Far Cry 3 is an open-world shooter through and through. The setup is simple: You're set loose on a massive island in the south pacific and tasked with gradually conquering it. Here's a gun. Have fun. It's an exhilarating and empowering adventure that combines player freedom with shiny technical polish.

Like the original game, Far Cry 3 is set on a tropical island found somewhere at the intersection of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. We'll be testing FC3's open world environment using 29 DirectX 11 graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia.

Modern tablets were designed primarily as media consumption devices. But more recently, units like the Microsoft Surface are challenging this idea with optional keyboards for tablets. Unsurprisingly, accessory makers have come up with a few units for the iPad as well. We checked out three of them.

Hitman: Absolution is the first game to be developed using the new Glacier 2 engine, specifically built to have a strong emphasis on enabling very dense crowds and allowing players to not only interact with characters but also to influence their behavior. The engine is said to be able to handle up to crowds of 1200 characters, which makes Absolution unlike any other game.

Absolution picks up the Hitman story where the last game in the series, 2006's Blood Money, left off. Yes, the last Hitman game was released more than half a decade ago. That's a long time between sequels, even in the relatively slow-moving video game world. But that extended time in development likely accounts for a lot of what makes Hitman such a sprawling, interesting game.

OCZ is finally ready to unveil its first truly in-house SSD controller. It's been three years since Indilinx released a brand new controller and they are doing so today with the Barefoot 3, which is to be featured in OCZ's latest SSD series known as Vector.

With updated pricing, drivers, and performance across the board, we are revisiting today's AMD and Nvidia graphics card offerings to see where you should spend your hard-earned cash this holiday season and into early next year.

Each iteration of Sony's flagship device has improved and been better than the previous version, but no single attempt has been just right. The Xperia TL, available now on AT&T, is as close as the company has come to finding the smartphone sweet spot, but is that good enough?

The Wii U meets the standards of modern console gaming, while also supporting Wii Remotes and therefore serving as an HD version of the Wii. It does all of these things and introduces some well-realized new features to modern console gaming.

For Call of Duty fans, developer Treyarch just delivered an early Christmas present when they released Black Ops II this week. As the ninth game in the Call of Duty franchise and the sequel to the 2010 game Black Ops, we are hoping to see something meaningfully new from Black Ops II.

The Galaxy Note II is a smooth and dynamic experience from top to bottom. Its above average size can be both a gift and a hindrance. It's probably too big as a phone or too small as a tablet for most, but many will find it's a comfortable compromise between the two form factors.

This comparison review takes a look at 8 popular SSDs that cost $100 or less, featuring capacities of up to 128GB. The OCZ Vertex 4 128GB, Samsung 840 120GB and Crucial m4 128GB are included, while the most affordable high-capacity SSD featured in our roundup is the Kingston SSDNow V+200 120GB.

When Bungie introduced the sci-fi, FPS franchise over a decade ago, it wowed fans with a perfect formula of alien creatures and versatile weapons. Hardcore Halo fans can rest assured that 343 has stayed true to the core of Halo, and we urge them to keep an open mind when confronted by its new skin.

Warfighter uses DICE's Frostbite 2 engine -- the same software that powers Battlefield 3 -- which may partly explain the high-end hardware requirements. We are testing MoH Warfighter with 29 DirectX 11 graphics card configurations from AMD and Nvidia across all price ranges.

The Medal of Honor series has become, in most every respect, a flagrant imitation of Activision's much ballyhooed Call of Duty series. You play the game from the first-person perspective. You hold a machine gun and shoot bad guys, almost exclusively foreigners.

Mists of Pandaria is best looked at from two different perspectives. One: how is it for the new player? And two: how is it for the experienced player? If someone's been in a holding pattern at level 85 for years, what does Mists of Pandaria offer to that player, and how do its many changes improve or diminish the World of Warcraft experience?

AMD is refreshing its desktop processors with Piledriver, an enhanced version of Bulldozer that focuses on improving instructions per clock and frequency -- just like it did with the new Piledriver-powered Trinity APUs. In other words, instead of a major overhaul, Piledriver picks up where Bulldozer left off.

Windows 8 remains a nice upgrade, possibly a Service Pack-plus caliber upgrade when you look at the desktop improvements. Metro doesn't make Windows 8 more capable, but it does pave a way for Microsoft to sell slates and appeal to a mainstream user base that craves simpler devices.

With most Thunderbolt products available today being storage-related, we wanted to see what the new Gigabyte Z77X-UP5 TH motherboard and its dual Thunderbolt ports had to offer in terms of performance. Put to the test: Western Digital's Velociraptor Duo, which boasts of a pair of 10K RPM Velociraptor hard drives.

XCOM is about as perfect a remake of an old game as I could have hoped for, in that while changes have inevitably been made, they're mostly for the better, and anything genuinely new introduced is only there to improve things.

Having attacked the mid-range and upper-end markets, Nvidia has its sights set on the sub-$200 range, unleashing its GTX 650 Ti. At $150, the new arrival is roughly 34% cheaper than last month's GTX 660 and about 7% pricier than the Radeon HD 7770, which fetches around $140 depending on features and rebates.

With a mix of familiar MMORPG tropes and new, modern approaches to delivering them, Guild Wars 2 is an excellent, welcoming take on the genre.

AMD is finally prepared to offer a desktop version of Trinity, which brings a new socket and a new high-end chipset. Given that Piledriver improved Bulldozer's power consumption, we expect Trinity to be more efficient than Llano, while Cayman's VLIW4 architecture should boost the GPU's speed -- or so we hope.

The Aspire S5 comes with a beefy Core i7-3517U clocked at 1.9GHz, 4GB of RAM and 256GB of flash storage. In most instances, an SSD is the best addition period, for any modern system, but Acer took things a step further with two 128GB SSDs in RAID0. It goes without saying that the storage subsystem should be blazing fast.

The sixth-generation iPhone has finally landed. Apple has almost completely redesigned the phone's exterior, yet it still looks very much like the iconic handset everyone is familiar with. There's a larger 4-inch screen, LTE, a faster processor, and a new dock connector not everyone is a fan of.

While the Samsung 830 SSD and many of its year-old peers may still be attractive, Samsung is ready to move on to bigger and better things. The new flagship offering, the SSD 840 Pro, refines the 830 Series' firmware with faster random and sustained performance as well as improved reliability.

Borderlands 2 benchmarks and performance analysis -- Borderlands 2 succeeds at building on the foundation laid three years ago, delivering new characters, more weapons, smarter foes, and the same addictive loot-driven co-op first-person shooter action. We take the game for a spin on today's finest hardware.

We took notice when Crucial announced its m4 mSATA SSD in a 256GB capacity at under $1/GB. The mSATA drive is tiny compared to Crucial's standard 2.5-inch m4, and despite the size difference, both 256GB models feature the same read and write speeds of 500MB/s and 260MB/s.

Torchlight II is much more of a beast than its predecessor; in terms of scale and ambition, it's right up there with the biggest names in loot-collection and click-based combat. And so of course, Blizzard's Diablo III looms large over the entirety of Torchlight II. How could it not?

Ever eager to keep AMD on its toes, Nvidia continues its push into the mid-range market with a Kepler-based card that is expected to retail for about $230 -- right in-between AMD's Radeon HD 7850 and 7870. The GTX 660 is based on the new 28nm GK106 architecture which inherits all the key innovations introduced by the flagship GTX 680.