Far Cry 6 Review
“Did I ever tell you the definition…of insanity?”
When Far Cry 6 first came out, I didn’t hear much about it, both from the YouTube side of things and from my gamer friends. Far Cry 5 didn’t quite feel like a quintessential Far Cry game (pun intended) and Far Cry New Dawn had progressive elements but felt a lot more like a $10 DLC than a full $40 game release.
That being said, I loved what I considered to be the core Far Cry experience games, 3 and 4. Both had fun environments to explore, charismatic main villains, animals constantly trying to kill you, enemy fodder to snipe or stealthily kill, weird side characters, and perfectly optimized skill trees and inventory management systems to boot.
Far Cry 6 has some of these characteristics but falls short in its execution. Here’s why.
Gameplay
Game logic
Video game logic dictates weird things happen because they’re in the context of a fictional reality, like how in GTA Online you can get in a car accident without a seat belt on and not fly straight out of the windshield or pull a rocket launcher out of nowhere.
In Far Cry 6, you narrowly escape a sinking ship with one of your best friends who immediately dies and gives you her cell phone before she passes away, telling you to find Libertad, the revolutionary group. Her cell phone didn’t have a waterproof case on it, managed to survive hours submerged in water, and was around 80% battery by the time she handed it off to you. Game logic aside, if a company manages to invent a cell phone like this, I want stock options.
Streamlining and bottlenecking weapons systems
On Far Cry 6’s tutorial island, you’re introduced to the basic game mechanics of driving, killing, and navigating your weapons systems. In every other game before this one, you’d have to hunt a specific animal a couple of times to gather their pelts to craft character upgrades, including extra weapon holsters and ammunition bags. After starting as a regular guy who never held a gun before, your player character slowly becomes a killing machine via a combination of craftable upgrades, experience points, and skill trees with unlockable perks.
That’s completely thrown out the window here. In the latest iteration, the game gives you four weapon slots in the first hour of gameplay and a Supremo weapon, a backpack that fires heat-seeking missiles. Skills are no longer tied to a level system, instead, you have to find random gear with perks associated with each item.
And, for some godawful reason, you need gunpowder as a crafting resource to upgrade the scope of your rifle.
Gunpowder.
For a glass and metal scope.
Granted, there are a lot of weapons to unlock in the game. The problem is once you find a set of four weapons you regularly use, there’s little to no incentive to try any of the new ones out.
You’ll loot a chest and say, “oh, great, I got another Gunpowder crafting resource I’ll never use and a Supremo bond to upgrade my already overpowered Boba Fett rocket launcher backpack.” Why change out my weapons when my combination of an assault rifle, a pistol/shield combo that fires shotgun shells, a sniper rifle, a pistol, and a weapon of mass destruction backpack works just fine?
Additionally, the game tells you there are two types of ammo to use, Soft Target and Armor Piercing rounds. Soft Target rounds deal more damage to enemies without heavy armor, and Armor Piercing rounds do just what they say. I don’t know about you, but the easiest thing I did for myself was to switch all my bullet types to hard rounds because a headshot will still kill in one hit, and three body shots will down them just as easily without me having to do mental math over which gun and bullet type I should use.
In any other game, if you shoot an enemy, you don’t have to think about the ammo type unless it’s in the context of the weapon you’re using. My brother, an aspiring gun nut, complained about how the game considered two very different types of guns with different sized ammunition to carry the same rounds, and soon found himself quickly without rounds for both.
Side characters and quests
Previous entries in the series introduced a few wacky side character quest givers and did so masterfully. Because there were so few of them, they were fully fleshed out and felt like genuinely charismatic people with varying strange motivations and desires.
In this game, it keeps throwing new characters at you almost once an hour and gives you so little to work with in terms of interactions with all of them that when some inevitably die to advance the plot, you feel little to no remorse for them. After all, you were just introduced to them an hour and a half ago.
One of the other things that irked me about this game’s writing was how every other sentence dropped the f-bomb like it was going to be banned tomorrow. The word has become significantly more mainstream in the past decade, but if you use it all the time, it loses its impact and emphasis.
Quests follow a familiar pattern to fans of the series. Go here, get a quest, go there, shoot enemies as loudly or as quietly as you want, the location turns from red to blue, you get some kind of reward, rinse and repeat.
But the problem I find in Far Cry 6 is the sheer number of quests that feel like they don’t mean anything. For example, liberating road checkpoints and blowing up anti-aircraft cannons. Congratulations, you get a little animation after killing all four enemies in thirty seconds and another useless Gunpowder crafting material.
There were times in this game when I’d do a bunch of missions for hours and feel like I wasn’t progressing anywhere. The game’s story goes on and on about how you have to convince random groups and people to join Libertad to help in the fight against Castillo, the dictator, but they never seem to do anything outside of sending you on suicide missions on their behalf.
Final thoughts
Like movies, the sequels of video games tend to pale in comparison to the originals; I vastly prefer Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 to Black Ops 4 (to date, I have yet to find a gun in a video game I enjoyed more than the KAP-40.)
Something along the late lifecycle of a successful franchise will almost always ruin what positive past experiences fans had. This is true for Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, and now Far Cry (but for some reason, Rockstar Games and Bethesda nailed their 5th iterations.)
The true test of a video game’s enduring popularity is its price point within three months of its release. A quick Amazon search brought up the current (at the time of writing) price point of $21.99 for PlayStation 5 and $19.99 for Xbox One.
Yikes.
I picked it up during a holiday sale for $35 and have only recently gotten around to playing and reviewing it, and I feel like Ubisoft owes me at least a partial refund. It’s still not as bad as Cyberpunk 2077, a game that was on sale in recent memory for $5.
Can I recommend Far Cry 6? Not at full price. After sinking 21 hours into it, I have a long way to go before I complete the story and the side quests, but I have little desire to finish it.
