There are games like Doom that forever change their genres. Then there are games that don’t necessarily come to mind on a day-to-day basis, but which constantly re-enter the conversation when developers get together and talk. Far Cry 2 is a real developer's game: an imperfect gem to be sure, but one that changed the industry by changing how people thought about games.

Far Cry 2's central genius is that it’s an open world that doesn’t exist to glorify you, the player. At best, you’re a villain. Most of the time, you’re honestly of little consequence. The intro sets the scene with you as the world’s least prepared mercenary, visiting Africa on the hunt for a wanted weapons dealer called The Jackal. It goes poorly. Before you can even begin the hunt, you catch malaria, end up bed-ridden, and have the Jackal himself pop round to go through your things, point out that you’ve failed miserably and won’t be paid, before wandering off with a “So long.” Few games have been quite so happy to lower the stakes to something that non-existent.

Of course, you don’t just go home. Instead the mission quickly descends into the kind of nihilism that wouldn’t be matched until the underrated Spec Ops: The Line. You kill because that’s what you do, working for two factions who were criticised at the time for being basically the same collection of psychopathic arseholes before people realised that yes, that was the point. There are no good guys in Far Cry 2, and no glorious crusade to save the war-torn country from some handy moustache-twirling dictator. There is only war, malaria, death and greed.

As would become a series staple, Far Cry 2 had next to nothing to do with the game that came before it save for being a shooter, and certainly none of the mutants and other silly elements that slowly took over its storyline. The developers, led by Clint Hocking, explained that the goal was to capture the spirit of the series, though it often felt (maybe cynically) like the money-men just weren't paying attention until it was too late.

Far Cry was a level-based game that just happened to have really big, open-feeling levels. Far Cry 2 was a playground. True, it wasn’t completely open, in that the story was still tied together with missions and specific objectives, and no matter how much you drove around killing things, nothing would change until the plot dictated it did. But once you were actually on assignment, it was anything goes. Snipe enemies from a distance, steal a car and go smashing into a base, run in guns blazing, set things on fire…

What made Far Cry 2 different from the average open world game was how it managed to embrace the potential of this freedom without either descending into anarchy or coming across as ridiculous. You’re certainly no godlike presence. Along with needing regular malaria treatments to prevent vomiting your guts up at the worst possible time, every system and plot point is there to reinforce the darker elements of the setting—whether it’s tracking down blood diamonds or conducting brutal assassinations that can only lead to more trouble.

Another legacy of Far Cry 2: one of the all-time great game trailers, thanks to perfect pairing with Massive Attack's Angel.

More directly, even standard elements like taking a bullet go a little further than most. Get injured and you'll be ‘treated’ to unpleasant examples of your wounds being patched up in the field. Throughout the game you’re regularly paired with mercenary ‘buddies’ willing to lend a hand, drag your injured corpse out of danger and offer their own objectives, but none are saints. By the end of the game, the glitter of diamonds and chance of escape is more than enough to shatter any friendships.

Really, Far Cry 2 was to the military shooter what Deus Ex had been to sneaking around urban environments—a game that made those environments into another weapon, and gave them the weight that had been lacking from most prior open world games like 2006’s cartoony Just Cause, or GTA and its endless copycats. It was also first and foremost a shooter, unlike RPGs like Fallout 3 or the clunky hybrid that was Stalker. 

That greatly contributed to how smooth the action was, as well as the nature of Far Cry 2's basic play loops: clearing outposts, the simple act of navigating the world, and using its physics, tools and AI to prompt emergent action. These things made Far Cry 2 feel natural in small, vital ways. 

Everything from checking a real map to the effect of a grenade (spoiler: it explodes) flowed realistically from your basic understanding of reality, with no need to think of the action in terms of hit points, levels and game mechanics. If something felt like a good tactic then it probably was, and when things went horribly wrong or right, it was usually in a way that made for an interesting story.

Despite all this, Far Cry 2 can feel clunky today. Much of it did at the time, too. Particularly strange is the way that characters speak twice as fast as they should and without much of that human thing we call emotion. The shooting isn't the best the genre has to offer. And it’s hard not to chafe at NPCs you’re working for still taking a pop at you every time you meet their patrols, or the world being a bit too static—there being no way to carve out safe spaces or even permanently deal with an outpost. It’s fitting, but still annoying. It’s also unfortunate that despite all the strides taken with the open world, Far Cry 2 ultimately backtracked on an initial plan where the point of the game would be to simply track down and kill the Jackal, and you could ignore the story in favour of making a beeline for him and putting a bullet in his head. The actual game had no such possibility. A real pity.

What it accomplished in the end, however, is even more impressive. It entertained players, but more importantly inspired an industry to widen its perspective and explore the power that open worlds truly offered. Later games have refined these techniques, with elements appearing in everything from Ubisoft’s own Assassin’s Creed, to the later Just Cause games, to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Even where there isn’t direct influence from sitting down and playing Far Cry 2, there are few designers who haven’t at least heard whispered tales of what it accomplished and what it showed was possible. It may have spawned several official sequels over the past decade, but the true legacy of Far Cry 2 is the freedom it quietly inspired.

If you purchased the Assassin's Creed: Odyssey Gold edition, or purchased the game's season pass, you'll get access to a new remaster of Assassin's Creed 3 this March. First released in 2012, the original game is clearly ageing, so it's nice to see it getting some spit and polish.

According to an FAQ on the Ubisoft website, the remaster will boast higher resolution textures, new character models, a new Physically Based Rendering system for lighting, as well as denser crowds, environments and VFX. On top of all that, you'll be able to upscale the game to 4K and HDR. 

The information sheet also promises improved gameplay mechanics, with "several features being revamped or tweaked". But it doesn't specify what these changes are, as yet.

The remaster will come with all the usual post-launch content, such as Benedict Arnold Missions, the Hidden Secrets Pack, and all three episodes of the Tyranny of King Washington. You'll also get a copy of the Assassin's Creed: Liberation remaster, which was formerly a PS Vita exclusive. For more details on all that content, this has you covered. It's so far unclear when the remaster will be available as a standalone purchase, but I'd assume after the March 2019 initial release for season pass holders.

Chris Thursten reviewed Assassin's Creed 3 back in 2012, writing that its "entertaining storytelling and fantastic naval combat [is] marred by terrible mission design and endemic feature creep."

With videogames so full of long-running series it's inevitable that even the ones we enjoy will cough up the occasional dud. Whether you didn't like the combat focus of Fallout 4, or the sci-fi setting of Grand Theft Auto 2, or the underwhelming aliens of Mass Effect: Andromeda, or pretty much anything about the first Witcher game, it's easy enough to think of examples. So that's our PCG Q&A this weekend, where we ask both you and our team members: What's your least favorite entry in an otherwise good series? Give us your hot takes in the comments below.

Samuel Roberts: Assassin's Creed 3

Assassin's Creed's quality has been pretty variable over the years, but most of the main entries are worth playing for one reason or another—usually the environments. But Assassin's Creed 3 oversimplified every interaction so that I barely felt like I was doing anything, even when my character was performing rad shit like fighting a bear or climbing through a forest outside Boston. 

It soured me on the series for five entire years. Then I finally came back to give Origins a proper go, which is a much better game that I actually managed to get passionate about. AC3 was a complete waste given its choice of setting.

Andy Kelly: Resident Evil 0

This is a frustrating game. The idea of a Resident Evil prequel, revealing the events leading up to the outbreak in the original, could have been something pretty special. Instead we get this miserable, plodding, obtuse game featuring one of the most maddening inventory systems in history. You spend most of the game shuffling items back and forth between the two characters, or trying to remember which room you left something in an hour ago that you suddenly need. The locations are all rehashes of places we've been in Resi games a dozen times before, but less interesting. And the two-character puzzles aren't as clever as they think they are. There are almost certainly worse entries in the sprawling, inconsistent Resident Evil series, but the wasted potential of this one makes it extra bad. 

