A tropical paradise location and bloody ultra-violence in one package? Jonny can't believe no-one thought of it before.

When you open your eyes the first thing you're greeted by is a sense of overwhelming familiarity. You're in a dank, dark corridor, and ahead of you are a series of dank, dark rooms joined by a system of, yep, corridors. So far, so ho hum.

But there's something else during the first couple of minutes of play. Every now and then, there's a crack in the ceiling, and through it you catch tantalising glimpses of a welcoming blue sky. And then it happens - you open a door, and suddenly find yourself looking out over what could only be described as paradise. Micronesia - miles and miles of verdant green, glistening gold and brilliant blue - is suddenly spread before you, aching, begging, to be explored.

Of course, it's not going to be easy. You may be in the most beautiful place on Earth, but you're not on holiday, pal. One minute you were running a boat-chartering business - the next thing you know you're being hunted down by mercenaries and dragged into a plot involving Bond-style underground installations, mutant monsters and experiments gone wrong.

I'll come right out and say it. Far Cry's environments are the most beautiful and coherent ever seen in a videogame. Several times I've taken an extremely long detour from my mission just to trek through the jungle and take a closer look at a waterfall I spied through my binoculars, or to find a clifftop and bask in the beauty of the sea and the surrounding islands (many of which you can reach should you wish to jump from the cliff-top and swim for it). The huge environments allow for some beautiful long-range gameplay - taking an opponent out with a headshot from half-a-mile away (holding your breath so as to keep your aim steady) is a feeling you won't get tired of in a hurry.

Believable environments are the most important factor in making you feel immersed in a game - in making you forget you're playing. In twenty years of videogaming I have often played games which made me scared, joyful or triggered off numerous other emotions, but Far Cry delivered a first. After pushing a dinghy into the sea from the deck of an aircraft carrier - quite a drop - I jumped down after it, and actually felt my heart in my throat for a second as if I'd jumped down myself.

It's not just the environments themselves that are so impressive, but the fact that everything in them acts as you'd expect. Every object has been modelled with realistic physics - so things break, fall over, roll, splinter, and oh yeah - crush. If you're clever you can take out half-a-dozen enemies at the same time by crushing them under a huge pile of crates, by shooting out the chains holding up the rope bridge they're running across, or by driving a buggy at full pelt into an explosive barrel of petrol in the middle of an encampment - remembering to jump clear at the last possible moment.

You can even shoot beautifully coloured birds out of the sky or pepper the ocean with bullets, watching with amusement as dead fish rise belly-up to the surface, while human opponents are subject to "ragdoll" physics effects that can lead to many unintentionally humorous death scenes.

You just never know what you'll be doing next. One minute you can be swimming along the ocean floor admiring beautifully coloured fish and coral formations and the next, you could be soaring above the island in a hang-glider, aiming at an approaching attack helicopter with a rocket-launcher (Hear that? Yes, you can fly a frickin' hang-glider! How cool is that?) or simply enjoying yourself by racing a four wheel drive buggy across miles of sand dunes.

The AI is superb and puts up a very scary fight sometimes. The mercenaries you come up against are not the usual FPS opponents who are just soldiers doing their jobs. These are real nasty pieces of work hired to kill for money and chosen for their skill at doing so. The tension you feel from sneaking around a heavily-guarded camp in the undergrowth can turn to absolute panic once you've been spotted. Not only are they quite smart and work effectively in teams (pinning you down with long-range fire while sending others the long way around to come up behind you - take out the squad leader to put them in a state of disarray) but they all delight in telling you loudly and in detail what they plan to do with you when they find you.

It doesn't help that the undergrowth allows them so many opportunities to sneak up on you. I've literally jumped out of my skin on several occasions when a couple of nasty-looking goons have burst though the undergrowth mere inches from where I'm hiding. On one occasion, it was a buggy that burst through the bushes. I dived out of the way, and turned around expecting them to dismount and chase me on foot but instead the driver slammed the accelerator down and drove the buggy into me at full pelt, crushing me to death against a tree. Nasty.

Some of the levels which take place inside retread ground which is perhaps a little too familiar, but overall Far Cry does very little wrong, and the marvellous gameplay of the outdoor sections makes up for this anyway - the joy you feel when you get to go outside and play in the sun again is palpable.

It's a great time for PCs at the moment. Two years ago all PC owners could do was look at the graphical splendour of Halo on the Xbox and cry, but we've reached the point in the console cycle where PC games are, once again, leading the field technically - and right now Far Cry is as accomplished as it gets.

We've been waiting for ever for Half-Life 2 and its expansive areas, state-of-the-art physics and advanced AI, but few people seem to have noticed that a cocky young development house has snuck up and developed Far Cry - which beautifully marries all these features and more in an awesome shooter package. A multiplayer mode, promise of lots of mod support and a very accomplished level editor promise that this game will be on PC owners lips for months - if not years - to come.

So grab your shades, your Hawaiian shirt and a selection of the meanest weaponry you can lay your hands on. It's time for some fun in the sun. With a gun.

Jonny Austin