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In Far Cry 3, I'm always driving to distraction. Rook Island has come to feel like a special kind of freedom, its looping roads and bumpy dust tracks criss-crossing with breadcrumb trails, always suggesting unplanned stop-offs. Freedom does, nevertheless, feel like an odd word for this achievement. What, in a virtual world, does freedom even mean? The freedom to execute a pre-programmed action? To take a road less travelled, but one built by a team of hundreds for just that purpose? The freedom to switch off?Far Cry 3 comes from a series that has sometimes torn itself apart trying to answer this question. The original's awesome scale and visuals, not to mention the unique setting, eventually turned in on itself and became a B-movie. Far Cry Instincts is best left unmentioned. And Far Cry 2, the most ambitious and capricious of the lot, presented a Savannah of flaming beauty and then doused it again and again with gritty, pedantic mechanics. It is a series, in other words, that has sometimes been a tiny bit too clever for its own good. Far Cry 3 chooses an alternative path; it puts the brains into its menu text, sticks enthusiastic jock Jason Brody front-and-centre, and fills Rook Island with more baubles than a fat piņata.
The way you gradually map out this world borders on genius - it's obscured at first, then exposed in chunks as you climb its eighteen radio towers. These landmarks are great vertical streaks on the landscape, visible from miles around and a mini-game all to themselves; the frames increasingly ruined and twisted, eventually to ludicrous extremes, and the route up less obvious every time. Reaching the top nets a panoramic payoff, the camera swooping by local points of interest, before a thrilling zipline descent drops you at the beginnings of a driving 'supply' mission.
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