Motoring around Far Cry 2's picturesque African landscapes delivered the brutality of a nation ripping itself apart through civil war to your windshield, but it also brought frustrating moments of downtime when repairing broken engines. Ubisoft's third go-around with the open-world FPS includes driving improvements as a measure against the slim possibility that puttering around the Rook Islands while high on psychedelics becomes a boring affair. As Lead Designer Jamie Keen tells Official PlayStation Magazine UK : "You can just launch your vehicle at 70 MPH off a cliff. It might not end very well -- but you can do that stuff."

"If you want to just travel across coastal roads for hours on end, by all means, knock yourself out," Keen added. "We also have fast travel points that let you move quickly around the world. You never feel like anything is too far way, but it's there and it's the choice that you are making. This idea of player choice is very important to us, that you are the one that's deciding the pace and what you engage with."

While exploration definitely retains its importance in Far Cry 3, Keen doesn't want vehicular transportation impeding the allure of curiously poking into the brush, saying, "We want you, when you are wandering around the world, to just get lost out there and go off and explore, have a look around it and just satisfy your curiosity, but know that at any moment, things can just switch and you are suddenly on the receiving end of tigers or an enemy patrol or something like that." Our hands-on preview delves deeper into crossing bullets against sharpened fangs after driving around the twisted wilderness.