Tom Senior: Final Fantasy 13

After being consumed by Final Fantasy 12's deep squad combat systems I was bitterly disappointed by the 13th game's stifling corridors, endless dungeons, and a combat system that didn't get interesting for about 20 hours. It's technically a good-looking game, but its characters look like they wandered in from different universes. Plus the story, even by Final Fantasy standards, was turbo-bollocks, full of nonsense concepts you need a wiki to decipher. I hear it opens up after about 30 hours, but screw the effort it would take to get there. I'll go back on the road with my FF15 boyos instead, thank you very much. 

Wes Fenlon: Max Payne 3

Max Payne 3 is not a bad game. It's pretty amazing, in a lot of ways: the physics and shooting feel fantastic, the way it transitions from cutscenes to action is Rockstar's Hollywood obsession at its finest, and that soundtrack sets the mood. But I played the entirety of Max Payne 3 disappointed that it didn't feel like Max Payne. It's supposedly the same character from the first two, but without Sam Lake's writing, it just isn't Max. Max Payne 1 and 2 are bleak and cynical but temper that darkness with pulpy dialogue and inner monologues. They're more surreal, and more fun, and give Max more personality. Rockstar's writers totally missed the spirit of the first two games, turning Max Payne 3's story into pure bleak nihilism. Max just says the most depressing shit over and over again for 15 hours. It's repetitive and never really goes anywhere. Max is just never quite right. 

Jody Macgregor: Silent Hill: Homecoming

Some people might disagree with "otherwise good" when it comes to the later Silent Hill games, but I thought Downpour was a solid six-out-of-ten thing with a handful of good ideas (that sidequest where you follow the trail of ribbons in search of a missing child, for instance) and Shattered Memories was genuinely great. 

It's just a shame those are console exclusives and the only thing that shows up if you type Silent Hill into Steam is a terrible port of the worst game of the lot. Homecoming had way too much fighting, never a strong point with Silent Hill, and recycled the series' imagery like rusting walkways and faceless booby nurses in a weirdly joyless way. It's a bummer.

Deep down, I think we've all wanted to burn down a house.

Not out of vengeance, or a half-baked insurance scam, or to send a message to a crosstown mob boss. To me, pyromania is simply the most relatable form of gleeful mass destruction. Who isn't a little bit entranced by a towering inferno? Of course, in real life you can't work out your emotional baggage through incendiary therapy without getting the cops called on you, but videogames fill the void.

If we're being honest, games have only recently really helped us get in touch with our latent pyromaniac instincts. It was difficult to program inspiring flames on a Commodore 64, and the less said about Doom's pepperoni pizza take on lava the better. But that started to change in 2008, with the release of Far Cry 2 and its unprecedented wildfire mechanics.

"To me [Ubisoft] really nailed how fire should feel and I loved how it would burn the grass and environment, such a wonderful touch," says Bill Munk, creative director of Killing Floor 2, which itself is a game with an incredibly satisfying flamethrower. He's right. Open world sandboxes weren't exactly a rarity in the late-aughties, but Far Cry 2 was one of the first times our machines packed the processing power to handle the physics estimations necessary to set those open-worlds on fire. We haven't looked back since.

"I really think flame weapons are so fun because of the extreme destruction they cause to NPCs and to the environment," continues Munk, when I ask him why he thinks players enjoy a healthy bit of incineration every now and then. "It's such a fun power trip, not to mention fire-based weapons are generally more forgiving on how accurate you need to be with your aim." 

Today, we're seeing games that play with fire on a more granular, mechanical level, rather than the engine-porn stagecraft it's been used for in the past. The best example I can think of is probably Larian Studios' Divinity series, which has persistently injected an immersive suite of environmental effects into the relative solemnity of a turn-based RPG.

I've always found this screenshot, where a rustic wooden platform is scorched to the depths of hell, to be an effective shorthand for why people who don't necessarily play a ton of strategy games still fall in love with the absurdity of Original Sin's magic systems.

"We tried to tweak duration, area and availability of fire skills so that the player is frequently put into position where their battle plan is spinning out of control and they need to improvise and take risks," says Nick Pechenin, systems designer of Divinity Original Sin 2, when I ask him how fire has been a useful tool in Larian's game design. "It was also important to us that although the ways in which surfaces are created and interact with each other have almost no randomness, smallest deviations in how the player targets their skills and positions their characters lead to wildly divergent outcomes, essentially generating fresh combat experiences every time."

It was fun to hear someone speak so intelligently about the mechanical theories behind cauterizing your enemies. For me, fire effects in videogames aren't about all clever design. Fire taps into my baseline, brain-bypassing id—the caveman wants and needs of my idiot gamer brain. But I suppose that's how it should be. A good blaze should be emotionally and aesthetically resonant, and when done right, it serves a distinct gameplay functionality buried deep below our perception. To borrow a J-school aphorism; it is showing, not telling, to the highest degree. With that, here are some PC games that excel in the art of pyromania. 

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

The urtext of video game flamethrowers; a lot of people's first quintessential next-gen experience back in 2001 was torching bunkers in that gorgeous, liquid-orange id Tech 3 goodness. I remember this thing being a little bit overpowered, mostly because of its ridiculous range, but frankly any good flamethrower should be. The only good Nazis are the ones conflagerating to death at your feet. 

For bonus Nazis-on-fire action, check out this trailer for the 2009 Wolfenstein's Flammenwerfer.

Far Cry (series)

We talked about Far Cry 2 above, which will always and forever be the crown prince of video game fire effects. But we also must give a nod to the other games in the series, specifically Far Cry 3, which had its finger on the pulse of the nation when it included a level where your shit-for-brains protagonist burns down a marijuana growing operation while a Skrillex/Damian Marley collaboration blasts off in the background. (It was 2012, what did you expect?) Truly a magnificent moment in the history of gaming that will only continue to get more hilarious as time goes on. 

Terraria

Terraria does such a great job with its physics for a 2D platformer, and one of my favorite ways that manifests is when you're digging through the sediment and throwing down an endless bread crumb of torches to guide your way back to the surface. It can be a pain to farm gel and wood to make sure you never run out light, but there's something kinda dramatic about zooming out and seeing the vast network of dimly-lit mineshafts you've inadvertently created. Especially for someone like me, who's always been bad at the aesthetic parts of crafting games. 

Alien Isolation

Alien Isolation is a game about being completely screwed, but one of the very, very few times you feel like you have a chance in that awful, no-good, godforsaken spaceship is when you've got the flamethrower on your side. One big angry ball of flame is all it takes to put the xenomorph on its bony heels, and that respite can be downright euphoric. The flamethrower as the odds-evener, as it should be. 

Diablo (series)

Blizzard prefers a heavy touch when it comes to their aesthetic design, so it's no surprise that their darkest franchise lays it on pretty darn thick whenever we make a journey to the underworld. Diablo's hell is absolutely unreasonable; a giddy orgy of blood, lava, blackened gothic chapels, and belching geysers of flame. Personally, I'm partial to Azmodan Lord of Sin, best known for lobbing infernal orbs of molten rock at your hapless barbarian (a mechanic that was later beautifully integrated into Heroes of the Storm). Good on you, Blizzard. We can only hope that Diablo 4 brings an even heavier dose of hellishness. 

Shovel Knight

This is PC Gamer, which means we can't mention Super Mario 64, or Banjo Kazooie, or Sonic The Hedgehog on this list. That's a shame, because the mascot platformer is forever betrothed to lava levels—nothing quite ups the ante like the chance to singe the overalls right off of Mario's nubile body. Thankfully Yacht Club, who has dedicated its existence to bringing picture perfect 8-bit-esque adventures to Steam, picked up the slack. Of course Shovel Knight has a lava level, and of course it learns from the masters by bringing a candyflipped Bowser's Castle that's challenging, dramatic, and thoroughly retro. If we could bottle and administer the feeling you get when you use that indestructible shovel to traverse the lakes of Hell, everyone on earth would realize that videogames are a force for good. 

