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).

This article originally appeared in issue 246 of PC Gamer UK. Article by Rob Zacny.

You play Jason Brody, a child of wealth and privilege. You meet him through home movies of his latest vacation. Beautiful, vapid young people drink, dance, jet ski and sky dive in a tropical paradise somewhere. Then the camera pulls back, and you’re watching the videos through Jason’s eyes as he sits inside a wooden cage in a pirate camp.

His kidnapper, Vaas, holds Jason’s phone through the bars of the cage, enjoying this opportunity to mock an American princeling. Vaas’s mohawk sits above a pair of unnaturally wide eyes. You and Jason belong to him now.

By the end of the intro, you and Jason have watched someone bleed out through your fingers as you try to staunch a fatal gunshot wound. You have killed a man: a pirate loomed out of the darkness, and suddenly there was a knife and you were shoving it into his chest and neck. You are lost. Your friends are gone.

He’s been to college, but Far Cry 3 is unequivocal in its statement: Jason Brody’s education has finally begun.

Far Cry 3 combines ideas you’ve seen in other games and other genres. It has Crysis’s sense of stealth, and the open-world chaos of its predecessor, Far Cry 2. You’ll find a bit of Assassin’s Creed in the way it reveals the map and side-missions, while the hunting, crafting, and character progression smack of Elder Scrolls. From these very good parts, Far Cry 3 creates something new.



My guide to this world is a middle-aged man named Dennis. After Jason’s escape, Dennis welcomes Jason to his small village. He recognizes him as a fellow warrior, and will teach him the ways of warfare on this island.

I might as well get this out in the open: the racial politics in Far Cry 3 look troubling. Dennis and the villagers border on ‘noble savage’ stereotypes. They live together in harmony while women perform sensuous dances to the sound of drums. Dennis himself is a mystic, explaining that Jason’s new tattoos mark his progress on the path of the warrior. It all raises some troubling red flags.

Dennis shows me the basics of surviving on the island. I can reveal the map by climbing radio towers and disabling the jammers the pirates have placed there. Once the jammers are down, not only is nearby territory revealed, but so are new mission locations and hunting grounds.

My first hunting quest involves killing wild boar and gathering a variety of local flowers. Boar, in addition to making delicious sausages, are also good for fine leather goods. If you want to increase your carrying capacity for basic items such as cash and ammunition, you’ve got to craft gear using animal skins, which means things aren’t looking so good for Piglet, Tigger and Owl.

Plants, on the other hand, are primarily useful for crafting syrettes. Like all homemade drugs, the injections you make from plants enhance your skills and even grant various forms of second sight . One type of injection, the ‘combat instincts’ syrette, reveals all nearby enemies, so that I can see their outlines even through solid obstacles.

All my flower-gathering and hunting left me feeling that Far Cry 3’s tropical island is sometimes too much like a theme park. The colours are heavily saturated, the jungle almost painfully verdant, and the weather sunny and clear. Far Cry 3 seems like the sort of place where you might find Prospero and Caliban hanging out while Ralph and Piggy squabble over the conch and Sawyer takes his shirt off. It places itself somewhere between reality and dream.



Once I have the basics down, Dennis drives me to a pirate outpost. This is my final exam before being turned loose on the island, and I’ll be using my stealth, shooting and recon skills to tackle it.

Outposts provide fast-travel nodes, weapons lockers and hubs for side-missions. But first you have to take them from the pirates’ warm, still-twitching hands. To help me with my first battle, Dennis brings along a posse of indigenous warriors, the last hold-outs of the native population that has been driven into the heart of the island by pirate attacks.

My battered machine pistol doesn’t inspire confidence in my ability to shoot it out, so I circle through the trees to come up behind the outpost. Thanks to the dense jungle and poor visibility, I easily slip into the outpost. Three guards are doing lazy turns around the courtyard while spouting some amusing, if repetitive, dialogue.

