC pack for Assassin's Creed 3 takes place in an alternate reality. Which is cute, because it suggests they think their current tale of exploding suns, genetically coded tourist trips to the past and magic space wizards is the actual reality.

In the upcoming alternate-alternate reality tale, George Washington is recast as a power-mad tyrant who crowns himself king of the US. Hijinks ensue, likely in the form of Connor running up trees, sulking at people and stabbing a deer. Maybe there'll even be an assassination or two, although not on the basis of the few hours I've played of the main game so far.

Here's a trailer full of dramatically earnest narration.



I'm genuinely looking forward to finding out what justification they give for Desmond pursuing this line of history warping investigation.

Threequels Far Cry 3 and Assassin's Creed III have been mysteriously absent from the UK version of Steam for a few weeks now, possibly because of the impending apocalypse, possibly because Ubisoft hate Christmas, possibly because they were pushing their awful Uplay service. Whatever the reason, it's thankfully now moot, because both games have suddenly popped up on Steam. You won't find them under New Releases, but both Assassin's Creed III and Wallet-Crafting Simulator 2012 can now be bought with Steam money. And just in time for Christmas, too.

In related news, Ubisoft have revealed that there's a Far Cry 3 patch in the works that will allow us to customise that intrusive HUD until it's to our liking. In a statement to Kotaku, Ubi had this to say:

"Based on feedback from both press and fans, the Far Cry 3 production team is working on a patch that will allow you to toggle most HUD/UI elements based on player preference. The patch will also avoid issues encountered in the .dll hack that might create a mission walkthrough break (missing QTE prompts, critical information, etc)."

A double-dose of jolly good news, then. There's no word on a release date for that patch yet, but hopefully it will arrive before Christmas.

I am pursuing a man in a tricorner hat through the streets of colonial New York. In the top-left of the screen, Assassin’s Creed III instructs me to chase him. In smaller text just below it, there is a secondary objective: ‘do not shove or tackle anyone’. I turn sharply into an alleyway and barge past a woman, earning myself a red X on the mission log and losing my ‘full synchronisation’ bonus. I’m not sure why I want to be fully synchronised, but the completionist in me insists that I try again.

A few attempts later, I’ve figured out a system. Stop sprinting when the alleyways give out onto open streets, edge carefully around pedestrians, and continue. It’s ludicrous - why on Earth would I not shove someone, if the fate of a nation was at stake - but I’ve not incurred the red X, I’ve not lost my bonus. I chase the man and, as is tradition, wait for the cutscene where I catch him. It doesn’t come. We pass through the same fishmarket for the second time and I realise that we’ve done a lap of central New York. The game is waiting for me. Oh! I think. This is an assassination. I do those.

I can’t get close enough to use my hidden blades so I wait until we’re running down a clear alleyway, pull my flintlock, and fire. Desynchronised! Target was killed. Try again.

It takes another couple of tries before I figure out that the game wants me to catch him - tackle him, if you will. My objective is to give chase. My sub-objective is to not tackle anyone. The solution is to tackle someone. You may Google your own facepalm jpeg.

Assassin’s Creed III features the silliest and most self-defeating mission design in the the series’ history, and it’s a huge shame. When it isn’t directly hamstrung by constrained mission areas, flakey AI, and imprecise movement, it manages to steer you into the path of these flaws anyway with optional objectives that encourage you to game the system - and Assassin’s Creed III’s systems do not hold up well to gaming. When full sync bonuses were introduced in Brotherhood, they were designed to encourage creative use of the tools at your disposal. Here they more often tamp down your options, exposing the emptiness of the game underneath. You can ignore them, sure, but you can’t ignore the signal sent by that big red X.

Lafayette got a street in New York. Connor fights in every battle in the revolution and doesn't even get a bench.

There’s a lot more to an Assassin’s Creed game than its missions, but the fifth in the series drops the ball with such regularity that it resonates through the entire experience. A pervasive sense of frustration is the snare drum that accompanies Assassin’s Creed III on its march through the American revolution.