World of Warcraft

It's been a long, long time since I played a Fire Mage in World of Warcraft, but one of the most satisfying feelings that MMO ever produced was the Presence of Mind/Pyroblast combo back in vanilla. I'll break it down for you: Pyroblast was this ridiculous, deep talent-tree spell that let you hurl a massive fireball at an enemy after a six second casting time. That made it kinda useless, because the downtime was so heavy. That is, unless, you also specced into Arcane to pick up Presence of Mind, which, when activated, would make your next spell cast instantly. You see where I'm going now, right?

Presence of Mind/Pyro quickly became my favorite thing to do to people in Warsong Gulch. I'd reckon to guess that it led to more Alt-F4s than anything else in Warcraft's early years. Well, that's not true. Remember when Rogues could stunlock you for, like, half a minute? Man, maybe World of Warcraft Classic is a bad idea.

Team Fortress 2

It's pretty hard to balance a flamethrower in a multiplayer game. Usually they're either totally weak and watered-down, or an ultra-scarce pickup that you see once every 20 games. So hats off to Valve for not only building out the Pyro as a crucial part of the Team Fortress fabric, but also making him fun to play! Torching a crowded control point feels great, but every good Pyro knows the value of the secondary shotgun when you get locked down in a dual with a Scout or a Soldier or something. The variation between the loadout makes you feel useful and multi-dimensional, rather than the kid hogging the cool weapons and sandbagging the team.

BioShock (series)

I love the way Jack's hand looks when he's got the Incinerate plasmid equipped. All of the biological upgrades in Rapture are horrifying in their own visceral ways—I never ever need to see that Insect Swarm cutscene ever again—but something about walking around BioShock's dead corridors with a left hand that's smoldering from the inside out is awesome, and troubling, and could probably serve as a tentpole for some half-baked fan theory. In this Randian dystopia, the Left is on fire! I also think BioShock does perhaps the best job of letting us live our deepest, truest arson fantasies. Just snap your fingers and set anything on fire. Easy as that. Great for clearing out crazy people in a fallen kingdom, and also probably great for party tricks. 

Dark Souls

You have to think that From Software knew their take on pyromancy was awesome, considering how it's, by far, the easiest school of magic to use in a game that's famous for its abstruseness. No degenerate attunement system, no gatekeeping stat requirements, just throw on your fire glove and start roasting skeletons. Everyone who's spent some time in Lordran knows exactly where they were the first time you were invaded by some refined griefer who rained ungodly hellfire on your poor, PvE-tuned knight. We all rushed back, retrieved our souls, and vowed to get our revenge in New Game Plus. And probably started learning pyromancy.

You can chart the progress of PC gaming in many ways: the force of a shotgun; the substance of dialogue; the scale of an RTS. 

But behind all the obvious stuff, wafting leafily the background, is the humble tree. And trees are important. They tell us more about the inexorable march of progress than gunfeel ever could. Firstly, because they illustrate the lengths developers will go to immerse us in a game by adding extraneous detail we might ignore. And secondly, because ‘gunfeel’ isn’t even a word. 

Join me, then—a digital lumberjack, armed only with a Collins Gem copy of All You Need To Know About Trees and 11 synonyms for wood—as we learn to tell frond from bough in the history of trees in games.

For more hot tree-based content, head over to James's piece on where trees come from in games, this piece ranking chopping down trees in survival games, Tim's ode to the trees in Firewatch, Chris painting 100 trees and this interview with a Skyrim modder photographing lots of trees. Holy what, why does this website like trees so damn much?

Early days: roots manoeuvre 

Genus Maledictis

An interesting-to-someone-who’s-spent-too-long-looking side effect of the simplicity of early games is that trees are more than set dressing. In some titles, they’re the closet thing you have to an enemy. Examples of this go back to the ZX Spectrum. In 3D Deathchase, for example, you foolishly ride a motorcycle through a dense forest and trees are the only thing that can kill you; you’re not so much chasing death, as driving directly into it. The looming threat of these homicidal trunks is lessened somewhat by the fact they look like IKEA table legs, which also explains why my BJURSTA Extendable gives me night terrors. It was a formative time.

Pinus Chillaxus

To find a PC-specific example of an early tree, we need to scamper forward to Skifree. Most of us remember it for that bastard yeti, but it’s likely trees were responsible for more anguish. They’re sad, mean, twisted little saplings that poke out of the snow, threatening to cut short your perfect slalom in an eruption of bark and shattered bone. They resemble a prison tattoo of a child’s drawing of a tree, and are more memorable and threatening for it. If it isn’t already there, burn this image into your mind right now—we’ll need it to compare with The Witcher 3 later on. 

The '90s: Copse Out Conflictus ridiculam

As graphics improved during the '90s, the gaming tree burst into life: think of this like blossom season, with the swollen buds emerging into a fantasy of colour and shape (so long as the colour is green and the shape is treeish). Lovely 2D foliage is everywhere, but 1993’s Cannon Fodder can be singled out for being so absurdly generous with its jungle. Even the box art is aggressively green, like it wants to fight you for not being made of leaves. At the time, snaking between those lurid branches felt like being in Platoon. And then there’s Mortal Kombat 2’s living forest, which brought trees literally to life in 1995. You could argue this planted the seed for other lumber-based elements in fighting games—like Tekken’s possessed wooden training dummy, Mokujin, or Forest Law—but only if you’d spent too long researching trees in games.

Prunus puzzlus

‘Enough of your 2D fronds, you bunterish copse enthusiast!’, you probably cry. And you’re correct to do so. We need to examine 3D trees to understand how far we’ve we’ve still got to go, and Myst gives us a useful example. Now, Myst is a pretty game. But the trees here look more like wizards’ hats than actual foliage, and that’s a different feature altogether. Rocks, buildings, skies: all wonderful. But if you want realistic woodland, you’re going to have to wait, or click onto the next page.

Elsewhere, we’ve got the likes of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. Its leafy illustrations look smart, but they are all suspiciously similar. This is a great place to take stock, though. No series demonstrates coppice development quite like the Elder Scrolls. It’s the gaming equivalent of Understanding Tree Improvement 101 (if we ignore the brief diversion to the Mushroom Kingdom in Morrowind). We’ll come back later.

Turok: 1997’s Dinosaur Hunter was also impressive. Looking back, it felt like you were pushing past endless fronds in thick jungle. But 21 years later, those palms look rather lonely poking out of that misty landscape, like Jurassic Park via Silent Hill.

Bellum Blowupem

And while we’re still in the 90s, let’s stop off at Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines. This provides a great contrast to the snotty green smears of Cannon Fodder, and puts five years of progress into context. The variety of greenery is impressive enough to recall the tiny trees available at those quietly sinister model train shops. We’re not at the actually-looking-like-real-trees stage of development yet; but they do look like models of actual trees, and that’s something.

The '00s: Wood you kindly?

Maxis Decimus Deciduous

Remember the dark days of page one, and 3D Deathchase, when trees held dominion over men, motorcycles, and men on motorcycles? Well, 2000 was the year the woodworm turned. The Sims gives us control over trees, letting us purchase, plant, and gently rotate trees in a way that signals our ultimate triumph over nature. Large or small, indoor or outdoor, alive or dead: every type of tree is ours to manipulate. And, in a further act of ghoulish humiliation, The Sims even lets you decorate a murdered tree in the name of Christmas. Mankind’s victory is absolute. 