By bringing each of the enemies into focus in Jason’s camera viewfinder, they’re marked on your minimap and in your first-person view. As with the ‘combat instincts’ injection, a marked enemy is visible at all times, even through solid obstacles. It pays to take a few minutes to conduct a proper recon in this game.

After marking about five guards and their attack dog, I’m ready to begin. I put the camera away, pull out my pistol, and start creeping up on a nearby pirate. He’s oblivious to my presence, too busy complaining about an STD he picked up at his last port of call. His day is about to get worse.





It’s hard to get anywhere in Far Cry 3. Half of the people you’ll meet along main roads are pirate raiders who want you dead. Fortunately the other half are fellow rebels who’ll let you pass unmolested, but it’s your own easily distracted brain that might be your deadliest enemy. I decide to hit another outpost astride a long dangerous route between two major quest locations. It’s a quick five or ten minute drive along a coastal road from my position. But it takes me almost two hours.

The first thing that gets me is a pirate patrol. I’m in a jeep barrelling downhill onto the white sands of the shoreline when a car full of pirates blazes past in the opposite direction. We spot each other at the exact same moment and throw our jeeps into hard sideways spins. I was quicker on the handbrake: I manage to get my ride straddling the road before the pirates turn their jeep around. Bailing out, I take cover behind the engine block as they race toward me.

I fire a half dozen shots that blow in their windshield and most of their driver’s face. A few more get the other pirates as the now-driverless jeep hurtles past and crashes into a tree.

Far Cry 3 is not a game of drawn-out gun battles: neither Jason nor his enemies can stand much punishment. Most of the firefights I had fell into one of two categories. The first was fast, random encounters like this one – if you don’t finish these off quickly, reinforcements will show up and the maths will turn against you. The other was like my raid on the outpost: a long recon and planning stage followed by a swift, decisive annihilation.

Before I can leave, two more patrols appear on the road. My skirmish turns into a running shootout that consumes most of my health syringes and most of my ammo before I manage to reach a hiding spot in the forest.

After losing the pirates, I catch a glimpse of a hawk circling nearby. I glance at my half-clip of rifle ammunition. What the hell. The hawk falls on my third shot. That’s the easy part. The hard part is finding where the damn thing actually dropped. After five minutes of searching the forest floor, I give up and shoot another hawk that appears to have spawned near the same location.

At last, I am ready to resume my journey. I go back to the scene of the pirate battle, grab one of the few cars that didn’t get shot to pieces, and start driving along the same route as before. This time I won’t let myself get dis- wait, I see a radio tower from the road. I head over there, kill the pirates guarding it, and reveal more of the map, which tells me that I’m near a hunting range. Perfect: I need deer hides for some new Bambi-coloured gear. I mosey over to the picturesque meadow, and find deer shuffling in flowers and tiger grass. I plug a few in the head from five feet away.



After my hunt, some flower picking, some item crafting, and a long walk to find a new vehicle (with a few further gunfights along the way), I finally resume my drive to the outpost... and end up pulling over at a roadside bar to play a surprisingly good game of high-stakes poker against three computer-controlled opponents.

But for sure, as soon as I fleece these fools, I’ll get back to storming that outpost... right after I use my winnings to buy new weapon upgrades.

My final mission in Far Cry 3 is to sneak aboard a beached cargo vessel the pirates are using as a communications hub, in order to eavesdrop on their radio chatter and discover where one of Jason’s friends is being held. But first, I have to stealth-kill some sentries who hold the encryption codes for the pirates’ communications. If I’m discovered, they’ll destroy the codes and I’ll fail the mission.

I arrive at the shore late at night, although the sky is so clear and the colours so saturated in this game that night is more of a dim, electric blue. It hardly interferes with visibility at all, but pirates do seem to have a harder time spotting you after sundown.

Since I need to maintain silence, I distract the guards by throwing rocks against crates and the sides of the ships. Far Cry 3 uses a radial marker to indicate whether you’re hidden. It points in the direction of guards about to spot you, giving you a chance to scurry into a convenient bush.

