Far Cry 3 Eyes-on Preview (VIDEO)

The demo for Far Cry 3 shown at the Ubisoft press briefing starts with, ahem, fireworks and ends the same. For reasons we'll likely learn later, you're the leader of a group of natives who hang on your every word. So much so that you get to have the high priestess and lead your followers in a haka ritual.

Your character isn't a native but with tribal tattoos you're ready to assault an island village.

Some of the action we've seen so far includes lunging takedown attacks that stay in first person. You knife and wield your shank without ever leaving or shaking in first person. There's the initial attack and followup moves to go with it.

Then things get weird as you seem to be trapped in a hedonistic, nightmare dream world where shanties catch on fire spontaneously. The whole thing was setup with dozens of monitors with multifeed processors. Then a man with Mohawk yells lots of mean things at you. The story telling elements of Far Cry 3 look like they'll be tampering with our preconceived notions of being a hero and the prototypical badass in a videogame environment. Something tells me, blasting enemies won't just mean blasting enemies.

Speaking of blasting enemies, you proceed to shred the whole village that you set out to attack. You even get to free a tiger out of his cage to attack enemies before you in fact kill the Tiger yourself. We've seen similar concepts before with dogs and other-dimensional critters before, but the size and detail of the tiger are supposed to make a difference here.

Further along in the demo, Angry Mohawk Man shanks you eventually. But instead of simply dying we see fire coming out of your belly; an extremely psychedelic trip ensues and you float off into the galaxy of TVs, stripper poles, nebulas and that same high priestess shows what she was really doing in that opening scene.

Insanity, it seems, is a big part of the gameplay.

More info on Far Cry 3 is one the way.