Then there’s Halo: Combat Evolved. Released on PC in 2003, the first Halo captivated people with grass you could stare at for days—but the forests are equally appealing. Thick forests in Halo (the level), menacing vines in 343 Guilty Spark, icy pines in Assault on the Control Room: Combat Evolved has more types of tree than it does guns.

Spectatus Tropicana

And now things get real. The branchmark by which every other game that followed would be measured, and, back in 2004, easily the most realistic jungle ever rendered. Hang gliding over Far Cry’s indecently dense foliage felt like nothing else: the dream of a hallucinating druid, trapped inside your home computer. It was reason enough to spend all your money on a PC powerful enough to play it at maximum settings, and few technical leaps forward since have felt quite so overwhelming. If only Far Cry’s mutants looked as good. 

Settingus Maximus

The forest moon of Endor from 2005’s Star Wars: Battlefront II deserves a quick mention for bringing to life one of the most recognisable woodlands in cinema, and World of Warcraft offered a variety of forests that still feel nourishing now (as well as the ability to turn into a tree if you’re a Druid). And, in 2006, the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion showed us an overwhelmingly lush Cyrodiil. But we can’t linger here too long; 2007 is waiting. The All Ghillied Up level of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare shows trees reclaiming the shattered landscape, and wins extra points for basically letting you play as a tree. And Resident Evil 4 set the standard for bark detail in games—yes, it’s a thing. Leon could probably take rubbings of those things. But once again, Crytek steals the show with an unparalleled PC classic. Crysis lets you shoot down trees, making the foliage tangible, and on max settings it still looks better than most games now.

Arbor Hominem

And finally for the 2000s, we pay homage to Harold. Perhaps not the most realistic tree in games—and certainly not the most handsome—but he does give us one of the best sidequests in 2008’s Fallout 3. 

The '10s: Barking orders

Pinus Draconicus

Progress in the 2010s is harder to spot. Partly because the advancements are more subtle, and partly because Crysis still looks better than everything. But The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, released in 2011, at least makes it easy to see how far the series had come in terms of herbal fidelity. Skyrim is a love letter to the nordic spruce; a landscape of leafy grottos, autumnal forests, and those majestic, lofty pines. You can even chop logs and use a sawmill, reminding us of man's largely one-way relationship with trees.

Scribo Misticus

Minecraft’s blocky forests were a visual somersault backwards, but they did let us interact with wood in ways that meant crafting mechanics would be a part of every game for the next 200 years. You can punch, chop and reshape wood, and there’s a fine variety of planks on offer—it’s like B&Q, but with fewer pigmen. If you haven’t made a treetop retreat in Minecraft, you’re playing the game wrong. Another standout is Alan Wake, released on PC in 2012, which delivered deep, misty forests that are as atmospheric and evocative as they come. We also had the Kmart/Lidl Twin Peaks of Deadly Premonition a year later, which helpfully undermines my earlier point about everything in the 2010s looking great. And then there’s Proteus, also released in 2013, which reminds us that trees don’t have to be meticulously detailed to look striking.

Apocalyptus Herba

As we approach the end of our forest bathing stroll, we return again to Crytek, who accidentally made the first Crysis so pretty that everything that’s followed has looked guff. Crysis 3 is almost an exception, but the foliage has lost some of its depth and lustre, even though the game is set in a post-apocalypse when nature has reclaimed the cities of humanity—perhaps in revenge for the humiliation suffered in The Sims. Battlefield 4 also has excellent foliage, but you were probably too busy flattening buildings and complaining about the linear campaign to notice. 

Gusty Venefica

And finally, we come to it. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is the sort of game you stop playing just to watch the trees. When you first reach Velen and see those weatherbeaten leafy landscapes, you feel like dragging your rambling relatives to your 4K monitor so they can appreciate the glory of nature without going outside. And CD Projekt Red clearly love a good thicket, as evidence by the variety on offer: we’ve got hanging trees, sacred trees, dead trees, possessed trees. No game has ever featured boscage in so many starring roles (I told you I used a thesaurus). Cast your mind back to the grasping shrubs of Skifree, and revel in 22 years of planking progress.

But also: it still doesn’t look as good as Crysis. 

A rustle. A breath. A bang. Everything about a good videogame sniper rifle is sexy, sleek, and dangerous, from the look of a long steel barrel to the echoing crack of gunfire heard for miles around. We love playing games with great sniper rifles not because of how they look or sound, though, but because of something much deeper and darker: we want to play god. The allure of the sniper rifle is the allure of the divine power to reach out—way, way out into the distance—and snuff out a life.

It’s twisted, but that really is the heart of it. For proof, compare the sniper rifle to its Big Boomstick cousin, the shotgun. Both are typically slow to shoot, but they hit hard when they do. Both are loud. Both make explosions of fire and gore.

But a sniper rifle is unusual because its entire purpose is to make a fight unfair. We want to see the enemy without being seen. We look our enemy in the face without being in danger. Invisibility, invulnerability, and instant kills: the sniper rifle is a cheat code with a trigger. This is what Zeus feels like when he throws thunderbolts.

Today we’re celebrating the sniper rifle by talking about how it changed games, and all those pieces that make it a great videogame weapon. It starts with distance.

How to make a great sniper rifle 

Almost all of the godlike power of a really fun sniper rifle comes from its ability to shoot at long range, so let’s start there. A great sniper rifle has to have a scope that lets us see deep into the microscopic horizon.

The best recent example of this is PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, where your ability to see other players is your most useful skill. There’s something so disconcerting about running across an open field late in the game, looking around, and seeing no one. You know other players have to be close, but the hills seem quiet. This is where PUBG’s rare scopes come in. An 8x or, inshallah, the 15x scope brings you all of god’s many powers: eliminate a contender from the island in one shot before they know you can see them at all.

Counter-Strike’s AWP is a legend itself, and arguably it helped start the "all-powerful bolt-action sniper rifle" trope that we’re celebrating today. Counter-Strike is a game where split-second accuracy and twitch reflexes decide every battle, and using the AWP demands the patience of a tortoise and the reflexes of a hare. If you’re good at it, the AWP locks down entire sections of a multiplayer level. The AWP’s power isn’t just in killing, but in threatening to kill.

Giving players a better view from the inside of a multiplayer melee is one thing, but sniper rifles can do so, so much more than that. Games that focus on realistic simulation turn sniping into an advanced physics problem that only the best shooters can manage to solve under pressure. Throwing a tiny piece of metal at a target a mile or two away—so far that you have to account for the Earth moving as it rotates—only makes a great sniper shot feel more god-like.

Arma 3’s military sandbox is the best rifle simulation you can play today, and it only gets better with community-made mods that model everything from air pressure to wind speed. Making a shot at one or two miles away stops feeling like marksmanship and starts feeling like flying a spaceship to the moon: up a bit, left a bit, now turn this dial and flick this switch at the same time, and don’t forget to breathe. But only after you pull the trigger.

Arma 3 may have the most accurate long-range sniper shots, but the most famous must be from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s best level, "All Ghillied Up." Working your way through long-abandoned farmhouses in Chernobyl's radioactive exclusion zone, there aren't even animals around to break the silence. The tension grows as you sneak past soldiers and into town. When it's time to take the shot with your M82 sniper rifle, music stirs as we watch a little red flag dance around in changing wind, holding our breath and waiting for the perfect moment to throw the lightning.

Bring the noise

It’s obvious that a good sniper rifle has to be loud as all hell. I understand that there are some that prefer their sniper rifles to be utterly silent for stealth reasons, but these poor souls are mistaken. A sniper rifle has to sound like the Earth breaking because, again, a good sniper rifle is the fist of god.

When it comes to noise, nobody does it like the boxy brick of a rifle in HALO: Combat Evolved, a hideous piece of technology burdened with the equally hideous name SRS99C-S2AM. We’re not here for looks, though. The Halo rifle has a boom that rocks around any level followed by reverberating echoes. It’s the echoes that really get me. And it’s not just the loud noises: the SRS99C is a symphony of little beeps and whirs.

