Far Cry 6

All events and characters in this game are entirely fictional...even those based on real people.

Of course that is paraphrasing the funny fake disclaimer from South Park, but it is right on the money for this game. I'll elaborate on it more when I discuss the story portion of the game.

At first glance I didn't think much of Far Cry 6, but it has grown on me since. That does not mean that I think it is a masterpiece now, far from it. But now I'm convinced that it is a superior game to Far Cry 5.

The gameplay

The biggest improvements are to gameplay. This game is more like Ghost Recon Wildlands than ever before, whether you consider that a good or a bad thing is up to you. I certainly consider it a good thing, as Wildlands is one of my favorite games from recent years. But don'T worry, Far Cry is still an FPS, albeit they are forcing TPS view in camps for no reason whatsoever. That said Far Cry is still far less realistic than Ghost Recon, especially with some of its outlandish weapons. They are taking much more liberties with weapon behaviour and attachments here.

The biggest improvement is that the tier system introduced in New Dawn is completely gone. There is still a level or as it is called here rank system, but it merely represents military presence in certain areas of the game  world. How often are the patrols, and how well equipped and alert are the soldiers. But you can go to any region from the start of the game and defeat enemies, without hitting a level wall. Of course some enemies are more resistant to certain types of ammo and weapons than others, but there is no artifical barrier preventing you from taking the fight to any enemy.

What I do take issue with is that there are no difficulty levels in the game. I don't know why they decided to do this. The only choice is between story and a so called action mode. Action mode being regular and story mode where combat difficulty is highly reduced, to what we shall call journo mode. For games journalists who hate playing games, but still want to write about them, for redacted reasons.

Unfortunately even on action mode the difficulty is so low that I could waltz through enemy bases without a care in the world. The game only started to show some teeth when I reached level 10, which is about 3/4  way through the story. For reference I finished the game at level 13. And even beyond Level 10 I wouldn't call the game hard, except for a few specific missions, where enemies spawn in your face left and right. Otherwise most of my deaths were from self harm. As there are a ton of weapons that apparently blow up in your face if you try to fire them from hip high cover.  Or accidentally launching rockets from an aircraft on the ground instead of throttling up, that was probably the main cause of death for me in the game.

There are a ton of weapons in the game, but most of them are sidegrades rather than upgrades. I already found my favorite weapons, that I used for the entire rest of the game within the first few hours.  What is strange is that bullet drop is only implemented for sniper rifles, as in weapons that are categorized as sniper rifles by the game. (and tank shells - yes you can drive tanks) But nothing stops you from slapping a scope on an assault rifle and using it for the same effect.

What makes the game even easier is that the fire rate of pistols and assault rifles is only limited by how fast you can click. You can basically empty an entire 20 round magazine in 2 seconds. This makes even the basic pistol a far deadlier weapon than it has any right to be. And by far the most useless weapons in the game are shotguns. They do nothing. It's not even like in other games where they are weak from a distance but deadly up close, here they are useless from 10m distance and weak even from point blank range. Probably because body shots are worthless in the game, you have to go for the head on every enemy, even on regular unarmored ones. I accumulated 1600 kills in the game, 1200 of which were headshot kills.

There are "improvized" superweapons in the game called supremos, that I found utterly useless, and you can't even uneqip them. Why would I want to unequip them? Because your character looks like an idiot running around with a bunch of explosives strapped to their back in every cutscene.  One of the villains even call you backpack, which is supposed to be an insult, but it is entirely apt. I hated that thing. I tried to use it maybe five times during the entire game. Four of which it did absolutely nothing, and once it killed me instead of the enemy.

Resolver weapons are improvised heavy weapons and are a tad better, although most of these have more drawbacks than advantages so I preferred to use traditional weapons instead.

Sorry if we are getting a bit long winded but I'm still not done with gameplay, feel free to skip ahead to the next headline, if you are not interested in this.

What is both a blessing and a curse is the size of the game world, it is far bigger than Far Cry 5, not as big as Ghost Recon, but certainly big enough. Why is this a bad thing you ask? Because travelling to mission locations is a hassle. There are five main regions in the game. A mid sized island where the prologue of the game takes place which is about 2 hours, then three large regions that you can complete in any order you wish, and the last is the capital city where you rarely venture, as it is too tightly controlled by the military and there is not much to do there outside of a few main story missions.