You undertake that march - for the most part - as Connor, a young assassin with a British father and a Native American mother. Connor’s quest to negotiate a future for his people against the backdrop of revolutionary war is well written and often well acted. The game’s treatment of issues of race, class, democracy and empire even manages to be insightful, and Ubisoft have no qualms about turning America’s founding mythology on its head. Characterisation is strong. Connor will get some flak simply for not being Ezio, but he comes into his own in the second half of the game. Assassin’s Creed III has a cracking villain, too, in a senior British Templar that the writers seem to like more than they do their ostensible lead.

The game suffers for a lack of female characters - the only real exception being Connor’s mother, who after a brief period of activity retreats from the stage to usher in the series’ next male protagonist. It’s a shame that the game does not do more, given how laudably it addresses themes of repression in other contexts.

There is also, of course, Desmond. Creed’s sci-fi metanarrative splutters to a stop, pulling together its various precursor races, ancient artifacts and cosmic threats for a conclusion with the dramatic impact of a wheezing cat finally sicking up all over the carpet. It’s not all bad: a handful of present-day missions let you see what Desmond’s time in the Animus has taught him, and Danny Wallace’s character has somehow metastasized from the human equivalent of Clippy from Microsoft Word into a likeable person with something to say about history.

"Why?!" "Why?!" "Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?!"

There’s a lot going on, then, and a lot to do. The new Animus bombards you with side-missions, collectibles and challenges, often without heed to what you’re doing or whether the tone will be ruined by the sudden notification that you’re in the top 50% in the world for whistling. Its three main explorable areas - Boston, New York, and the compressed frontier that links them - are liberally sprinkled with men to stab, lists to fill out, and every other form of open-world busywork you can think of.

"Oh wow, that goat really does yell like a man."

Crafting returns, expanded from Revelations’ bomb-making into something far larger and far harder to rationalise in the context of a game about a man who stabs people. Combining materials gathered through hunting and purchased from settlers in your homestead allows you to make a wide array of items for further crafting or trade - from barrels to booze, venison jerky and Franklin stoves. You can top up your supply of arrows and other consumables in this way, but it’s far quicker and not very much more expensive to just buy them. The system feels irrelevant and the cumbersome interface prevents it from simply being a breezy distraction. It’s one example of the many ways that Assassin’s Creed III manages to draw the player away from what is fun or meaningful. It’s like thrusting a pile of dried fruit and a bottle of Captain Morgan into the hands of a pilot and telling him that he’s allowed to make rum and raisin ice cream now. That’s nice, Assassin’s Creed III. Do you mind? I’m flying a plane.

Puppeteer-style controls are gone, replaced with traditional keybindings: interact, attack, secondary weapon and so on. The verisimilitude suggested by the old arms, legs and head system has been lost, but the new way is clearer and for the most part it’s a worthy change. The animation team deserve credit for the way that Connor moves through the environment - the seamless transitions from ground to tree-branch, from street to interior, from attack to canned takedown animation. Assassin’s Creed III manages to incorporate detail that other games would force into quick-time events into the flow of regular play, and as a result it’s substantially less compromised than you’d expect by its cinematic ambitions. If ‘less compromised than you’d expect’ sounds like guarded praise, then that’s because it is.

Counter-riposte combos are still the dominating force in combat, but what exactly constitutes a riposte has been diversified: firing lines mean grabbing an enemy to use as a shield, and heavy foes are better responded to with quick, aggressive jabs at their defences than waiting for them to attack. No more Ezio-style multi-man murder sprees spring from a single tap of the attack button. Hoisting the leader of a roaming patrol into the trees with a rope dart before slamming to the ground and taking out his friends with a few precisions strikes builds on the best of what the series is good at, which is self-contained, satisfying bursts of action. Moments like this are one of the key things that protect Assassin’s Creed III from outright mediocrity, but the problem is that they have to be staged by the player in the open world: the game’s main missions, which should be an opportunity to encourage creativity, more often actively punish it.

Tree-climbing feels and looks great.