Even though the reloading sound is pretty good, it’s the only thing wrong with the SRS99C. Since it’s a semi-automatic rifle, it lacks the the iconic, metallic bolt-action clanks that come with the best sniper rifles. Racking the action on a bolt-action rifle sounds so good, that even in our ode to the greatness of shotguns, we had to admit that maybe, just maybe, bolt-action rifles sound even better.

The sound of thunder and clanking machinery is even more jarring, more fantastic, when it’s contrasted with total silence and tension. Once the silence is broken, it’s OK to chime in with a really good soundtrack, as seen in this great clip from Far Cry 2.

History lesson: the first sniper rifle 

After celebrating all that makes a good sniper rifle "the cheat code of weapons," it might be obvious how difficult it is to build a game around a worthy sniper. Giving the player god-like powers makes it hard to design levels and enemies that challenge them—and of course, you can’t tone down the sniper rifle without ruining the whole damn thing.

But for a long time, difficulty balance wasn’t the thing that stopped videogames from featuring sniper rifles, it was technology. In the early years, one of the things that games couldn’t really do was distance; we had height and width, but no depth.

There were some strong attempts, though. In 1988, one of the first sniper rifles ever depicted in a game came from the French videogame Hostage: Rescue Mission. The game came out on platforms like the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and the Amiga. In the game, a police sniper sneaks around an embassy full of hostages to reach a vantage point, then uses a myopic little scope to scan the windows for bad guys.

But without 3D spaces, there couldn’t be any real distance. Though conventional wisdom claims that the first true sniper rifle in videogames was in Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64, the truth is actually much closer to PC gamers’ hearts. A full year earlier, in August 1996, Quake Team Fortress released as a mod for Quake. Included among the Soldier, Spy, and Engineer was the Sniper. Snipers came equipped with a "Sniper Rifle," a menace that could kill at distance with one shot—as long as the player was fast enough and had great eyesight.

In March 1997, LucasArts released Outlaws, a western-themed shooter that seems to be mostly forgotten today. Those of us who played it, though, saw something new. Attached to the standard lever-action Winchester rifle was a sniper scope that magnified objects in 3D. As far as I can find, this real-time 3D magnification had never been done before at the time. Outlaws did it five months before Goldeneye launched.

LucasArts was sort of a pioneer in gaming back then, but I still think it’s unlikely that Outlaws started a trend. It’s more likely that the time for the first-person sniper rifle had just arrived. In the next year alone, 1998, we saw zoomable, first-person sniper rifles pop up in Half-Life, SiN, Starseige: Tribes, and Delta Force. Multiplayer games in particular started to play on larger maps, and the sniper rifle quickly became a staple for long-range battles. In 2000, the original Counter-Strike launched the AWP, and Deus Ex brought sniper rifles into a free-form immersive sim setting.

By the time Operation Flashpoint (the pre-cursor to Arma) launched in 2001, Battlefield 1942 arrived in 2002, and Call of Duty released in 2003, the sniper rifle was an essential part of any videogame that included guns at all.

Lasers, etc.

Not all sniper rifles throw lead. Despite my grandstanding up in the "Bring the noise" section, a rifle that shoots lasers or—gasp—silently flings arrows can still be a lot of fun. The obvious example here is Half-Life 2’s incredible crossbow, a hideous sci-fi monster that nailes people to walls with superheated pieces of rebar.

The joys of Half-Life 2’s crossbow are numerous: the all-seeing perspective of a decent scope, the one-shot power of that glowing slab of iron pinning a Combine soldier’s body to the architecture.

Even the loud, bass-heavy thunk and twang of the crossbow, though obviously not as good as a huge boom, is really nice to listen to—and possibly even kind of musical? The best crossbow noise doesn’t come from the crossbow at all, but from the slightly muted, high-pitch whine of the "soldier down" Combine alarm heard from a long way off.

For laser-throwing sniper rifles, the powerful Darklance from XCOM 2 is one of our hands-down favorites. A shot of boiling, angry red death rays flying at aliens is, in general, pretty fun, but the Darklance has another edge. Unlike every other sniper rifle in the game, soldiers can fire and move in the same turn. If you do it right, a sniper armed with the Darklance can flit around the edges of a map, firing and moving, smiting and disappearing. Darklance might not give you the joy of a first-person perspective, but its power is no less biblical.

In conclusion

Videogame sniper rifles are rad. Though they can be monstrous in multiplayer games and their effects can be more pornographic than 10,000 dicks on parade, a well-made sniper rifle is a beautiful thing. It’s a smoothly oiled machine, a clap of thunder you can hold in your hands, and the fist of an angry god all rolled into one.

But for all its power, the reason the sniper remains so compelling is how well it's balanced out by its limitations, and all the tension they bring. Missing a shot can mean an eternal few seconds of reloading, standing naked in front of the world. That moment can give way to panic, and without a cool head, you're lost. So goes one of the greatest sniper shots ever captured on video.

There's one more tool in the sniper's belt, which forgoes range, its greatest asset, to make you feel somehow more omnipotent. If there's a more rewarding shot than the no-scope, an impossible doming that spits in the face of the sniper's intended balance, we don't know it. The no-scope defies nature and reason. It's the ultimate trump card. 

Using a sniper well is an instinctive skill or a physics problem or both, and great games use them to make you feel unstoppable. Long live the scope.

It’s when you notice the little details in games that they really come alive. Those little things that hint at some sort of existence outside your control or awareness. They could be art props made to suggest who lived in the spaces you’re romping through, or little room layout details that show how the world works, but some of the touches that bring games to life the most come through animation.

This is a celebration of incidental animations that don't help you win or make you lose or do much of anything important. They just happen, and you probably don’t even notice them, or think about how much work they actually took. There’s a madness to incidental animation, that so much effort has been lavished into producing something so ancillary, something which many players might never come across. But it can make the difference between a game feeling right and feeling that little bit off. It’s about conjuring that suspension of disbelief. It’s where the magic is.

This selection of great incidental animation can’t hope to be exhaustive, since it’s simply compiled from the games I’ve played, and even within that paltry selection it’s only the things I’ve noticed, remembered and captured (with some pointers from some friends). But hopefully it’ll give you a new appreciation of the little things.

Assassin's Creed: Origins: Wet Bayek

Props to that special moment when a game nonchalantly plays out a very human response to something you’ve put your character through. Bayek doesn’t complain at you getting soggy, but his little hand and foot shakes give a sense of the person under all the stabbing. 

Rise of the Tomb Raider: Wringing out the ponytail 

Relatedly, Lara’s attention to her hair after coming out of water is a reminder of the tricky nature of dealing with long locks in extreme conditions. It’s just one of the many little animation details in Rise of the Tomb Raider, but several friends pointed towards it as their favourite and heck, they’re right.

Prey: Q-Beam wobble

Who was it at Arkane Studios who realised, "The Q-Beam absolutely has to comprise three objects which wobble as you move"? They are a genius. Weapons in games rarely passively react as you move around, and OK, that’s maybe because it’s a little distracting, but here in the Q-Beam, it’s wonderful. 

Overwatch: Junkrat's grenade launcher

Another delightfully ramshackle weapon is Junkrat’s Frag Launcher. The way all its jiggling bits and pieces move as you walk do a great job of communicating Junkrat’s pegleg limp, and the way the flap on the end of the barrel flips as you fall really gets a sense of momentum across. You can almost imagine how his insane launcher actually works.

Titanfall 2: Alternator

Still on guns (because games are basically guns, right), I just love all the unnecessary (i.e. necessary) movement in Titanfall 2’s otherwise fairly straight Alternator submachine gun. Little bits flick back and forth as you fire, simply to express and celebrate its name. The Alternator was designed by Respawn animator Ranon Sarono, who’s a master of the gun animation form. His showreels and game gun jokes on his YouTube channel are recommended viewing.

