Far Cry 2

We come back from Africa with a verdict on Ubisoft Montreal's visually astounding shooter.

	Version 360, (PS3, PC)	Developer Ubisoft Montreal	Publisher Ubisoft	Genre FPS

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Given the sparsity of alternatives to combat and the unimaginative A-to-B mission design, there's a lot riding on the shooty stuff, and thankfully it delivers. Each static encampment is surrounded and pervaded by familiar but aptly-chosen props like exploding barrels, mounted machine guns and sniper nests, together with Far Cry 2's frontline innovation, flammable materials.

The visual denseness puts you on the same footing as the somewhat goldfish-sighted AI, making direct assault a foolhardy prospect indeed: in this chaos of elevations, cover points and bushfires, there's always at least one goon you didn't see coming. While gets its knickers in a twist over buildings the AI is a brute on open ground, pinning you down from afar and sending in shotgun troops or turreted jeeps to flush you out. It's tempting to favour an all-round performer like the AK47, but a combined arms approach works wonders: by four hours in, we were segueing from silenced pistols to flame throwers at a moment's notice.

Regrettably, Far Cry 2 runs aground on some of the same reefs as its similarly broad-minded stablemate, Assassin's Creed. Traversing the world gets old very quickly: guard posts are mysteriously restocked with wrathful mercs in between visits, and the temperamental nature of the game's vehicles means you'll have to pop the hood every five minutes, or, worse, leapfrog to one of your assailant's rides. A decent rapid-transit system might have declawed this particular bugbear, but Far Cry 2's is laughably underfunded, with buses departing from four or five locations in total.

The online multiplayer has changed little since our preview: it's a solid, deceptively by-the-numbers affair, whose six classes, 14 maps and four head-to-head and team-based modes offer more dramatic possibilities than first meet the eye. The two-tiered experience system is an accessible variation on Call of Duty 4's brilliant but demanding original. During unranked matches, players will pile the ole' EXP onto their classes of choice at a hectic rate, allowing casual players to plumb the depths of a class in a single evening. Ranked matches, by contrast, generate experience much more gradually, and will suit those who want to make more of an investment.

But Far Cry 2's (probable) online success will stem from its map editor, which is, to cut a very long story very short, trouser-soilingly vast. Pretty much any object you come across in single player - piles of tyres, hang-gliders, rusting hulks of old train carriages, great sepoa trees and oil barrels - has been clamshelled within the editor's sturdy radial menus. You can raise, lower, sculpt and erode the terrain, set the time, weather and water level, adjust the dimensions of the playable area, and lay down spawn points, ammo depots and health packs.

Like LittleBigPlanet's Create mode, the editor's very comprehensiveness is a tad counter-productive, ensuring that only the most dedicated and least gainfully employed members of the hardcore fraternity will get to grips with it, but then Far Cry 2 doesn't claim to be a massively mainstream experience, so we can't really slap Ubisoft about on that front. There are, in any case, a few shortcuts in place for the less motivated. If the idea of carpeting your creation with flora plant-by-plant is irksome, there's a handy wilderness generator waiting in the wings, and the start menu provides a checklist of mandatory features for each multiplayer mode.

Far Cry 2's gargantuan performance isn't without the odd misstep, but we'd be foolish to deny it our recommendation. Just as the repetitious mission design, vagaries of travel and oddly depopulated environment threaten to swamp the experience, they're met and matched by a counter-tide of organic opulence, combat invention and undeniable bang-for-your-buck. It's a compromise, perhaps, but a compromise very firmly in Ubisoft's favour.

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