My targets investigate the noise, allowing me to approach unseen and kill them out of sight of the camp. Once they’re dead, circling inside the base and taking out the code-bearers is simple. Then comes the hard part.

No sooner have I eavesdropped on the pirates’ communications from the ships’s bridge than a couple of squads of goons arrive to investigate why the camp went silent. Now the bridge, three stories above the ground, is a trap. Stupidly, I decide to use my high ground ‘advantage’ to pick off the pirates as they arrive on the beach.



I get a couple before the rest soak the superstructure with machinegun fire. It’s intense – I can’t even peek over the side without getting shot. The AI may not always be brilliant (and I question Ubi’s decision to leave them all in easy-to-spot red shirts that stand out in the jungle) but it certainly understands the value of suppressive fire. These guys get into cover and start firing everything they have.

I fling a few grenades over the side and pray the explosions catch a few, then sprint down to the main deck. The first pirates are already coming aboard – I can’t get down the way I came. I flee to the prow of the ship and hide, trying to pick off the pirates as they bound along.

Far Cry 3’s AK is one of the better weapons I’ve used so far in my adventure, but it still feels like a third-world piece of garbage, much like the machine pistol I had at the start of the game. The game’s guns buck in a satisfying way, refusing to hit anything unless you keep adjusting your aim and show some restraint with your trigger finger. High-level weapons and upgrades promise to ameliorate this later, but here at the beginning of the game, it’s all too easy to spray a clip at someone from 20 feet away and only hit air.

My AK goes dry as two more pirates storm over. I sprint toward them, drop into a slide between them, leaving their shots flying over my head, then jump back to my feet right behind them and take them both out with my knife. I grab their rifles and jump down to the sand below.

I run around the back of the ship and flank the last group of pirates. I walk toward them, aiming down the iron sights, methodically downing them as they run for cover. It’s over in seconds.

Just as the guns fall silent on the beach and I stand ringed by corpses on a moonlit shore, a PR rep taps me on the shoulder. “Time’s up. Are you ready to go?”


A radio message is coming in from the village, where the pirates are launching a retaliatory raid. I have enough experience for some new abilities, enough money for some weapon upgrades, and I’m just getting the hang of stealth and distraction. I want to save the village and hunt more pirates, and I want to go explore the blank spaces on my map. I want to rescue Jason’s friends, and find out whether a better version of him was waiting at the end of all these adventures. So much to do, so much more than either Jason or I ever expected to find here.

“Can I get a few more minutes?”

Motoring around Far Cry 2's picturesque African landscapes delivered the brutality of a nation ripping itself apart through civil war to your windshield, but it also brought frustrating moments of downtime when repairing broken engines. Ubisoft's third go-around with the open-world FPS includes driving improvements as a measure against the slim possibility that puttering around the Rook Islands while high on psychedelics becomes a boring affair. As Lead Designer Jamie Keen tells Official PlayStation Magazine UK: "You can just launch your vehicle at 70 MPH off a cliff. It might not end very well -- but you can do that stuff."

"If you want to just travel across coastal roads for hours on end, by all means, knock yourself out," Keen added. "We also have fast travel points that let you move quickly around the world. You never feel like anything is too far way, but it's there and it's the choice that you are making. This idea of player choice is very important to us, that you are the one that’s deciding the pace and what you engage with."

While exploration definitely retains its importance in Far Cry 3, Keen doesn't want vehicular transportation impeding the allure of curiously poking into the brush, saying, "We want you, when you are wandering around the world, to just get lost out there and go off and explore, have a look around it and just satisfy your curiosity, but know that at any moment, things can just switch and you are suddenly on the receiving end of tigers or an enemy patrol or something like that." Our hands-on preview delves deeper into crossing bullets against sharpened fangs after driving around the twisted wilderness.