The game looks substantially better on PC but otherwise this is an underwhelming port. Keyboard and mouse controls can’t be rebound and feel like an afterthought, so play it with a gamepad. The game ran at 30-50 fps on full settings on an Intel i5 760 system with 8Gb of RAM and a Radeon HD 6970. A few dips to 20 fps while in busy cities necessitated dialing back shadow quality a little. The game uses Ubisoft’s Uplay system, but a permanent internet connection isn’t required and all you lose for switching to offline mode is a few entirely missable unlockables.

The root of my issue with Assassin’s Creed III is this: that for as much stuff as it provides, the amount that it actually allows you to do feels thinner than ever. A vast amount of its content can be reduced to ‘get from A to B and push a button’, and stealth rarely strays from minigame territory: ‘try to stay in the circle’, ‘try to stay in the circle when it’s moving’. It’s about pattern recognition rather than creative thought, binary reactions with no room for life or dynamism. Ubisoft clearly hope that top-grade presentation will be enough to convince you that holding forward to make Connor walk between cutscenes is somehow satisfying - but it isn't. Players deserve the freedom to make up their own minds. Isn’t that what Assassin's Creed purports to be about?

Assassin’s Creed III’s basic mechanics fare much better in multiplayer, where human opponents - or allies, in the co-op Wolfpack assassination challenges - provide the depth and dynamism that the single-player game lacks. The other area where the game excels comes entirely from left field: naval combat.

Connor's dapper Captian's garb is only available outside of naval missions if you pre-ordered from specific retailers.

Connor moonlights as a privateer captain in a series of optional sea missions that thread in and out of the main plot. During these you take the helm of an Assassin frigate, barking orders at your men and steering your warship into broadsides and boarding actions. It’s absolutely spectacular - weather and ocean effects create a phenomenal sense of place, and control is just arcadey enough to be exciting while retaining the heft associated with 18th century naval warfare. What’s more, the mechanics are actually interesting, rewarding tactical thought in a way that sits flush with Assassin’s Creed’s broader historical mission statement. Why is Assassin’s Creed suddenly the best Master and Commander game ever made? I have no idea, but I’m glad that it is.

It is not that the rest of the game feels rushed. The production values on display hit the heights of what this industry is capable of. It’s quixotic, but often admirable for it. Assassin’s Creed III is not a half-assed game: but it is approximately half ass. Frequently during my twenty hours with it I’d find myself wishing that other body parts had played a bigger role. Brains, perhaps, for rethinking the necessity of crafting or trading or courier missions or Desmond. Hands for testing and determining that, no, it is not fun to be whacked with a great big red X for failing to abide by pedantic and inartfully implemented rules. Assassin's Creed III rises above mediocrity by virtue of its ambition, its writing, and the set-piece moments where its best ideas form ranks and push. It's the sequel that proves that a revolutionary rethink is needed, but not the sequel that pulls it off.

Far Cry 3 will its own improved version of the user-friendly level editor that shipped with Far Cry 2. That's according to a report from Far Cry 2 mapper Fallen Champ, who visited the Ubisoft Massive studio in Malmo, Sweden, earlier this month and got an early look at the updated tools. He's posted plenty of details of his experience on the Ubisoft forums.

The vibrant jungles of Far Cry 3's islands means plenty of new themes and terrain types to experiment with. Town, Temple, Airport, Village, Mines, Radio Tower, World War 2 and more are listed as asset types. Different types of water and waterfalls will be available and a tunneling tool should allow for more inventive caves and hidden routes. Mappers will also be able to drop AI-driven NPCs into maps to test out combat, though it sounds as though full maps can't be exported if they contain NPC animals and pirates, which suggests we won't be able to create co-op maps with the tools.

There's always a chance that modders will make their way around that particular limitation. We'll find out soon enough. Far Cry 3 is out on November 29 in Europe and Australia, November 30 in the UK and December 4 in North America, and it's rather good. Find out why in our Far Cry 3 review, and see the Far Cry 3 level editor in action in the video below from Platform 32.

I don’t know what an Undying Bear is exactly, but I’ve vowed to kill it. I hope it’s just a name. This is a mission for the island’s Rakyat tribe, and Rakyat tradition dictates that I must defeat the creature with the infinite-ammo pump-action shotgun they’ve given me. A recent tradition, I would guess, but one I’m happy to honour. The truth is, I have an ulterior motive for finding and killing the legend: I’d really like a new rucksack.

