Farcry thrust itself upon us in 2004, simultaneously unhinging our collective jaw with its gorgeous open island paradise environment, brutally unforgiving cat-and-mouse gameplay and wringing out screams of pain from processors and graphics cards the world over. A couple of console crossovers later, and it's now time for the sequel. Finally got the whopping 1.85 GB demo downloaded earlier tonight and was able to clock in a few hours.

First of all, I'm ecstatic that this thing is running at a decent clip on my rig, which is half-decent - Intel Dual Core, 2 GB RAM and a GeForce 8600 GT. And I haven't made all that many compromises with the bells and whistles either. That's what I call Christmas coming in early.

Basic premise: North Korean army has taken over an island and naturally, there's something around those parts, and "the whole world hangs in the balance." Anyway, just gives you and a bunch of racially diverse badass teammates an excuse to jump out of a plane and shoot shit up. Naturally something goes wrong right off the bat and all of you get split up like the cast of a cheap slasher movie. Anyway, enough about the story.

Shit, the part where the gameplay kicks off is so goddamn atmospheric, it's as close to being in the movie Predator as I've ever felt (well, that's primarily because it rips off a lot of elements from Predator, but it's just a detail). Soon enough, you're in the fray, hauling some fairly lethal hardware and a state-of-the-art nano suit that lets you unleash way more damage than previous encounters.

The suit is definitely the biggest addition to gameplay - it has several operational modes: Armor for soaking up damage, Speed for well...you get the idea, Strength for chucking around heavy objects (including humans) and making superhuman leaps and Stealth for getting that predator stealth camouflage. You can switch on the fly, and they recharge fairly quickly, so this makes for a far greater ebb and flow in combat. This also goes a long way to cut back on the insane difficulty level that Farcry sadistically boasted.

Reasons for getting excited are twofold: one is that the environments are absolutely spectacular. If I was ever in a place like this in real life, I'd take a twig and play air commando. Good thing I don't have to in this case. The way that the setting changes from night to daybreak was superb - it's been done before, but never this well. Second is that combat is now even more open-ended and kickass than before. One particularly cold-blooded method I used was waiting till targets were isolated, hitting them with tranquiliser darts, creeping over and putting one between their eyes, courtesy of the silenced pistol. I suppose some might consider that merciful, but slaying an unconscious oppoent is pretty brutal, whichever way you put it.