Far Cry 2 Preview

This is not the Africa of the brochures, of mustard savannahs, shimmering waterholes and slow-motion cheetah kills. There are no excitable anthropologists roaming these villages, no jeeploads of middle-class safari goers heading out in search of big game. This is not the Africa of the National Geographic.

This is, rather, the Africa of an unassuming sidebar story at the back of the international news section, of indecipherable conflicts waged on forgotten grounds. This is the Africa of the guerrillas, those who fight over a carcass land stripped of resources by long-gone colonialist vultures. This is the Africa of potholes, of rusty AK-47s, worthless money, dusty shantytowns, sweltering poverty and buzzing malaria.

Far Cry 2 is a third world FPS; a place where your guns might lock up and fail at any moment, where medical attention takes the form of prising bullets from wounds with heavy pliers and where, if you want to buy a round of drinks for your buddies, you better hope you brought diamonds for the down payment.

Gone are the sci-fi elements, the clicking aliens and Wolverine-like feral abilities of Crytek's Far Cry games. In their place Ubisoft Montreal conjures a heavy kind of realism beyond the stretch of most of the game's immediate rivals.

All this is made clear during the game's opening section, a long taxi ride from a small, makeshift airport to your hotel lodgings - 10 minutes and 3 per cent of the game away. The verbose driver delivers a near comprehensive overview of the socio-political situation that provides the backdrop to this most hyped and anticipated first-person shooter.

Ubisoft claim there's no in-game loading, which would explain why the initial load takes a fair bit of time.

Your character, chosen from a roster of nine multinational options, lounges in the backseat. He admires whatever you point his eyes at in the 360-degree view that's rolling past: a farmer driving oxen through a shallow river, light aircraft streaking overhead ("they're not coming back...") or dusty military convoys.

En route checkpoints must be tactfully eased through ("You guys thirsty? You want me to pick you up a beer on my way back?") while on the radio you hear for the first time about the United Front for Liberation and Labour (UFLL) and Alliance For Popular Resistance (APR), two warring factions who control the area and your destiny in the game.

Your mission is to assassinate The Jackal, an arms dealer supplying both sides of the conflict with guns and ammunition, stoking the fires of ongoing conflict as he does so. And your mission, as your character spills from the backseat onto the sand and into the throes of early onset malaria, is over before it's even begun.

Look out for green lights blinking on your GPS - this indicates diamonds are nearby.

Sick and incapacitated. It's a brave way to begin a first-person shooter, a genre defined by violence, aggression and power. But make no mistake: the Portal-esque twisting of convention doesn't for last long. Five minutes later, dazed and blurry-eyed, you're staggering to your feet from a bed on the floor, groping for your pistol in an effort to fight your way out of a UFLL/APR skirmish that's erupted outside your bedroom window. From here on in, the rules are as old as videogame time: shoot them before they shoot you.

Of course, most gamers are less concerned with all this plot, premise and geography than they are with the game's much-vaunted visuals and, in this regard, the tested Xbox 360 version satisfies rather than amazes. Far Cry 2, the console version, certainly matches its closest system rivals - but it rarely surpasses them, save perhaps in the small details.

Explosions chuck fistfuls of leaf confetti into the air; driving through the undergrowth sees foliage whip back to attention after passing bowed underneath your axels; direct sunlight and deep gloom cause your eyes to adjust; forest fires creep and devour everything in their path, their speed and ferocity defined by whatever the dynamic weather's doing at the time.

The details: these are the graphical trimmings that ensure Far Cry 2, at least in part, matches its hype. Still, there's no denying that, with its waxy surfaces and awkward cross-hatch shadows, console Far Cry 2 falls short of its PC counterpart's high mark.

In terms of raw mechanics the game is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Along with a machete you can carry three other weapons, each mapped to the d-pad according to type. Pushing left selects your primary weapon (an assault rifle, sniper rifle or shotguns). Pressing right calls up your secondary gun (a handgun or SMG) while down selects the heavy-handed option: a rocket launcher, machine-gun or flamethrower. Weapons can be purchased over the counter at arms dealer shacks (ordered in via the lime-green interface of an ancient Amstrad) and, as in hyper-traditional RPGs, they degrade with repeated use.

Beyond its guns the game takes many of its cues from the most recent Grand Theft Auto. Along with a hand-drawn map your character also carries with him a chunky, Soviet-chic GPS tracker which is then stuck to any vehicle windscreen you appropriate. The device marks your objectives, updating your position automatically as you drive, mimicking the real life challenge of keeping one eye on the road and one on the Sat-Nav. Thanks to the narrow, winding and gulleyed tracks you'll often crash into a tree trunk simply because you were plotting the best route via GPS and missed the turning.

Militia safehouses are located throughout the jungle. Eliminate the residents to unlock save points.

Maps are crucial when going off-road too. Reach a high point above a settlement and you'll be able to use a monocular to target items in the camp, which in turn adds them to your map. Using this method you can scout for ammo piles, sniper points, mounted weapons, health stations and new vehicles, forcing you take responsibility for recording where things are in the world.

Soon enough you'll fall in with your first buddy, a sympathetic character pulled from the eight others you didn't choose to play as. These befriended characters offer benefits such as bonus mission objectives or evacuation from sticky combat situations, as in GTA, but mercifully you don't have to take them ten pin bowling for the privilege.

Then, once you reach Pala, one of the region's main towns, you'll have the chance to meet with both UFLL and APR leaders, taking on missions and switching sides as you see fit - and it's in this area that the game promises to deliver freedom to the player.

Malaria pills are required to keep you healthy. You get them by helping refugees flee the country.

The similarities to Rockstar's well-known systems are palpable. Even if the style, execution and character perspective is wholly different, the streaming world, dynamic weather, day/ night cycles, vehicle theft, map and buddy systems and branching narrative all ring familiar.

But it's a mechanical familiarity that's welcome. With Assassin's Creed, Ubisoft Montreal demonstrated an ability to pick out unusual, unfamiliar but deeply interesting game locations. Indeed, that was a title in which the delightful minutiae of the world helped distract from a lack of big picture design. Far Cry 2 presents an Africa beyond the brochure and the cliché, and it seems the development team has designed a collection of systems to compliment the focus on glorious, exacting detail.