A lot of what you do in Far Cry 3 raises perplexing questions: why would a rucksack made from the skin of the Undying Bear hold more than the one I made from four dead dingoes earlier? Can’t I just make one out of six dead dingoes? What is it about Undying Bear skin that facilitates a particularly capacious rucksack design? And more to the point: if it’s never died, how would anyone know?

But as I scramble away from it, panic-firing my traditional tribal pump action, what I’m actually wondering is this: when did Far Cry 3 become so good?



We’d been told it was an ‘open world’ game, but everything Ubisoft showed of it made it look like a monologue-heavy, tightly scripted adventure, its freedom limited to small mission areas. That is in there, it turns out: there’s an absurdly long series of missions about rescuing your friends from the pirates who’ve captured them. But it’s just one of the many different games you can play on this vast, freely explorable tropical island.

Hunting wild game to make bags out of their skin is another. Guns, money, syringes and all types of ammunition require their own special container, and every size of every container can only be made from the skin of one particular species of animal. And while guns, money, syringes and all types of ammunition are abundantly available on the island, its people have apparently never invented the bag.

So you, American tourist Jason Brody, must bring your container technology to the island by personally inventing and reinventing various types of harnesses, wallets and sacks, culminating in your magnum opus: the Undying Bear Skin Rucksack, a masterpiece of dermatological engineering capable of holding up to 96 leaves.



If you’re going to ask players to buy into a system so hilariously removed from its origins in real-world logic, it had better work. It does. Making the island’s wildlife the fodder for your personal upgrade system turns you into a hunter, forced to study and understand the jungle as you explore it. The place teems with life, to the point that you’ll often just sit in a bush and watch it. Check out the leopard stalking those boar! What are those dogs howling at? Ooh look, a Komodo dragon mauling a villager!

They don’t just fight amongst themselves: the island is dotted with pirate outposts, and the roads are travelled by trucks and cars full of pirates, Rakyat rebels, and civilians. Almost any pair of these have some reason to scuffle if they blunder into each other on their randomised routes, and hearing it happen around you makes the place feel alive. Distant gunfire or beast growls are never just ambience: something’s actually happening over there, and you can go and find out what. Maybe steal its skin.

Those outposts are what the game is really about, and conquering one demonstrates everything that makes it great. Your first job is to scout: you’ve got an entire island of free space to circle this small settlement, and the zoom lens of your camera to study it with. The first Far Cry let you tag enemies with your binoculars: once seen, they’re marked on your map in real-time. Far Cry 2 ditched that for being unrealistic. Far Cry 3 brings it back with a vengeance: not only does your camera mark enemies on the map, it lets you see them through walls from then on. As with the skin-crafting, the philosophy is clear: screw reality, this ability makes the game more fun. It does.



Once you’ve scoped and tagged the 5-10 enemies guarding the outpost, you have perfect situational awareness. You could open fire, but at least one of the pirates will make it to an alarm panel. That brings a truckload of goons to reinforce, and things get very messy. So priority number two is to disable the alarms, and the systems for this are deliciously clever.

You can shoot them. OK, that one’s not clever, but it has an interesting complication: only the panel you shoot is disabled, and even a silenced shot will make enough of an impact noise to send the guards running to the others. If it’s a small camp, and you’ve scouted it thoroughly, and you’re sure you have line of sight to every panel, you can speed-snipe them all before the guards can set them off. This is cool.

Trickier, but cooler still, is to methodically eliminate each pirate without alerting the others. This is tough, but your tools support it: you can lunge for any unwitting enemy nearby and impale them on your machete before they can call for help. A perk system lets you spend experience points to upgrade stuff like this, including a great trick that lets you steal the dying guard’s own knife and throw it at someone else for a second silent kill.



My favourite method, though, is often more practical. If you can get to one of the alarm panels in person, you can tamper with it to disable them all. It’s silent, instant and comprehensive. But the panels are always in the heart of the outpost, watched by everyone. Getting to one requires perfect scouting, obsessive planning and steady nerves.

