This pure sandbox stuff leaves me totally cold. I tend to wander around for 15 mins impressed by the tech and then never go back, because I realise there is probably less to engage me there than Mercenary.

How do you get to fly the plane exactly, how much of that is implemented? Point and hope like a Halo warthog, or have they implemented anything more specific and interesting?

There is no horrible cross hair driving. Larger planes you cannot barrel roll, the smaller nimble ones you can, so a harrier jump jet you can spin all over the place, its great fun.

To get to fly the larger plane, you drive, helicopter to the airport, go to the terminal get in a plane, with Y, and start flying, first attempt I couldn't taxi the thing and drove into a lump of trees, so I got out of that, and hooked myself onto a plane that was already on the runway and took off with that.

My first jumpjet experience was a very fast hillarious smash into a superstructure. There is fun in jumping out of a plane, and then whilst skydiving, landing on another one and hijacking that. You tend to do that alot with helicopters as they send a heli after you when you are attacking a base, they are quite feable, so you have to escape and nick the one that just brought the other one down.... if you see what I mean.

The mechanics of driving/flying are totally straight forward. Helicopter controls are particularly sweet, just set the height and you just hand around on that, or near that plain.

Sounds like you'll get what you'll get from the game from the demo, that gives you 30 min in a particular locale, killing a local boss gets you bonus minutes I am told.

There's nothing like ordering a plane on a long bridge, attempting to get to flying speed agains traffic, (it ended badly).

Normally I'm in alignment with Paper on these games, but the enthusiasm of Jibs posts make me want to check the demo out at least. This sounds like an update to Hunter, which I hold fond memories of.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_%28video_game%29

you had a parachute in Hunter so could in theory parachute out of a helicopter.

I remember you talking about Hunter, I've always liked Body Harvest, the potential has never quite been realised on the old alien invasion open world missiony gameplay front... the only way to get one of those out of the door these days would be a movie tie in I bet.

The demo is quite heavy handed, it doesn't really explain anything and its quite lite on controls... the demo initially gives you the impression its a gun combat game as it starts you in some kinda gun range area... my advice is to run off to the nearest cliff edge and base jump/sky dive, parachute onto a car, take over it and drive into a tree... be creative in the sand box.

Naturally figuring out the controls is the learning curve as its quite light on explanation, as it is in the full game. Just remember its all about the grappling hook.

I'll dl the demo tonight inbetween fixing the central heating and cueing up 'Bob the Builder: Project Build it' on PS3 iPlayer for Max

Well I'd already dl the demo pre-update, so I thought I was golden, but when I run it, it loads up the main menu and then won't let me progress. Exiting crashes the PS3 .

I doubt the PlayStation3 controller would really make great shakes of the game tbh. The SixCrapsis and the shoulders of doom would cripple any game.

Your Xbox3sizzle still knackered?

hehe,

I was trying to do something similar to that last night. 360 version is working a ok.

Grappling Hook is the game basically. It feels a lot like Red Faction: Geurilla (sp?), but with a greater freedom of movement.

You can do a lot with the grappling hook, but I'm not sure there's enough sand in the box to keep it fresh for long.

One thing I wanted to try was stretching it out accross a road to see if I could use it like a trip wire, but couldn't get that to work for me.

The cool thing is it does let you move around the environment at great speed. It's not quite as good as the Ninja Rope in Worms(2).

The game holds buckets more appeal compared to GTA, but that's not saying much really.

Its a game where I really really really want to see a giant alien spider come over the hills, or a Dalek invasion, y'know, its so constrained by the real world... I mean the grappling hook is a start, buts its such a conservative thing. Infinite parachutes, cool, inexplicable grappling hook, cool, ability to jump on any vehicle and horse around, cool, someone needs to open the lid on imagination really.

Imagine having Super Mario Galaxy planetoids just floating around, they seem to be so happy with modeling the real world and stretching it slightly, they don't jump in completely.

I've always wanted a game that presents itself as a generic mainstream FPS say, then just flicks a switch 30 mins in and everyone is walking on the ceilings on fire or something, but with a bit more panache. Like Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

That would be cool. A real 'Dusk Till Dawn' flip switch style of game.

