Far Cry 2 Hands-On Preview

We've been playing a stunning near-final Xbox 360 build over the weekend.

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The resolutely first person view leaves you with no shortage of opportunities to take in the sights, and they're more than worth the effort. With its detailed real-time shadows, colossal draw distances and relatively negligible pop-in, Ubisoft Montreal's new "Dunia" engine is a powerhouse. Step out of the oppressive equatorial sunlight and your eyes will take a few seconds to adjust to the interior gloom, necessitating caution when infiltrating enemy bunkers. Pile this technological magnificence onto some beguilingly organic environments - the team spent weeks travelling around Kenya last year, and altered their design work drastically as a consequence - and you're looking at a new aesthetic benchmark. There's less of the rubbery artificiality which occasionally lets down Bethesda's (otherwise scintillating) Fallout 3, though non-narrative NPCs do look like they've been bolted together from spare parts.

They don't act like it, though, thanks to some well-localised spontaneous dialogue and combat behaviours that are just the right side of stupid. As in the original, enemy grunts will remember where they last spotted you and investigate the area, which obliges you to keep on the hoof but also, pleasingly, allows you to lure patrolling guards from their positions. Even if you gun them down it's best to seal the deal with your machete, as mortally wounded foes will sometimes unleash a last-ditch burst of pistol fire while prone.

As in the original game and Crytek's spec-hungry Crysis, the vegetation is a prominent visual and gameplay feature - not least because you can now start fires and watch them spread, as determined by the materials and the dynamic weather system. This can have drastic ramifications in combat, as the undergrowth is also your chief source of cover: get a little too liberal with the old Molotov cocktails and you'll find that all the luscious, undulating grass you've been hiding behind has become a death trap. Conversely, you can foil pursuers by coating the scenery in napalm, or even orchestrate the burning of entire encampments by paying careful attention to wind direction. Whether this feature amounts to a design revolution on the scale of Half Life 2's Gravity Gun remains to be seen, but Ubisoft Montreal plainly wants you to experiment with it, furnishing you with a flame thrower from the get go.

And experimentation is vital indeed if you're to make strides against entrenched opposition. At one point we found ourselves swapping fire with two shotgun troops in thick undergrowth, whilst fending off the attentions of a distant sniper and trying to storm a bridge defended by machine gun emplacements. Given the all-pervading verdure and the bleached camo palette, it's often difficult to identify the source of gunfire. Scouting the layout of an area first is a good rule of thumb: while holding your map you can whip out a monocular with left trigger, clicking the right trigger to "paint" heavy guns, health packs, vehicles and ammo dumps.

There's plenty more to talk about - multiplayer modes, the map creator and the effects of reputation, for instance - but we're keeping mum on the details till Far Cry 2 makes berth next month. On the basis of our near-as-damnit complete preview build, however, we'd advise you to get that preorder down without further ado. Despite heavy competition from the likes of Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, Ubisoft Montreal's unsentimental sequel tops our list of multiplatform shooters this winter.

Far Cry 2 is released October 24 2008 for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. This preview is based on the Xbox 360 version.

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