That generally means creating a distraction, and that’s another thing Far Cry 3 is great at. You have a dedicated button for throwing a rock, and the sound will distract any idle guard in earshot. It’s not a new feature for the series, but short-sighted enemies, more predictable AI and the see-through-walls thing make it massively more useful this time. And those same factors apply to other distractions: a car-full of rebels showing up, a stray bear wandering past, or the pirates’ pet leopard suddenly finding its rickety bamboo cage shot open.

Last time I did the cage trick, the leopard savaged every pirate in the camp, waited for my Rakyat allies to show up and take over, then savaged all of them too. That camp is under leopard control now. I gave him sovereignty.



Part of what I love about all these systems in Far Cry 3 is the way they chain together. I find myself hedging my bets: I want to take an outpost down undetected, but I’ll try to sneak in and disable the alarms first in case I screw it up. And before I do that, I’ll drop some C4 under a nearby truck: if I’m close to being discovered, detonating that’ll take their attention off me. Often, halfway through carrying out my plan, the guards catch sight of something they want to attack outside the outpost walls, and rush off to shoot at it. So you have to be ready to restrategise on the spot, and sneak through any window of opportunity that opens up.

Once, when I couldn’t get to an alarm panel, I was rumbled halfway through eliminating the guards. I finished the rest off before the reinforcements arrived, but that left me trapped in an empty building with eight angry pirates hunting for me. It was heart-poundingly tense. I’d peek out of windows to tag them with my camera, then watch their silhouettes through the walls until one strayed close. I couldn’t risk leaving the huts, so I’d just throw a stone near the doorway. The sound would lure him inside, I’d impale him on my knife, drag his body out of view, then wait for my next target.

If you do manage to disable the alarms, your reward is an even more satisfying second phase to the fight. You still have to eliminate all the guards, and it’s still good to remain unseen, but now it doesn’t matter how panicked they get as their friends drop around them.

Far Cry 2 had outposts too, though they were smaller with fewer ways to approach. They were also the source of my biggest problem with that game: they repopulated. Far Cry 3’s solution to this problem is: they don’t. You can conquer the whole island, outpost by outpost, turning each into a rebel base with hunting and assassination missions to help secure the area. It’ll just take you a while, because it’s huge.



Taking over an outpost gets you a new safehouse with a built-in shop, selling a fairly ridiculous array of guns and attachments. These are unexpectedly satisfying to use, and Far Cry 2’s slightly tiresome habit of causing them to randomly jam is gone. It’s also very generous about which ones you can fit silencers to - I ended up taking a silenced SMG, a silenced sniper rifle, the silent bow, and a grenade launcher for emergencies (leopards, basically).

Yes, it’s a game in 2012, so it has a bow. Along with the endlessly distracting rock and the brutally effective machete, the bow makes you feel like a hunter, stalking and butchering teams of heavily armed guards with nothing but blades and guile. You’re never forced to get it, and it’s not actually as effective as a good silenced sniper rifle, but it gives you a sense of identity the other two games never had. As you walk through a silent town of corpses, pulling your arrows back out of their skulls, you can’t help thinking, “Christ, I’m glad I’m on my side.”

Your captured outposts become hubs for two types of missions: assassinations and hunting quests. Both are fun, but assassinations are the highlight: you’ve got to take out an enemy commander with only your knife.

I’ve been putting it off, but I should probably talk about the story missions. The pirates have captured - no kidding - you, your brother, your brother’s girlfriend, your girlfriend, your friend, your other brother, and your other friend. By the end of it I was surprised we didn’t also find my mother, niece and high-school English teacher somewhere in the compound.

It’s not all bad. About half of the Jesus Christ /thirty-eight/ missions give you enough freedom to have fun with the predatory combat systems that make the outpost fights so great. The other half... erk. They’re like a guided tour of all the clumsiest ways to mash story and videogames together until both of them break.

You left the mission area! Restart! You lost the target! Restart! You failed the quicktime event! Restart! A plot character got themselves killed! Restart! We spawned some enemies in a spot you knew was empty! Restart!



