Far Cry 6 Review — In Need Of Another Revolution

I’ve been a fan of Far Cry for quite some time, hav­ing played the series from the sec­ond title through the cur­rent game. I’ve also obtained Plat­inums for all the main games in series avail­able for the PS3 and PS4, includ­ing the spin-offs Pri­mal and New Dawn. So I’ve seen my fair share of Far Cry, expe­ri­enc­ing the games to their full extents. I feel 100% jus­ti­fied in say­ing Far Cry 6 isn’t real­ly a Far Cry title.

It’s not that Far Cry 6 isn’t a good game, but Ubisoft has put this spe­cif­ic Far Cry title through dras­tic change, push­ing it more into the vein of oth­er Ubisoft games. Hon­est­ly, there is just so much fun­da­men­tal adjust­ment, it lit­er­al­ly should have been titled any­thing else but Far Cry.

As far as the sto­ry goes, Dani Rojas, who was pre­vi­ous­ly in the Yaran military–and the main protagonist–is attempt­ing to leave the island of Yara due to the “draft­ing”, which is just a polit­i­cal word for forc­ing slav­ery on the Yaran peo­ple. Antón Castil­lo, the pres­i­dent (more like dic­ta­tor) had cre­at­ed Vivi­ro, a can­cer treat­ment drug that devel­oped from Yara’s tobac­co. Vivi­ro was sup­posed to bring sta­bil­i­ty to Yara, which is what Castil­lo promised to the peo­ple. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, treat­ing the tobac­co with the chem­i­cals need­ed to cre­ate this drug caus­es seri­ous dam­age to those who come in con­tact with it. Obvi­ous­ly, Antón needs work­ers to dis­trib­ute the chem­i­cals, which lead to the “draft.”

Dani decides to join Lib­er­tad, the guer­ril­la fight­ers try­ing to over­throw Antón Castil­lo to recre­ate a new Yara. But since I’m not one to ruin the whole sto­ry, you’ll have to play the game or read a full synopsis.

I do have some qualms with the sto­ry. It’s unlike oth­er Far Cry games, where your inter­ac­tions with the peo­ple are sim­ple chats that bring on the next mis­sion. A lot more time is spent on Dani deal­ing with many dif­fer­ent locals, along with all of their prob­lems. While this is not a bad aspect of the game, you hard­ly see the intrigu­ing deal­ings with­in Antón Castil­lo’s regime. In pre­vi­ous titles, more is seen of the vil­lain, as well as the affect they have on the country/region they con­trol. This is what has always kept me on the main mis­sions, because why stray away when anoth­er encounter with this mon­ster could be on the horizon?

See­ing Antón Castil­lo (played by the spec­tac­u­lar actor Gian­car­lo Espos­i­to) was absolute­ly the best part of this game. He plays this role so well, and see­ing the mind of a dic­ta­tor (and how it affects his son, Diego) is more on par to what Far Cry is all about. How­ev­er, the time between see­ing these beau­ti­ful per­for­mances is so long it tru­ly under­mines the whole expe­ri­ence. The first area takes over 20 mis­sions just to come across that sec­tion’s head hon­cho. I saw three or four scenes with Antón Castil­lo through­out that whole time.

The biggest issue is most of these mis­sions are just unnec­es­sary. It arti­fi­cial­ly adds play­time, but does­n’t actu­al­ly add any­thing to the storyline.That being said, I feel most of Far Cry 6 is just a bunch of arti­fi­cial addi­tions that have no pur­pose oth­er than to keep play­ers in the game. 

Far Cry 5 intro­duced the need to col­lect mate­ri­als in order to upgrade weapons at a work­bench. Well, Far Cry 6 took this a bit fur­ther and made the work­bench an extreme­ly irri­tat­ing process. I love try­ing new weapons and hav­ing a set­up for every occa­sion. Well, col­lect­ing mate­ri­als to obtain that goal is frus­trat­ing. Cer­tain mate­ri­als can only be acquired from alpha ani­mals (more on that lat­er), while things like gun pow­der just means a lot of search­ing and killing to get. No to all of this.

I miss the days when upgrad­ing a gun sim­ply need­ed mon­ey and/or an ani­mal skin. This cur­rent process just makes it more dif­fi­cult to obtain the bet­ter mods, sights, silencers, and what­not. Mak­ing these com­po­nents is a nec­es­sary, since Ubisoft com­plete­ly upend­ed the com­bat sys­tem. Ene­mies now have weak­ness­es, like soft-tar­get or armor pierc­ing bul­lets. Vehi­cles that have shield­ed win­dows can only be blown out with weapons that have blast bul­lets. While these are not bad in their own right, they def­i­nite­ly fall more into the Ghost Recon cat­e­go­ry than Far Cry. 