With Far Cry 3, Ubisoft appear to be delivering a positively psychedelic take on the modern shooter. But just what kind of rig will you need to do justice to the experience of setting fire to a Komodo dragon while under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms?

Ubisoft have confirmed a November 29 release for Far Cry 3 in Australia and Europe, while the US will have to wait until December 4.

Have a look at this Far Cry 3 survival guide to see why we're excited.

Minimum Specs

- DirectX9c graphics card with 512MB Video RAM Dual core CPU 4GB Memory

Example minimum 1 (NVidia/Intel)

- NVidia GTX8800

- Intel Core2 Duo E6700

Example minimum 2 (AMD)

- AMD Radeon HD2900

- AMD Athlon64 X2 6000+

Recommended Specs

- DirectX11 graphics card with 1024MB Video RAM Quad core CPU 4GB Memory

Example recommended 1 (NVidia/Intel)

- NVidia GTX480

- Intel Core i3-530

Example recommended 2 (AMD)

- AMD Radeon HD5770

- AMD Phenom II X2 565

High Performance Specs

- Latest DirectX11 graphics card

- Latest quad core CPU

- 8GB Memory

Example high performance (NVidia/Intel)

- NVidia GTX680

- Intel Core i7-2600K

Example high performance (AMD)

- AMD Radeon HD7970

- AMD Bulldozer FX4150

It looks like Vaas isn't the only maniac battling for control of the jungle in Far Cry 3. Hoyt Volker is the leader of a band of well equipped privateers. They've set up camp on the Southern island, which means you'll have to don some funky gloves and parachute in and take it down from the inside. With a rocket launcher.

In Far Cry 3, pretty much everyone hated and wanted to kill you. It's nice to see that Far Cry 3 is building on that by introducing an army of animals that hate EVERYONE. Check out Dan's Far Cry 3 hands-on for an idea of the destruction a rogue bear can cause when set free in the middle of an enemy camp, and check out the trailer below for more animal madness, and the odd explosion of course.

Last week I had the chance to dive into the refreshing waters of Far Cry 3 at Gamescom. I was given free rein of a portion of the world map. I fought Komodo dragons, drowned, fled a shark, trashed bandit bases, crashed a multitude of vehicles and annoyed half of the jungle's wildlife. This is the story of my Far Cry 3 safari.

I start in a small village, five or six buildings and a few idle, wandering locals. There's a man in a dirty shirt waving at me. I guess he's the obvious demo clue, so ignore him and start chasing a monkey. The monkey gets stuck into some foliage (probably a bug) so I go shopping. Wandering into the local corner shop, an old lady sells me a scope and super-large magazine for my AK-47. She appears to be out of kit-kats. Looking at the menu, I can carry my knife, grenades and two weapons – at the moment. My secondary weapon appears to be an SMG. I test this on nearby bushes.



I win $50 off the man with the dirty shirt in a knife throwing contest and look around for something else to do. My in-game map appears to all be messed up and the developer tells me that the local bandits have scrambled the local radio frequency. I don't really understand what that has to do with my map, but I really don't want to miss The Archers so I hop in a jeep and start barreling up the hill. Straight up the hill. The developer looks a little perturbed as I rev between the trees. I burst out of the bushes in front of a bandit jeep. The bandits doubletake and hop in their jeep to chase me. I handbrake turn past them, which sends them off the wrong way down the hill.

At the radio tower, I hop out of the jeep. In the distance, I can hear the confused shouting of bandits. Each tower, the developer tells me, is a puzzle. This starting one is easy, but climbing them gets progressively more difficult throughout the game. I run quickly to the top and tear out the jamming device from the control box. Like Assassin's Creed's high points, when you've uncovered one of these points, you can see the world around you, revealing optional quests in the surrounding area in a short montage. From here, I can see an intruiging ruined tower, the local bandit base and a hang glider.



