If you were stranded on a desert island what would you take? A complete collection of GM, obviously, a wave-powered generator to run your PC, and Buffy Summers - just so you had someone to play Counterstrike against. But the hero of Far Cry, Jack Carver, didn't choose any of these things - he brought 12 types of weapon, five vehicles and about 300 heavily armed mercenaries to his tropical paradise. Oddball.

ISLE BE BACK

But Far Cry is more than just a Judith Chalmers-free holiday simulator - it's also a free-roaming first person shooter with intelligent enemies and a bounty of different routes and tactics to try. And if you can see somewhere interesting on the beautiful horizon, you can walk there, swim there, or steal a jeep and drive there, squishing soldiers.

But you don't always need to be that gung-ho and gun-happy. Instead you could pilfer a pair of binoculars to peer miles ahead, adding the guards you see to the MGS-style radar, allowing you to pick a path around them, using the dense jungle as cover, before taking them out with an extra-shaky sniper sight.

Along with this sizable solo story, there is also a multiplayer mode that will let you battle against hordes of other online players, fighting across eight massive maps stretching over 2km-wide islands. Add in a fantastic level editor and Far Cry might well be worth being shipwrecked for.

Far Cry will be available for PC on 26 March