Far Cry 2: jammed shotgun

Technically, Far Cry 2’s gun-jamming animations don’t fit our criteria for incidental animation because they directly affect the game, but they’re just so expressive. The sheer annoyance of the player character, as demoed here by Tigerfield, is just wonderful, and completely matches your own reaction to finding your gun suddenly refusing to work.

Far Cry 2: Hand

Far Cry 2’s filled with incidental animation. The way the player character’s hand interacts with the world around you set new standards.

But here’s the real incidental animation gold in Far Cry 2: the fingers change position to turn the watch’s bezel one way or the other. I’m sure Ubisoft Montreal could have designed it more efficiently, and I’m so pleased they didn’t.

Head over to page two for more wonderful incidental animations, including indie Quadrilateral Cowboy, Dishonored 2 and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.

Metal Gear Solid 5: iDroid 

Look in the background, and you’ll see Snake’s thumb mirroring your control of the iDroid menu on a little side-mounted joystick. Utterly pointless. 

Quadrilateral Cowboy: Bathroom 

Blendo Games’ Brendan Chung is something of a connoisseur of incidental animation, so I asked him to pick out what he’s most proud of from his own games. He chose the bathroom in QuadCow’s Valencia Villa. "The bathroom is way too detailed and interactive considering it has no gameplay impact and is not part of the critical path," he says. Every cabinet opens, every component works. "The excess I'm most happy with is how both the shower and sink, after you turn their water off, continue drip-dropping for a few seconds before completely stopping. I am secretly hoping this becomes industry standard."

Who fancies starting a campaign? 

Prey: Boiling curry 

Or maybe it’s a stew. Either way, this combination of a lovely shiny shader effect and a very simple undulating mesh brings a pot eternally cooking in Talos-I’s kitchen to life, if you should ever notice it. Chances are, you won’t. 

Dishonored 2: Audiograph 

Even more Arkane, here’s Dishonored 2’s wonderfully characterful audiotape player. Watching the handle wind around and its punchcard jigger in and out makes having to stay nearby to hear the tape almost bearable. 

Destiny 2: Sweeping bot 

This bot, found in a dead end in the depths of Destiny 2’s social area (if you put the time into exploring it), is a callback to a sweeping robot which featured in the first Destiny’s Tower social space. We can all cherish its heartbreaking dedication to a thankless task—perhaps it’s a reference to all the effort that went into animating it?

Little Nightmares

If you take a moment to watch them from safety, you’ll see one of Little Nightmares’ awful chefs perform a little under-face scratch which is just fantastic.

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus: Reactor

Most incidental animation is small, but it doesn’t need to be. A way into his new adventure, B.J. Blazkowicz enters a vast hall that houses a reactor at its far end. The hall’s monumental machinations serve absolutely no function, the flying saucer-looking thing having no discernible purpose, and yet there it all is, but you were too busy shooting Nazis to see it.

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus: Digital readout 

Still on Wolf 2, someone Machine Games went to the effort of making actual digital readouts on the assorted Nazi control boards that you probably never spent any time looking at, ensuring they count meaninglessly up as far as the digits allow. This is perfection, and an exemplar of the form. 

So here’s to the most lavish of incidental animation. Let it only become more so.

Once upon a time, Ubisoft's library was simple: it made platformers starring terrifying mascots with no limbs, and roughly 17,000 Tom Clancy tie-ins. But over the last decade, Ubi has muscled in on the genre that GTA made famous, building huge worlds spanning radically different time periods. Regardless of whether you’re controlling a historical hitman or a coma-bound cop, though, Ubisoft’s sandboxes love to borrow mechanics from other Ubi games.

Join us as we look back at the history of the Ubisoft's open world games, to see just how these sprawling sandboxes have evolved (and grown more and more alike).

A stealthy start

Ubisoft first began to dabble in the sandbox space with 2007’s Assassin’s Creed. Skip back a decade, and you’d never guess the seismic scope the franchise would reach. Before the 2D spin-offs, books, and shitty Michael Fassbender films could wear us all down, there was just this ambitious (more than a bit broken) sandbox that spawned many of the features open world games still cling to in 2017. 

Chances are you don’t remember much about the original Assassin’s Creed. You probably recall moping around ancient Jerusalem stabbing folk as a dude in a hoodie. Perhaps you have a dim recollection of eavesdropping on NPCs chatting away on benches. Maybe you even remember that early kickass trailer with the horribly catchy Unkle song. 

The one thing you’ll definitely recall is Ubisoft’s obsession with making players scale super lofty buildings. That all started in Altaïr’s adventure. To fully scope out all of the Holy Land’s side activities, you had to climb the tops of the tallest structures across Jerusalem, Acre, and Damascus. Doing so gives you a very literal eagle’s eye view of the sprawling mass of humanity hundreds of feet below; a bird of prey swooping around the building when you reach its summit. 

These vertigo-bating landmarks birthed Ubi’s most infamous open world feature: gradually filling up a map with mission markers.

Crossover feature: Climbing towers

Assassin’s Creed may have introduced us to the idea of big-ass buildings that revealed points of interest when climbed, but it was 2012’s Far Cry 3 that really cemented the feature. Jason Brody’s leopard-punching, pirate-blasting, tattoo-inking tropical holiday had the sort of wide reaching influence on the open world genre its two predecessors could only have sweaty night terrors about… mainly because its predecessor literally gave you malaria. 

Surprisingly, Far Cry 2’s obsession with making you stuff pills down your throat to keep mosquito-borne diseases away never caught on—nor did its love of jamming weapons. Far Cry 3 ditched the annoying obstructions in favour of features that kept you itching to explore.

Far Cry 3’s antenna towers undoubtedly cast the longest shadow on almost every Ubi open world that followed. Scaling these rickety structures—which often feel like they’re being kept up by little more than prayers and a few loose screws—helps Brody fill his map up with all manner of side distractions. Haphazardly jumping, swinging and climbing your way between the crooked layers of the towers in Far Cry 3 isn’t just a hoot in and of itself, it also makes tracking the series of wildlife hunts, enemy encampments, treasure chests and races spread throughout the densely packed archipelago a lot easier.  

Crossover feature: Animals

Also, animals. An ark's worth of animals. Brief hunting escapades may have popped up a few months prior in Assassin’s Creed 3, but it was Far Cry 3 that really took the pelt-collecting ball and ran with it. Forget quietly ruminating on the unspoken majesty of the animal kingdom: Ubi’s critter-obsessed shooters just want to make you shoot endangered species in their furry faces. 

Not that the trend Far Cry 3 kicked off (which seemed heavily inspired by Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption) entirely revolves around needless slaughter. Hunting down and skinning animals allows Brody to use pelts to craft ever larger ammo bags and other weapon-focused accessories. 

The creature carnage in Far Cry 4 takes things even further, with attacks coming from land, sea and air—lord are that game’s ultra aggressive eagles ever jerks. The Himalayan sandbox would also introduce rideable beasts in the form of rampaging elephants, which the prehistoric follow-up would go nuts with.

Last year’s Far Cry Primal makes the toothy, tusked inhabitants of its ancient world the stars of the show. Far Cry 3 may have let you punch sharks, but next to Primal’s wild encounters, that's positively tame. When you can train sabertooth tigers, command jaguars to stealth kill fellow cavemen, and use an owl as a sort of feathered, Mesolithic drone to tag enemies—a feature both Watch Dogs 2 and Ghost Recon: Wildlands would quickly reskin—bopping Jaws’ cousin on the nose ain’t no thang. 