Ooh, and lots of animal icons have appeared on the map. The developer is telling me how if I defeat the local bandits I'll free the native tribe who'll be eternally grateful and give me glorious gifts. Whatever. I've just spotted a komodo dragon icon on the map. I love komodo dragons. For the non-herpetologists, they're 11 foot long man-eating lizards with a fatally toxic bite, a throwback to a time when were little rats being eaten by dinosaurs. I must see it. I hop back in the jeep while the developer's still talking and head off in the opposite direction to the bandit camp, straight over a sharp drop. The vehicle falls through the trees, bouncing off the hillside all the way down, and lands surprisingly undamaged on a road. I quickly skid the jeep across rickety bridges and dirt roads to the approximate location of the komodo dragons.

I skid to a halt and walk into the jungle. I stop. Over the headphones, I hear birdsong. And yet more bandits, who must have found my jeep. And, yes, over that way, a faint hissing noise. I walk closer towards it, through the undergrowth, slowly closing it down, step by step. At which point two four-foot long komodos burst out of the undergrowth, hissing like split pipes. They're only babies at that size, but the speed of their charge is terrifyingly realistic, and I unload my AK at them. They swarm me, and nearly kill me. I run through the foliage, bandaging my arm frantically, past a surprised looking bandit. He's about to fire on me when the Komodos close on him. I turn and empty the clip at all of them. Five seconds later one bitten bandit and two komodos lie dead. I actually feel guilty for a moment about biodiversity. Then the developer tells me I can turn their skins into ammo bags.



My impromptu safari done, I decide to investigate the bandit camp. The hanglider disappeared from the map when I got down from the radio tower's vantage point, but I remember it was near an old fort tower, so I razz the jeep back up the hill. I do a complicated parking manoeuvre on two bandits at the tower and spot the hang glider on a ridge just below it. I run down, shooting men as I go. Shooting men, whilst fun, is the least interesting part of the game. The open world exploration is just joyous.

The hang glider, in particular is such a nostalgic throwback to the first game. I remember using Far Cry's level editor to create the highest possible map with a single hang glider on top of a mountain peak, so you could just spiral down past the foliage. This hang glider is positioned to overlook the bandit camp. I push off and pull up immediately so I'm drifting slowly way above the camp. The camp's on a promontory and there's a sniper on the roof, with a clear line of sight down both approach roads. Hmm.

Ooh. Over in the water, there's a patrol boat. If I can take that over, I can sail it close to the camp and unload its turret gun. I wait for it to pass me and swoop down. Delusions of grandeur overtake me. I am Batman. I am the terror in the...

...deep. Crap. I missed the back of the boat by a foot and instead landed on a bull shark just behind it. Right. I'm now under a boat with a giant angry fish and I'm running out of air. Fleeing as fast I can with Jaws hanging onto my leg, stabbing my arm with morphine, I pop out of the water on the front of the boat. In front of the turret gunner. Sadface.



The game respawns me back at the hanglider. This time I ignore the boat. I just swoop down immediately, picking up huge amounts of speed, and aim for the roof of the base. Because I started so high up I'm going scarily fast when I jump off, but I miraculously survive. Irecover more quickly than the sniper standing next to me, so shoot him, then crouch down and unload my submachine gun, then the AK at the enemies trying to storm the roof. After thirty hectic seconds, they're all dead, and the natives drive up to take control of the base. The developer has been looking shocked all this time. "I didn't think you could land on that roof," he says.

Right. I'm getting a taste for this now. I can see that my minimap is telling me that there's a relic out at sea. The developer tells me it's really hard to get to without the breath upgrade. I shrug and try anyway, swimming out (still terrified that Jaws is out here somewhere), and then diving off a reef, down, down, deep into the rusted hull of a container ship. I spot the relic and grab it, then get lost trying to get back out. I black out, hands waving at the blue sky so near. Except that my inventory says I still have the relic. Hmm.

