Far Cry 2 isn't exactly a follow-up to the original - "there are no mutants", as the person demonstrating the title told me. It tries to capture some of the impressive scope of the first game to bear this name though, expanding on the already-huge environments. Instead of lush tropical islands though, you're now in Africa, so expect to see a lot less green and a lot more brown.

Only a small portion of one of the levels was shown but it showed off a fair chunk of the various bits and pieces that are on offer. The core of the gameplay is your stock-standard FPS - shotguns, assault rifles, RPGs - though the scale should again be highlighted; the level size is huge. Aside from the lack of mutants, there are other differences to its predecessor though, including an increased effort to free up the game style to let gamers play the way they want. If you really like sneaking around and silently killing people, then you can do that - but if you're like me and prefer to charge through the front door guns blazing, well that's definitely an option too.

On the sneaking side, a cool new feature involves scouting out enemy locations through your scope - any time you see a bad guy or something else of interest (like a health kit), it will get placed on your map - so if you really want to find the best, safest way to take out an outpost full of heavily armed opponents, you can scout around a base marking down where all the snipers are and plan an efficient, silent, and deadly attack.

Of course, that is matched by improvements to the other playing style as well. Massively destructible environments and spreading fires means you can drop a few IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices, those things that cause all that trouble in Iraq) underneath a building and then watch in glee as you hit the detonator - the building collapses in a most gratifying way, and anyone unlucky to be caught in the resulting bonfire dies a horrible (although fun to watch) burning death. Also neat - the fire will actually spread along the paths of flammable entities, like dry grass.

Another major new feature is the addition of unlockable NPC assistant characters. Throughout the game various accomplices present themselves to you, and there are secondary (optional) missions in which you can make them available to you. These guys will help you in different ways at different points throughout the game - one example I was shown was when shot to death by bad guys, you come to with one of these NPCs carrying you to safety - essentially bringing you back to life without too much loss of game. Very handy and good incentive to go after those secondary objectives.

Visually the game packs a pretty impressive punch - there's a lot of detail in the environments and the physics engine adds a lot of interactivity as well. Big explosions blow tree branches back and forth, foliage flies up when you let rip with a machine gun - all very immersive.

While there was no particular stand-out features that really blew me away, it is a solid progression for the series and will definitely be worth a look. As always I inquired about dedicated servers for the PC side - a question which stumped the first guy I asked, who bumped it up to someone on the production team – at which point I was told that there's nothing confirmed yet, so we'll have to see how that unfolds.