Stop thinking about the end of the world or today’s competition for a moment. I’d like to transport you back to March 2008, when everyone was either running XP or Vista, Windows 7 was still in very pre-beta phase and the word “Ultrabook” wasn’t even invented yet. That was the month that Crysis was released and ever since, Crytek’s titles have been looked to as a standard that will always push hardware to its very limit. Crysis was insanely taxing on then-modern systems and only last year did we get to the stage where playing it on Ultra (comfortably) was possible with most mid-range cards. Far Cry was hard on most systems too, but it didn’t have that same kind of oomph-sucking ability Crysis did, even though it used the same engine. Over the years we’ve had Far Cry 2 (Dunia engine, based on the Crytek engine), Crysis Warhead (Cryengine 2.0) and Crysis 2 (Cryengine 3.0) pushing the boundaries of what’s capable on a mix of different hardware and platforms. This year, Ubisoft returns to the throne with Far Cry 3 – once again returning to an island paradise and, once again, bringing even systems costing R15,000 or more down to earth to eat humble pie. Its running the new Dunia 2.0 engine and it looks spectacular.

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