Ubisoft has since pushed more animals into Assassin's Creed: Origins. Even Watch Dogs 2 depicts San Francisco's Pier 39 with a rookery of slovenly seals leisurely sunning themselves on gangplanks.

Crossover features: Sneaking, tagging, and stealth takedowns

Stealth has also played a large role in many of Ubi’s open world games, regardless of the setting, era or enemy type. It started with players blending into crowds with the ‘social stealth’ gameplay of the original Assassin’s Creed. It was an innovative feature for its time—after all, most stealth games up to that point forced their characters to either hide in the shadows or a cardboard box.

Sneaking mechanics were quickly shoved into most of its games following Assassin’s Creed's success. Who cares if these stalking scenarios were often absurd: they make for easy mission design, dammit!

Diving underwater, then pulling pirates into the drink as you clear out enemy strongholds in Far Cry 3. Slipping between cover to slap a chokehold on Watch Dogs’ various shortsighted guards. Poking Edward Kenway’s head out of Assassin’s Creed 4’s suspiciously plentiful patches of long grass. Using a tiny, extra voyeuristic RC car to infiltrate the offices of a tech startup in Watch Dogs 2, then zapping any security personnel that get too curious. Solid Snake and Sam Fisher have a lot to answer for.  

Whether you’re whacking religious zealots in the time of the Crusades or putting San Francisco office workers to sleep with a taser gun, over the years Ubisoft has proven there’s no open world setting it can’t crowbar a stealth section into. 

Tagging enemies is another prominent feature most Ubi games have turned to over the last few years. This actually predates Ubisoft's open worlds, in games like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and Rainbow Six: Vegas, but it's since become a vital part of their sandboxes as well.

Placing markers down to keep track of your foes’ positions popped up in Far Cry 3, with Brody’s super useful set of pirate-tagging binoculars. Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs, and Ghost Recon have all subsequently borrowed this eagle-eyed feature, while even the likes of Metal Gear Solid V have benefited hugely from Jason’s peeping Tom bouts of recon making tagging an open world staple.

Oh, and almost every one of those games lets you perform stealth takedowns, too. Because of course any self respecting hipster hacker/out of his depth fratboy/neanderthal can neutralise foes with the quiet, deadly efficiency of a Navy SEAL team.

Crossover feature: The Ubisoft collectible

This is the big one. More than any of the above crossover features, one recurring element has helped prop up Ubi’s increasingly sophisticated sandboxes this past decade: collectibles. ALL the collectibles. 

Eagle feathers in Assassin’s Creed; lost letters and spirit totems in Far Cry; Watch Dogs’ key data caches; Kingslayer files in Ghost Recon: Wildlands; even crystalline shards in the otherwise wonderfully nonconformist Grow Home, and its sequel Grow Up. Grand Theft Auto 3 may have introduced the world to sandbox collectibles with its fiendishly placed hidden packages, but we doubt Rockstar envisioned game worlds rammed full of bird feathers, PC files and statue heads. 

Hell, Ubisoft has even managed to cram several garages full of collectibles into its vehicled-based sandboxes. 2011’s brilliantly offbeat Driver San Francisco has 130 movie tokens to hoover up as you bomb around the Golden City while you mind-jack cars in gaming’s most exciting coma. The Crew wouldn’t miss this OCD party for the world, either. The flawed 2014 racer scatters 20 Wreck Parts in each of the five sections that make up its vast North American sandbox of endless highways. 

It’s almost as if Ubisoft doesn’t trust you enough to leave you to your own devices for five minutes. A good thing, too. Why take your time admiring the painstakingly recreated canal networks of Renaissance era Venice in Assassin’s Creed 2, when your inner completionist could be making Ezio ruin his shins by scampering up rooftops for mangy bird feathers?

There’s no question Ubisoft’s open worlds have evolved drastically over the last ten years. Place the original Assassin’s Creed next to the upcoming Beyond Good & Evil 2 (Michel Ancel’s long awaited sequel lets you explore entire galaxies), and you may as well be comparing a kid’s crayon scribbles to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Still, there’s no question Ubi’s plethora of internal studios love to crib concepts from each other’s games. 

So whether its a slightly out of place stealth mission, wads of XP to splurge on increasingly convoluted skill trees, or vaulting up towers to open up that fog covered map, you should probably expect Ubisoft open worlds to continue to share crossover features as they continue to evolve. Darwin would be delighted. Probably. 

Ranking the games in the Far Cry series isn't an especially easy task given that for the most part it's been a widely varied collection of shooters: Far Cry 1, 2, and 3 were all distinctly different from one another, and while Far Cry 4, Far Cry 5, and Blood Dragon were quite similar to Far Cry 3, Primal threw us a curve and plopped us in the Stone Age. Another issue with ranking them: the Far Cry games are all pretty good! There are no stinkers in the series, meaning there's no one to really dump on. This makes things harder.

But just because something isn't easy doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Below we've cobbled together a highly-unscientific ranking of the Far Cry series (sans Instincts, which only appeared on console). As with all of our rankings, this list is iron-clad and inarguable, so we expect nothing but collective head-nods of sycophantic agreement in the comments.

Here they are, the Far Cry games listed from worst to first.

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon

Developed: Ubisoft Published: Ubisoft2013

Samuel: Blood Dragon is a pleasingly concentrated and beautiful slice of Far Cry 3, wrapped in a joke that maybe wears a bit too thin. It essentially offers everything the main game does, but in a sillier and more explosive framework, designed as it is to poke fun at '80s movies and games in general—the latter of which is a contentious point for some. 

But it's so clearly enjoyable for what it is. Neon versions of Far Cry 3's creatures wander the landscape, and it's refreshingly streamlined, with no crafting and simpler progression systems. Throw a cyber heart to lure a Blood Dragon, watch the beast turn up to wreak some havoc, then move onto the next outpost. If the 20+ hours of game waiting in Far Cry 3 or 4 seems daunting, this is a pleasingly complete microcosm of the Far Cry experience.

Far Cry Primal

Developed: Ubisoft Published: Ubisoft2016

Chris: Cranking back the clock—way back, to 10,000 BC—would seem a good way to take the series in an entirely new direction. There are no guns in Primal, of course. No cars, no aircraft, and absolutely no radio towers (thankfully). In some ways, it's pretty amazing that the familiar gameplay of Far Cry fits so well in an environment without automatic weapons and off-road vehicles.

The flip side is that Primal feels too familiar to really stand out. Stone Age or not, it's still unmistakably a Far Cry game and never really feels like a fresh experience. The ability to tame animals to fight alongside you is new, and while combat restricts you to bows, clubs, and spears (there is, enjoyably, a bee-filled pouch that acts as a grenade), the hunting and crafting you spend much of your time doing isn't any sort of departure from the series. Despite sending you thousands of years into the past, Primal winds up feeling a little too similar to Far Cry 3 and 4.

Far Cry 5

Developed: Ubisoft Published: Ubisoft2018  

Chris: Far Cry 5 is built on the foundation of 3 and 4 with only a few tweaks on the established formula. The small changes are welcome, though: there's no skill tree, so you can unlock perks in any order you want, giving you the freedom to build your character to fit your playstyle. The crafting system of the earlier games has been trimmed down, too, so you unlock additional weapon slots and ammo bags through perks instead of having to hunt specific animals. Far Cry 5 wants you to get into the beautiful and chaotic open world of Montana with as few roadblocks as possible.

But flying in the face of all the freedom you're given is the unpleasant habit the game's bosses have for kidnapping you. They'll routinely drag you from your open world adventures and force you to listen to their long, rambling monologues. Worse, the villains are bland and forgettable, with gimmicky battles required to beat them. 

Far Cry 5 is still a fun and ridiculous sandbox of mayhem and destruction, but better bosses, and better writing, could have given it a higher ranking on our list.