I don’t feel like you have to be that smart to predict this stuff won’t work. You don’t have to play a lot of games to see how it backfires. And you don’t have to talk to a lot of gamers to find out how much we hate it when you cheat or punish us to make a scene play out the way the story needs it to. It’s so painful to see clumsiness like that in a game that’s otherwise so elegantly designed.

The island itself is so rich and interesting to explore that it’d be a fantastic game even without any main story missions. So the question is, does the presence of a half-rubbish campaign hurt it? A bit, thanks to one unwelcome quirk of the level-up system: most of those neat perks, including the knife-throwing one, are locked off until you reach certain points in the plot. That pretty much forces you to play it, though thankfully not for long. Most of the good ones unlock at the same time as knife-throwing, a few hours in. You can safely stop there and get back to the good stuff.

Elsewhere in Far Cry 3’s efforts to be all things to all people, it somehow has four competitive multiplayer modes and a separate co-op campaign. Playing this pre-release, it’s too soon to review the competitive stuff. The co-op missions are a lot of fun, though: brisk, ridiculous shooting galleries about helping each other plant explosives and repair vehicles. There’s no server browser, unfortunately, but they’re best played with friends where possible. My favourite moment was taking a stealthy loadout and playing scout for a heavy-gunner friend in a dark cave: I’d ‘spot’ targets in the dark to highlight them on his HUD, he’d gun them down and draw all their fire.



Another caution about online stuff: Far Cry 3 uses Ubisoft’s Steam-like service uPlay, and if you play online, your game can get interrupted temporarily if your connection or their servers go down. It’s just a brief pause, though, and you can always start the game in offline mode to avoid it entirely. You miss out on uPlay achievements and a few lame unlockable rewards that way - I didn’t particularly care.

Other than that, it’s a nice PC version: responsive mouse movement, specific graphics and FoV options, tutorials reflect your custom controls, and it runs decently on Ultra-everything on a modest 3GHz dual core machine with a Radeon HD 5800. The engine doesn’t quite suit the jungle as beautifully as it did the African desert in Far Cry 2, but it has some beautiful views.

The original Far Cry’s developers Crytek used to describe that game’s philosophy as ‘veni, vidi, vici’: you show up, you scout out the situation, and you decide how to conquer it. Ubisoft kept the Far Cry name, and Crytek tried to stay true to its spirit in the Crysis games. But only Far Cry 3 really feels focused on doing that concept justice. You’ve got a huge island to explore, ridiculously effective tools for scouting every hostile situation, and so many clever intersecting systems to inspire creative ways to conquer them. It’s a better stealth game than Far Cry 1, set in an open world that feels richer than Far Cry 2’s. That’s an amazing thing to play.

Remember Far Cry 2's multiplayer mode? With that user-friendly level editor? Perhaps not. When I think of Far Cry I imagine standing on a hillside looking at a gorgeous open world that explodes as I pull a rebar out of my broken hand. Deathmatch doesn't spring to mind, but there's no reason why Far Cry 3's multiplayer mode shouldn't be good. It's got guns, right? And men to shoot. And "innovations" like "battle cries" and "team support weapons" and the like.

One of those team support weapons is a psych bomb that seems to drop hallucinogenics onto an area of the battlefield, resulting in some quite interesting visual quirks. See that and much more in the new multiplayer trailer below.

I'm surprised that Ubisoft haven't talked more about Far Cry's lovely fire. The second game introduced had fire that would spread through bushes according to wind direction and speed. It was chaotic and brilliant, and it's in Far Cry 3 as well. Fire is probably the dominant predator on an island full of things that are very eager to fight each other. Forget Vaas, I'm more interested in how the eternal war between bears and tigers will play out in an open world setting. Beyond that, I'm excited to play the inevitable "be a bear" mod that'll surely follow. See fire, bears, tigers, brigands and a zipline, but not in that order, in the new trailer below.

Far Cry 3 is out on November 29 in Europe, November 30 in the UK and December 4 in the US. Check out Dan's Far Cry 3 hands-on for a sense of how it's shaping up (rather nicely, it seems).