Extending the grapple hook concept I'd want the ability to do more than one grapple at a time. The one rope limitation puts a lid on what's achievable, but give me 3 or 4 to play with and then things might get interesting .

Infinite parachutes is clearly win, but there doesn't seem to be much in the way of fall damage. I think they could have toughened that up a little, which would enforce rapelling from buildings using the hook or engaging in a more risky base jump.

Like you say there's potential here, but they've held back from making a game of it in the fear that people might not 'understand' a full on hyper-reality experience.

Some sort of fusion of Just Cause 2, Red Faction Guerilla and Crackdown would I think hit the spot.

OK...

I've been playing the demo of this a lot. Once you learn to live with the limitations of the grappling hook it's actually quite an engaging actioner. There's nothing mechanically here to write home about, but the level design is actually pretty good. The clever bit is the way in which they have mixed in stuff which can only be accomplished on foot. There are numerous pickups and mission objectives which can only by completed outside of a vehicle which prevents you from picking up an attack helicopter or a big tank and rinsing the game.

You could probably speed run the game by flying around and blowing everything up before dropping down to mop up on the ground, but it's sort of more fun to complete the locations one by one.

OK so I've been playing this even more and I'm actually pretty good at it now. There's quite a bit to like here. A few tips for anyone playing the demo

1. Timer doesn't start until you leave the first area, so make sure you complete that and pick up some weapons before you go.

2. There's a grenade launcher hidden in the top of the bell tower in the settlement immediately to the East of your starting location.

3. Try the mission that gets unlocked once you have caused enough Chaos. It's not too shabby.

I now have the full version of this and it's pretty nice. The scale and scope of the sandbox is very impressive. Mission wise the game gets off to a bit of a shoddy start with lots of escort missions, which aren't really my cup of tea.

The choice of vehicles is excellent though and there's some fun to be had just goofing around in a Harrier or crashing a 737.

I think the reason this works compared with GTA (which I really can't stand) is the way in which they've given you some tight objectives and packaged those in discreat locations which are available anytime all the time. By concentrating the gameplay down into these little pockets you can play for 30 minutes and feel like you've achieved something, plus there's always the urge to explore to the next unidentified location and see what's there.

Location wise there's some copying and pasting, but you can forgive them of that. There are plenty of unique facilities, with some excellent design. Some more interior locations would have been welcome, but given the parachute; grapple hook core mechanic their omission is hardly surprising.

So yeah, I bought the G20 and this looks ace bags on it. Its the weapon of choice to absorb the plasma goodness really.

Just flying around, getting those God rays through the clouds, performing an over a minute sky dive is brilliant.

The little pockets of authority domination kinda reward just bumming about, I've been getting into ammo difficulties... there is are some excellent missions in there, some nice scripted events within the sandbox world... and it knows its a computer game.

Its just a shame its about killing and so on... but maybe thats me, it does just apologetically fallinto go here, kill this, rinse and repeat... but you end up going there, getting lost, having fun, playing about and saving... then forgetting what you were doing.

So getting lost and absorbed in the crazy huge world, is just excellently escapism.

Yeah,

The game wants you to get lost. Climb up a mountain discover a tiny village, that's not on the map, or just spend some time skimming over the tree canopy. The fact you can airlift in a vehicle or a weapon at any point is da boom shizzle. Plus the transfer feature means you can get straight back into the action or traverse the map to a previously visited location if you just want to get stuck in.

I think I may have stuffed up the faction missions though. I appear to only have two factions on the go out of the three. Not sure where the other faction stronghold is now.

The PDA map is a little flaky in this regard. They needed to have a more searchable list of locales and allow even more zoom. An ability to add your own notation would have been awesome too.

Got run over by a 737 I jumped out of last night, which was proper funny.

I caused a 737 traffic jam on the runway by accident whilst demo'ing the game to my bro.

My 737 jaunts appear to be, get in plane, accelerate into trees.

Thats about it, I have to steal one mid take off to get in the air.

You found the crazy party airship thing?

There are some good things just knocking around, it might be part of a mission later on, but hey, good stuff.

Yeah the Mile High Club. That was awesome. Proper good bit of level design there. I missed the last crate on it too and fell off will have to make another trip back to complete it.

