We named this game our most anticipated PC title of E3 2008 and when we went behind closed doors at Ubisoft's meeting room to check out a PC demo build of Far Cry 2 our expectations were certainly high. We came away from the demo impressed by the game's promise, even though we are still scratching our heads as to why the game is even named Far Cry 2. With the exception of a couple of minor similarities, there's really nothing that ties in this game with Crytek's original 2004 shooter.

The game takes place in a section of Africa where your character has to take out an arms dealer that's up to no good. One of the many interesting features in Far Cry 2 is that you can select a different character that is set up with different weapons. Some have powerful but close range weapons while others have longer range arms to set up. There's no sci-fi or mutants here; Far Cry 2 is deadly serious.
Once we picked out our character and his loadout we entered the E3 demo which had us going to a contact to obtain a mission. In this case our mission was to blow up an oil pipeline without getting killed by its guards. Thanks to the advanced AI of your foes that's easier said than done. If they spot you they will immediately try to out flank your position, go for cover when threaten and otherwise be fairly hard enemies to beat if you slip up.

Fortunately if you find yourself on the wrong end of a bad guys's AK-47 you might get some help from one of 12 planned "buddies"; these are AI characters that you meet in the course of the game and will jump in and heal you up while also shooting at enemy forces (you are left with just a pistol as a weapon when this happens but oh well . . ..) We managed to accomplish our mission and then got word on our cell phone (apparently the African wilderness is full of wireless phone towers) that you have yet another job to do. We proceeded to get in a small boat and drive it on a tiny creek to our next destination; another enemy compound. We got some Molotav cocktails out and set fire to the dry grass. That triggered gas explosions in the compound and took our many enemies.

We can and will go on about the many cool features that Far Cry 2 has. One is that bullets have different effects on materials. Some will get deflected while others, like the sniper rifle, can go through barriers. Yet another is your map which allows you to chart where your enemies are if you spot them in your binoculars. There's a day and night cycle (six hours in the game = one hour in the real world) that you can take at-vantage of; you can sleep in a safe hour and then go on missions at night. One feature we wish were in the game is the African animals attacking you; no lion attacks here.

Visually Far Cry 2 looks every bit as good as Crytek's Crysis, despite the fact that Ubisoft actually made the engine for the game from the ground up rather than license Crytek's Cryengine. Lighting, physics, AI and more are at least equal to Crytek's efforts. The game takes place in a 50 kilometer world and that with an exception of a 10 second loading screen for going through the middle there's no other loading times at all in the game. We were told that the game will have a multiplayer component but for now they are keeping it a secret. However, fans of Far Cry and Crysis's mod tools will be happy to know that Far Cry 2 will come with an easy-to-use level editor to make multiplayer maps. Finally while the PC demo we saw and played was DirectX9 there will be a DirectX10 graphics mode as well.

As with Fallout 3 its hard to tell if Far Cry 2 will be any good based on so short a time span in our demo. But it did confirm our thoughts that the game will be the PC title to beat for the fall of this year.. We will get more info on the title ahead of its release.