The only pos­i­tive is once an item is unlocked, it’s avail­able for all weapons with­in that class. 

Anoth­er annoy­ing aspect of Far Cry 6 is the removal of skills. In pre­vi­ous titles, play­ers could lev­el up and use skill points to tai­lor the game more to their own playstyles. These skills would include actions like take­downs from above–where play­ers could silent­ly melee an ene­my from above–and pas­sive abil­i­ties like move­ment noise reduc­tion. This is still pos­si­ble of course, but it requires you to have the appro­pri­ate gear to do so. Not only does this force the play­er to lim­it what they use while just roam­ing the coun­try­side, but it also means a con­stant change of gear in the inven­to­ry for cer­tain sit­u­a­tions. I don’t like to use the word hate because it’s such a strong word, but…I hate this. I would have pre­ferred a hybrid of skills and gear, since this would have negat­ed the time spent in the game’s menus.

An inter­est­ing addi­tion to Far Cry 6 is the Supre­mo. It’s a back­pack-type weapon that’s made up of deplet­ed ura­ni­um. There are sev­er­al dif­fer­ent types of Supre­mos, but they all require a spe­cif­ic pre­mi­um mate­r­i­al type–Supremo Bond–as well as anoth­er high-end mate­r­i­al, Indus­tri­al Com­pos­ite, to install mods. It’s just anoth­er lay­er of search­ing for items need­ed to upgrade anoth­er piece of equipment.

The Supre­mo also holds all the gad­gets in the game. So grenades, molo­tovs, heal­ing abil­i­ties, etc., are all attached to this weapon. If you want to change a gad­get on the fly, you can’t, because you have to go to a work­bench (this applies to every weapon though). How­ev­er, any Supre­mo used can be seen on Dani’s back dur­ing cutscenes, which I dis­like. It just looks silly.

All in all, this entire combat/gear sys­tem is just not for me, and this is just what I felt need­ed to be mentioned. 

When it comes to Far Cry 6’s graph­ics, it’s a con­fus­ing top­ic. The cutscenes are extreme­ly janky. Like, every scene includes some form of frame rate loss. This real­ly breaks my immer­sion and makes it hard to enjoy what’s being going on in the scene. The char­ac­ter mod­els are extreme­ly detailed, espe­cial­ly when focus­ing on their faces. On the oth­er hand, the entire island is gorgeous. 

Yara has a heavy mix of the typ­i­cal “trop­ic island feel” along with odd­ly placed high­ways, shan­ty­towns, vil­las that play host to offi­cers of the FND, as well as places like air­ports and farm­land. Of course, Yara most­ly resem­bles an island, with palm trees, an abun­dance of foliage, and water pret­ty much around every cor­ner. But it also con­tains moun­tain ranges, gorges, caves, and water­falls. I do believe the only geo­log­i­cal struc­ture that isn’t includ­ed in the game is a vol­cano (don’t quote me on that though). 

Ubisoft also includ­ed dynam­ic weath­er. This is actu­al­ly real­ly spe­cial because few games include weath­er pat­terns like this. When there is a down­pour of rain, light­en­ing can often be seen off in the dis­tance with­in the dark storm clouds. Some­times it will be slight­ly over­cast, or bright and sun­ny. I did find myself look­ing at the sky while in fly­ing or just rid­ing around in the mountains.

While all these unique bio­mes and weath­er pat­terns are great to see, I felt like ani­mals were sparse. Pre­vi­ous game’s had so many annoy­ing ani­mal encoun­ters that it was more of a bur­den run­ning through the bush. Now that I’m look­ing for mate­ri­als that can only come from Alpha ani­mal meat and..yup..can’t find any. Where is the hap­py medi­um? It also seems that the ani­mal diver­si­ty is far less as well. I think this is because there is a lim­it­ed amount of mate­ri­als and the meat that’s tak­en from the ani­mals can only be exchanged for mate­ri­als. Ani­mal meat has no mon­e­tary val­ue in this game, so if you feel you’ve col­lect­ed enough mate­ri­als for weapon adjust­ments, there is no rea­son to con­tin­ue hunt­ing. I mean, you can sell the mate­ri­als but what is with the mid­dle-man process?

Speak­ing of ani­mals, my absolute favorite addi­tion is the horse. I can’t believe it took Ubisoft so long to bring a horse into the game. Far Cry 4 had ele­phants. Far Cry Pri­mal had sev­er­al mounts, but the horse is some­thing spe­cial. This majes­tic ani­mal makes it so much eas­i­er to tra­verse through the tiny moun­tain trails, or just off road in gen­er­al. I find myself look­ing for a horse spawn­ing loca­tion more than I do a car. I’m less like­ly to hit a ran­dom per­son with a horse–since they are far more maneuverable–which is impor­tant when ene­mies and friend­ly NPCs are just walk­ing about every­where. I do wish there was an option to direct­ly call a horse to you, like the option giv­en for a car. I also wish ran­dom NPCs would stop spo­rad­i­cal­ly ram­ming into my horse for lit­er­al­ly no rea­son. But that’s a true Far Cry moment.