Have you been to the giant Goldeneye style satellite dish? The game world has just enough of these well designed locales to encourage exploration.

It's just a very enjoyable experience all round.

Red Faction Guerilla looks similar in scope, so pick this up too. Having a bit of a glut on the 360 though. Picked up Bionic Commando for £5 and Namco Museum, also for £5. Purchased on the strength of Rolling Thunder

Attached a statue head to a fire engine last night and drove around town using it like a giant wrecking ball. Nice

Took out a Colonel from range using the sniper rifle too. It's great how you can airlift in the tools for the job when you get into a position like that. Would be better if you could airdrop more than 1 item at a time though.

I think the gameplay would have benefited from a snap to cover mechanic. Allowing you to pop up or out from behind obstacles.

Some of the larger city areas are going to take ages to completely clean out. I spent about 30 minutes last night just flying over the docks district taking out statues and water towers. The completion gauge was still under %50 even after taking out 20 or so targets.

A swing of genius.

So last night something 'emergent' happened. One of the enemy soldiers had the nerve to steal my little black helicopter, that I'd purchased from the black market to generally run around in and clear out a few of the civilian settlements. I was genuinely surprised that one of those little gits had got the balls to steal my ride. Grappled up onto the copter and threw the bugger out

15% complete...

46% Complete. This is a long slog, but every now and then there's a little surprise that holds my interest. These all take place within the missions, which on the whole are well constructed. I'm not sure I will have the patience to get to 100%; we'll see.

Yeah, some of the missions are good. The Nazi Zombie island is excellent... I mean it boils down to the same thing... go somewhere, kill some stuff, hit some switches... but its fluffy enough to be entertaining.

51% complete now.

Running the faction missions down before going back to the agency missions. Faction missions are quite variable in terms of quality. Some are really lovely whilst other's feel like a bit of an afterthought.

Quality and difficulty.... depends on how tooled up you are mind... I tend to go in with a handkerchief and copy of the Economist, not good ammunition.

I'm playing on the harder difficulty (setting below maximum hardness) as I found the demo to be too easy on Normal. The difficulty is about right for me in that I do get killed, but not so frequently that it becomes annoying. The increased difficulty also means I tend to approach situations in a more tactical way than I might have done on the easier settings. I'm using basic stealth explosive planting and sniping to take down most targets and using vehicles as refuges to locate crates and make quick dash and retrieve runs.

It's quite good fun played like that. The difficulty is pretty strange though. Some of the military bases I can just ponce around with a minigun all day long without any sort of problem. On the other hand I can be in a village and be totally overrun by enemies resulting in death. The difficulty does scale with HEAT level, but there's some other stuff going on in there which seems to factor in.

Toolage wise I tend to stick to the triggered explosives (maxed out), sniper rifle (maxed out) and 2 handed shotty (maxed out). SMGs and Frags as appropriate. I probably need to get into the Grenade Launcher. I bet that can do some real pain dangling from a helicopter.

Have you done the Nazi Island yet?

That's my fave.

You mean the Japanese no? The one that's a bit 'Lost' inspired with all the crazy EMP stuff. Yeah that was really really cool. A real highlight so far.

Yeah, that bit makes it feel like a proper game. The environment changes, the objectives feel objective like, the scripted events have a purpose... just getting to the island felt like an adventure and the build upto it was really fun. And the design and everything, it all worked.

It was the sandbox in the sandbox that made it entertaining.

You're right it's a strange one that. Perhaps it was an agency mission originally that got tweaked and downgraded to a faction mission late on in the development. Everything about that environment and scripting feels like a higher quality product. Maybe a lead designer's pet project? Who knows. I almost want to go back there to look around the crazy architecture some more even though there's nothing official to discover.

Well I thought I would knock this one on the head before going back to Bayo. 69% complete and completed all of the Agency Missions. I've got a couple of faction missions left to do, but after that I don't think I can be arsed to get everything maxed out to 100%.

The last Agency Mission I have to say started promisingly, but ultimately fell a bit flat, mostly due to the fact that the final couple of confrontations are stupidly easy (with triggered explosives).