Far Cry 2

Developed: Ubisoft Published: Ubisoft2008 

Chris: Far Cry 2 is the favorite of several of the PC Gamer staff, but favorite doesn't automatically mean best*, and loving something doesn't mean you need to be blind to its flaws. From crippling you with malaria before you even manage to escape the intro, to restricting your sprinting to a few steps before running out of stamina, to roadside checkpoints that repopulate with suicidal bad guys the moment you glance in another direction, traveling the map can quickly become an exhausting and frustrating affair. 

Making up for that, however, is everything else. The location, a sun-scorched province in Africa, is one of the most convincing environments a shooter has ever visited. The fire system is still fantastic, better even than the ones in later games, where flames spread through dry grass, up into trees, and across buildings, useful for flushing out and trapping enemies, but also often requiring the player to scramble to safety. The story is refreshingly nihilistic and bleak, the sprawling map leads into another, bigger one halfway through the game, and the gunplay (provided you're using guns you bought, as the ones you pick up off the ground are garbage) is fantastic.

*Note: I do really think it's the best, but we held a staff vote and I'll abide by the results.

Samuel: I appreciate the ambition of the story and the presentation of the world, though it's not particularly enjoyable next to the more recent games. I know that's an unpopular answer: Far Cry 2 is a favourite among game design academics, and fair enough. But sometimes you want to ride an elephant into a base, and that's okay.

I too appreciate Far Cry 2's fire and buddy system. Another touch I love about this game, that I assume Firewatch later borrowed, was the idea of the map being an object you hold in your hand. I haven't played the game in years, but I'll always remember that as a clever way of heightening the reality of that world.

Far Cry 3

Developed: Ubisoft Published: Ubisoft2012 

Chris: Rather than casting you as an ex-Green Beret or hired merc, Far Cry 3's Jason Brody was supposed to be just some random bro who finds himself in way over his head. Naturally, you're still completely capable of killing hundreds of people, flying wingsuits around, and doing everything else the trained killers from the previous games could, but for at least an hour or two Brody yammers on about how he's just a bro who doesn't know what he's doing. It's not especially convincing.

This game also served as Far Cry's dive into crafting, which was largely baffling: having to hunt multiple animals to make a wallet that could hold more money, for instance. Far Cry 3's animals are much more fun when they're the ones doing the hunting, leaping out of the jungle to attack goons and rebels alike, who are often already in the process of attacking one another. The whole island is like a explosive set of dominos, where tipping one leaves a chaotic mess in its wake. There are times when just watching the carnage is as enjoyable as participating in it.

Luckily, you can break from the extended and often not-great story missions (you're trying to rescue your friends and repair the boat to escape, despite having access to lots of working boats, but whatever) and do whatever the heck you want. And, it solved one of the big issues with Far Cry 2: once you took over an outpost, it was yours. Enemies didn't repopulate, and they certainly didn't repopulate the moment you drove off-screen.

Tim: My memory is so shot to pieces now that the two main things I recall about Far Cry 3 are that 1) it was my favourite Far Cry, largely because it ditched the whole "having malaria as a gameplay mechanic" thing, and 2) what I loved most about the game was its signature weapons. For some reason I found collecting each of these—from the meaty Bull shotgun to the deranged Shredder SMG—absolutely compelling. 

Unlocking them required an arduous amount of macguffin collection (this being a game that routinely tasks you with skinning 10 mongeese to craft a new wallet), but the chase for these white whale weapons was what drove me to keep going. Once I had them all my interest flamed out fast. An itch/scratch relationship I recognise only too well from my exotic weapon collection in Destiny. Actually, the other thing I remember about Far Cry 3 is that it genuinely felt like going on holiday. A ridiculous, action movie holiday accompanied by assholes, but a sunshine break nonetheless. 

Far Cry

Developed: Crytek Published: Ubisoft2004

Chris: It's hard to say how the original Far Cry holds up after a decade—we haven't played it in nearly that long—but at its release it was almost shockingly good. While it demanded a lot of our hardware at the time (it was a Crytek game, after all), it at least had some flexibility in graphical settings and still looked pretty great even on mid-range PCs.

James: The original Far Cry stood out for its massive open environments and the aggressive AI soldiers within. Firefights didn’t take place in a tightly scripted series of corridors—thick vegetation and a rudimentary stealth system turned encounters into an improvisational game of cat and cat and cat and cat and mouse (you). A few hours in, monsters get thrown into the jungle combat stew, and suddenly the enemy mercs are no longer sitting comfortably at the top of the food chain—not that they’re eating the monsters or you, I hope. Luring men to monsters and then hiding in a bush became the new headshot, an early push towards testing more skills than how quickly a player can point and click. 

By today’s standards, Far Cry’s take on sneaky open arena combat feels noticeably dated, with enemies that have acute senses and preternatural aim anyone would envy. This is also before the era of elaborate back-stab animations, so stealth takes more patience and guesswork than it should, but even so, it’s easy to appreciate Far Cry for its obvious influence on open-ended island-hopping FPS design. 

Far Cry 4

Developed: Ubisoft Published: Ubisoft2014

Chris: For a series that had been reinventing itself with each release—Far Cry 1, 2, and 3 were all markedly different from one another—Far Cry 4 was a noticeable departure. It built on the gameplay of the previous entry without completely reimagining it. Coming just two years after Far Cry 3, Far Cry 4 felt incredibly familiar, but the changes it did bring were all for the better.

Rather than the overly vocal Jason Brody, protagonist Ajay Ghale is more subdued and quiet, letting the player fill in the blanks of his personality. Instead of simple bad luck stranding him among scores of warring soldiers and freedom fighters, Ajay has a real reason for being in the region of Kyrat: he's returned to scatter his mother's ashes, and the region's rebels are a military group founded by his father. What's more, Pagan Min, the colorful and charismatic baddie, once had an affair with Ajay's mother, making Ajay's appearance in Kyrat a personal one in several respects.

Kyrat itself is a wonderful and chaotic playground, sprawling and mountainous and with plenty of new ways to get around in it, like gyrocopters and a grappling hook, plus the familiar wingsuit that this time can be accessed almost immediately. The insanely aggressive wildlife makes a return, allowing us to unleash them on unsuspecting enemies and providing no small amount of random, ridiculous carnage. Plus, you can ride elephants, bowling over vehicles and tossing enemies into the air.

Alongside the scripted story missions, outpost takeovers once again comprise the most enjoyable part of the game, freeform assaults that can be accomplished any way you like. Outposts are bolstered by the addition of strongholds: massive and well-protected forts that are even tougher and more fun to liberate. This being a Ubisoft game, the map is littered with all sorts of other activities, challenges, and points of interest. They don't all really add much but, but they do ensure there's something to do just about everywhere you roam. Throw in co-op (except for story missions) and Far Cry 4 is a heavily packed and gloriously fun sandbox of destruction. 

The official Far Cry 5 reveal is still a couple days out, but Ubisoft today released the first full-on promotional image for the game, and it is—to put it mildly—provocative. 

The image depicts a group of heavily-armed, heavily-bearded men, plus one woman and a wolf, positioned in a very Last Supper-like pose around a table festooned with a slightly-modified US flag—crosses instead of stars—and with a vaguely menacing messiah figure at the center. There are guns and ammo all around, of course, and a badly-beaten man sitting in front, his hands bound and the word "Sinner" scrawled across his back.   

Bringing the series to America in what appears to be a very believable context of religious extremism and right-wing survivalists is a bold move. Previous Far Cry games have been set in remote locales crawling with fictional villains (and even mutants at one point—how far it's all come) and were easy to dismiss as pleasantly distant and fully fictional. That may not be so easy with Far Cry 5, which is bound to upset some people—although I think it's the most interesting thing Ubisoft has done with the series since Far Cry 2. 

The Far Cry 5 full reveal is set to take place on May 26. Have a look at the full art below.