Anoth­er aspect of the Far Cry expe­ri­ence that fell flat is just the basic explo­ration. Pre­vi­ous­ly, the entire map could be explored with­out any lim­i­ta­tions. Map areas are now locked behind an arbi­trary Rank num­ber, which is tied to Dani’s cur­rent Rank and weapon lev­el when com­bined. If you don’t do enough main mis­sions or side mis­sions, it would be advised to avoid a ranked loca­tion high­er than your Rank–the ene­mies there are not exact­ly fun to deal with.

There is also the mat­ter of fly­ing. I used to thor­ough­ly enjoy just buzzing around in a heli­copter, drop­ping down on spots I want­ed to check out or spot­ting loca­tions I wished to come back to lat­er. This isn’t pos­si­ble in Far Cry 6. Anti-air­craft can­nons are lit­tered across the entire island of Yara and com­ing with­in the blast radius of these can­nons will result in being shot down. Obvi­ous­ly these can be destroyed, but it’s just such an unneed­ed additive. 

Far Cry 6 isn’t all bad. Its com­bat is just as smooth as pre­vi­ous titles, so it’s easy to tran­si­tion from weapon to melee kills (or vice ver­sa), or any gad­get of choice. Same could be said for the dri­ving, and it’s always fun to bomb it down the road and drift around cor­ners. I enjoy the col­or cus­tomiza­tion options for the vehi­cles, hors­es, and weapons, since this is such a great part of a game for me. Yah know, free­dom of expres­sion and what not. 

I know peo­ple like to “pet the dog,” but there is more than just the dog to pet. Every ami­go (com­pan­ion), friend­ly dog and horse can be pet. It’s not all the same ani­ma­tion for each ani­mal either, so it’s quite nice. I do wish the devel­op­ing team would have allowed play­ers to pet the cows and goats, because they’re cute. 

One slight­ly con­tro­ver­sial addi­tion to the game is cock­fight­ing. It’s a mini-game were you play the role of a roost­er, and you fight a CPU roost­er. There are 19 roost­ers strewn about Yara and it’s fun to see how each dukes it out in the ring. Win­ning does net some Yaran Pesos.

Aside from how Far Cry 6 plays and looks, it does have some bugs and visu­al issues.

These can be fun­ny, like a horse whose front legs are buried in the ground or rocks that float. I even had a visu­al tear in a cav­ern where it looked like shark fin in the water. That fright­ened me a bit. It’s the not so fun bugs that can be irritating.

Mount­ing a horse can ran­dom­ly cause the two of you to rock­et into the air. I’ve had a cou­ple of hors­es die–as well as myself tak­ing fall damage–because of it. When set­ting a way­point, a blue line should appear on the map show­ing the best way to get there on the road sys­tem. Sev­er­al times this fea­ture sim­ply has­n’t worked. Side note: when mov­ing between named loca­tions these pop up on the screen but take for­ev­er to go away. I’ve missed many turns because I can’t see the mini-map when these names pop up.

There was even one instance were I dove out of a mov­ing vehi­cle and end­ing up under­neath the map. I had to fast trav­el to free myself.

I’m all for inno­va­tion in a video game, but the amount of change (some of which I did­n’t men­tion) was just too much at once. Plus, all of the adjust­ments Ubisoft did make real­ly pushed Far Cry 6 more into the cat­e­go­ry of a soft Ghost Recon. It has the same game­play ele­ments, shares the same rank sys­tem, and con­tains anti-air­craft turrets–just to name a few. If they want­ed to make a new Ghost Recon, that’s great, but don’t name it Far Cry and pre­tend it’s some brand-new expe­ri­ence with­in the series. It just a re-skinned Ghost Recon, with a few Far Cry themes thrown in.

I would have pre­ferred a Far Cry that was more in-line with the oth­er main­line entries. Ubisoft could have had much more fun with this game, because the tech­nol­o­gy is there for con­sole play­ers. Most of the sto­ry is so lack­lus­ter that it does­n’t push me to go for those main mis­sions, because I’m not excit­ed about them. I can’t under­stand why so many point­less mis­sions are includ­ed into the main story.

If you’re into the kind of expe­ri­ence that Far Cry 6 is try­ing to offer, by all means, pick it up. If you’re some­one like me who wants an explo­rative game that’s more sim­i­lar to the games of the past, it’s gonna be a hard no.