Nsanity said:
Far Cry 3: The Digital Foundry Verdict
Compared to the first stretch of Dunia's legs on console the engine improvements are small but impactful. We don't see anything as game-changing as the wildfire dynamic being added to the equation, but refinements to motion capture and facial animation technology do much to amplify the beats in Far Cry 3's story. At the centre of the show is Michael Mando's delightfully off-kilter performance as Vaas, and the new tools are applied to equally great effect with the player's first-person hand animations. Jungle exploration has always been the running theme of the series, but propping up a narrative backbone in this way only adds to your sense of purpose around the islands.
But which version offers the best experience? Alas, abundant full-screen tearing does much to curtail the look of an otherwise gorgeously designed game on console platforms, for which both PS3 and 360 are guilty to equal degrees. Frame-rate is also a big drag too, and we'd hoped for better than the 20-30FPS fluctuations we're getting from both platforms during gunplay - though 360 fares slightly better here overall. There are stability issues with the PC release too but given the right hardware specs this is undeniably the road to take for a tear-free experience.
Image quality bears mention too: both console releases are tightly paired in their approach to multi-sampling native 720p outputs, and the only eye-catching difference is the dithered shadows on Sony's platform around globally illuminated areas. As if to compensate here, we see superior texture filtering on PS3 and slightly less evidence of triangle culling after fast-travelling around the archipelago. It's a close call in many respects, but the shadow issue sticks out even without the other formats to compare it to, leading us to give the 360 a nod here as well.
In all, Ubisoft Montreal has conjured up a beautiful, boar-skinning, hang-gliding romp on all three platforms, though tolerance is advised for console owners whose pet peeves include screen tearing. Otherwise, the scale of cut-backs to these versions isn't as extreme as we'd expected going in. Many principle effects and assets are faithfully upheld from the PC version - even down to the taxing ambient occlusion, and global lighting. Image quality purists will know where to find all the bells and whistles, but in the final tally, Far Cry 3 stands as a strong multi-platform release.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-far-cry-3-face-off
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