I've forgotten where I parked my jeep so I take a handy Trabant. It's surprisingly fast and I almost lose control going over the wooden bridges on the way to the next roadside camp. This has two entrances, one vehicle and a sneaky pedestrian one around the back. I crash the Trabant into the back door, then while the bandits are running that way, sneak around to the front gates. The noise of my crash has panicked a pack of bison which are running around madly inside the base. Strangely, the bandits have got a black bear in a cage in their base. I still feel guilty about murdering those Komodos, so I decide to shoot the door of the cage open. Welcome to the party, Yogi.

The bandits are just walking back, when Yogi runs out. Together me and Yogi clear out the base. Then Yogi runs off and chases bison in a kind of mad bear frenzy as arriving natives open fire. Inside the base, It's carnage. Yogi gets a couple of the bandits, a couple fall to my SMG, and one manages to escape both of us but turns up later dead with a jeep parked on top of him. Nothing to do with me. He's dropped a nice sniper rifle, though. I toss the SMG aside.



I hop back in the Trabant and head for the next Radio Tower. Climbing that (much more shakey and tumbledown), I quickly unlock it and spot the next bandit camp. This time, I find a zipline at the top of the tower, and take it down. At the bottom is a strangely glowing ATV. I climb aboard and it turns out its carrying medical supplies. I've got to rush it to the nearest native village via a series of handy waypoints within a few minutes or someone will die! Or at least, he'll die and respawn and I'll have to replay the mission. The ATV handles terribly, but I manage to plough into the native village sideways before crashing it into the sea. Mission complete! I am winning at safari.

I now have no vehicle, but the bandit camp is only in the next cove so I decide to swim for it. I stick close to the coast to avoid meeting Jaws again, and emerge on a sandy beach covered in debris. Climbing the steep shoreline, I pull my sniper rifle out and sneak up to the ridge. This base is much better defended. It's got clear lines of fire in all directions and seems relatively well-manned. I line up a shot but am attacked from behind as I pull the trigger. There's a grunting, but I can't see what it is. the developer tells me it's probably an angry Warthog. I run, but not before my alarmed gunshot alerts the scout I was trying to kill. Scattered shots pepper the foliage around me.



I lose the pig and start sneaking around to the opposite side of the base at a low crouch. The bandits lose sight of me, and one wanders into the shaking bushes I came from. There's a commotion. He's found the warthog. As his friends look on in confusion, I throw all my grenades into the base. All of them. Half the enemy dots on the minimap disappear. I snipe another two, switch to the AK and sneak up on the nearest barricade. I stab one guy from behind (gruesomely, the knife goes right through him), machine gun another, and jump into the base. There's one man left and he starts muttering to himself in terror. I climb higher and higher and jump down onto his head. Thanks to a random head-stomping perk I picked up earlier, he goes down.

The area of the map I played was about 1/20th of the full game. On this showing, it's big and emergent enough to give Just Cause a good run for its money. And you get to run away from animals of many and varied sorts. Safari, so good.

N.B. The game didn't look as good when I was playing it as these screenshots do. I'm not calling them bullshots, but they must have been taken on amazingly high-end PCs. With Photoshop installed.

This preview originally appeared in issue 242 of PC Gamer UK.

Sitting in a room and watching Michael Mando scream and laugh at a woman in a chair is a great way to pass half an hour. He looks a lot like his character, Vaas, the compelling psychopath who’s become the face of Far Cry 3. That’s mostly down to the full performance-capture technology – a full suit loaded with reflective strips, and a helmet with a camera strapped to it that captures every movement of his face. It’s also because he has the same mohawk hairstyle. As affable and likeable as Mando is, he’s not taking the role of Vaas lightly.

Producer Dan Hay suggests that there have been some method acting moments in the development, and writer Jeffrey Yohalem (Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood) has worked with the actors and directors to rewrite the script to suit their styles. Hay tells an anecdote of how they got the glint of madness that made that original trailer so compelling. Turns out that it was a simple trick making everyone repeat the same scene over and over again until they were tired and hungry, and then lying about turning the cameras off. It’s the kind of anecdote you expect from a movie set.

