(continued from previous page) ...if wounded, only to fix themselves up and come back after you. Much like the Last Stand perk in COD4, you’re going to have to make sure you finish off your foes properly, or you may be in for a nasty surprise.

Not all AI in the game tries to kill you however. Along the beaten path you can pick up ‘companions’ to help you throughout your travels. They will follow you around on your journeys, and help out in firefights, even attempting to pull you to safety if you're heavily wounded. This gives you enough distance and cover to heal yourself before they possibly hand you their (only) sidearm as a means to continue with your ‘dirty’ business.

It helps not to let these guys get killed off, as they are a reliable and useful allies (unlike, say, the cliché useless FPS ally Natalya from GoldenEye 007), and will probably be very helpful during some of the harder missions, or near the end of the ‘main’ story.

Going back to being wounded, your character has a very novel way of ‘fixing’ himself after taking damage. Leaving behind the current trend of ‘accumulative’ damage that can be recovered over time, FC2 has you operating on yourself, removing bullets from your own body when enough damage is taken. There are a finite number of times you can do this, largely based on the limit on ‘med kits’ you can carry. These can be picked up from merchants or from first aid boxes.

On the topic of equipment, you can carry up to three weapons at a time, although only one in each ‘class’, these being side arm, main weapon and ‘special weapon’. The special weapons include, but are not limited to, rocket launchers and flame throwers, and are not as common as the other types of guns.



But wait, there's even more! The game features day and night cycles, and even has changing weather patterns. Save points are located in ‘safe houses’, shacks dotted around the epic landscape that allow you to not only save your game, but also let your character ‘sleep’ or rest until a certain period of time. Perhaps you feel the urge to partake in a night raid when a village will be less heavily guarded - simply sleep through the day in a safe house. Incidentally, while playing the game, every minute of real-world time that goes by, eight game minutes will elapse. That is fairly long, even by game terms, so this feature could be very useful.

Now you may understand the whole cog and gear reference. All these bits, the RealTree, the enemy AI, the towns, the buddies, and the ticking clock, all of these are highly developed. Yes, most of them aren’t new, but rarely have they been executed with this amount of depth. The game is truly epic, and even if you feel gipped by the current lack of continuity from the previous game, you will still smile when you notice a rideable hang glider perching on the edge a cliff.

When pressed, Mr. Redding did reveal a couple of tidbits, namely the future expansion/downloadable content and possible Sixaxis controls,
which we reported here on PSU a week or so ago.

So, let’s wrap thing up. The November 2007 build we saw at Play.com Live apparently has "nothing" on the graphics of the current builds running on 360, and Mr. Redding assured us that their will be negligible difference between the two platforms. Whether or not you view that as a positive thing is up for debate, but either way, the game looked fantastic and had a truly epic sense of scale. Bring on the fall.