As much as that’s true, Jeffrey Yohalem dismisses the idea of Far Cry 3 making a good movie. “The story depends on the interactivity. There are strands of plot that involve the interaction between the player and the hero. It wouldn’t make sense as a movie.” This hints at the higher levels of narrative ambition going into Far Cry 3. While FC2 had a decent story, the new sequel doesn’t just acknowledge video game and Hollywood conventions, it uses them as tools to mislead the hapless player.



The playable demo at E3 gives a great taste of the varied aspects of Far Cry 3. It begins during a scene with Vaas’s sister, and seems to depict part of an initiation ceremony inducting main character Jason Brody as a warrior. This is tied to the tattoos on his arms, which represent the player’s journey through the story. Sidemissions, hunting and quests will earn you new tattoos – a sleeve woven in the order in which you do things. There’s a good chance your tattoo will be unique, as well as the introduction to many “let me tell you about my gap year” conversations should Brody survive.

In this scene, Brody’s tattoo is smoking and warping, which plugs into the game’s other themes – reality, hallucinations, and madness. The island is laden with mushrooms, which the dangerously meek Dr Earnhardt seems determined to distil into something purer. In the demo, I guide Brody towards Vaas’s island by diving off a cliff and into the sea. Pausing to admire a manta ray on the short swim, Brody takes out a sentry patrolling the pier with a stealthy lunge from the water. Maintaining the quiet approach, I find two more guards, giving me a chance to try out the melee takedown combo. It’s an unlockable skill, which lets you pinball from one lethal animation to the next with just the tap of a button.

The shape of the map intuitively guides you to the left, where a stack of boxes compromises the perimeter wall. I’m told there are two other ways in, but however you manage it, there’s a small playground of death inside – a network of roofs to stealth your way across, a machinegun encampment, a large fuel tank that takes some punishing but explodes eventually.

There are also buildings that reflect Vaas’s unlikely preoccupation with TV, art and showmanship, plus a live tiger in a cage. You can blast open the cage if you want, and the tiger’s antics will add a dash of chaos to the map until he inevitably gets shot or burned to death.



Clearing the map leads me into a room, where Vaas appears from nowhere and plants a knife in Brody’s shoulder. Whether through drugs or unconscious dreaming I find myself in a ‘corridor of Vaas’. The path is made out of televisions. Vaas is pole-dancing on the right, and taking your place in the sex scene with his sister on the left. And at the end is Vaas himself – proving you’re a ‘pussy’ by putting your gun to his head and telling you to pull the trigger. “I am you! You are me!” he screams. It’s just too much of a gift, even in a hallucination. You have to pull the trigger. But Vaas disappears, replaced by the friend you’ve already watched die once.

It’s a great slab of action and story, reassuring me about the open arena of Far Cry’s gunplay and raising juicy questions about what’s actually going on. Jason and Vaas, the same person? How much of any of this is real? And how tacky is that whole ‘white man leads an otherwise doomed tribe to victory’ thing?

Yohalem’s way ahead of us all. “The greatest pleasure about telling a story,” he says, “is to lead the player into certain expectations, and pull the rug satisfyingly from under your feet.” He’s not surprised by me mentioning Lost, Fight Club, and Avatar, because he put those seeds there on purpose. “There are going to be some pretty big rugs,” says Yohalem.

We've gotten pretty used to seeing Ubisoft games get delayed here on PC Gamer, but usually it's just us that gets the sharp end of the stick. No longer. In a democratic move, Far Cry 3 has been delayed for everyone, PCs and consoles alike, huzzah! Also :(.

According to IGN, the game has been pushed back a whole two months. The new release dates are November 29th in the UK and December 4th in the US, which means we lucky limeys get the first dance for a change. We await the inevitable last minute delay to the PC version, which will probably see us finally get our hands on it some time in January. For more on Far Cry 3, here's our latest Far Cry 3 preview along with footage of this year's E3 demo.