What I resented many times during the game, is that most fast travel spots have no vehicle spawning facilities. And fast travel spots are very rare to begin with. Plus until you take out AA guns travel by flying is impossible. Yeah it is literally impossible, because AA guns are fake, unlike in Ghost Recon where anti aircraft missiles can be evaded by flying low or behind terrain, here their shells have noclip mode. These issues all compound each other making trael to mission locations a chore.

Sometimes even acquiring a vehicle is a hassle, as traffic is negligible, and you are not supposed to hurt civilians anyway. You can order the basic car to you as a last resort, but even that is hit or miss, as it does not work if you are not near a main road, and even then sometimes the spawned vehicle will start driving away from you instead towards you. And to make matters worse the AI driver takes its sweet time getting out of the car every freaking time. It is so annoying that a few times I shot them in the head so they get out quicker, to the dismay of the game's morality police.

The controls of vehicles are an improvement over Far Cry 5, but still a joke by any human metric. Especially the plane. You can do a barrel roll without the pitch or yaw changing an inch. You can fly in a 45° bank and the plane will still fly straight as an arrow. It is so awkward and unnatural that it is impossible to get used to for anyone who has flown a plane in a game that gives a toss about physics. Comparatively the helicopter and land vehicles are acceptable, but still far worse than in Ghost Recon.

These are the types of missions and activities in the game:

• Main Missions - Obviously these advance the main story
• Yaran Stories - These are basically side missions
• Treasure Hunts - Mostly text based missions with no NPC interaction, where you search for some hidden stash of resources by completing environmental puzzles. I didn't find them worth doing as resources are plentiful already
• Checkpoints - These are control posts on main roads that you can capture, essentially turning them into a fast travel spot, which is due the aformenitoned lack of fast travel points is the most useful side activity. But even after capturing all there are large areas of the map with no direct access by fast travel.
• Military targets - Similar to checkpoints, only these are rarer and bigger bases that you can take over
• AA Gun sites - Destroying the AA guns throughout the map is also useful, so you can fly around freely. This is also the location where you can get resources specific to buying resolver weapons and supremos.
• Raids - Help a bunch of guerillas clear a base and steal supplies
• Steal Supply drop - Go to a specified location then defeat enemies there within a time limit and then steal the supplies.

That concludes the gameplay.

Story

The achilles heel of the game. It is hard to tell if the game is trying to be serious or satire, or outright comedy. Unfortunately this means that it doesn't work as either of those options.  It has a serious villain, and stakes, but most of the good guys are goofy or outright caricatures.  Like each character was written in a vacuum and none of the writers exchanged notes.

I swear that most of the supposed good guys appear as such cringe inducing assholes, that I'd rather put a bullet between their eyes than help them in any way shape or form. And you are supposed to become friends with all of them, but the character development to support this is just not there. So the whole we are besties now attitude feels empty. I didn't really care any more about them at the end of the game than I did at the beginning. Which is a testament to how unrelatable these characters are.

Even the villains are written badly, they just are, with no backstories, just evil for the sake of being evil, with no discernible motivations, or goals. It's all a mess. This is not how you write a compelling bad guy or girl. The orange man doppelganger was especially hilarous, but in a bad way.

There is also a quite large choice you can make towards the end of the game, but your choice is never even referenced or mentioned again, not even by the guy whose plan you completely foil.

The basic premise of the story is not even that bad compared to the rest of it, despite needing a metric ton of suspension of disbelief to accept that a third world dictatorship invents the cure for cancer and nobody else in the entire world can replicate it, so they control the entire supply.

Another by now recurring issue I find with games written by what I assume are "progressives" is the unnatural reveling in violence by the "good" guys including your own character, who will laugh and utter snide remarks while massacring enemies. If you enjoy violence and killing then you are a psychopath or sociopath. A decent person does not enjoy killing their enemies, they do it out of necessity, not bloodlust.

What also gives a clear indication about the ideology of the creators is the lack of diversity among the main friendly characters of the game.  80% strong independent female, 15% low iq dudebro and 5% totally useless men.

Even the composition of the cannon fodder guerilla ranks is at least 80% female. Seems like Yara had a certain birth control for male children 20-30 years ago. Of course you can make excuses that all the males were taken to the toxin fields to work, but most of the prisoners you find in these places are also female. Or that the men were conscripted into the military, but even among those enemy combatants there is a noticeable female majority. Which will be awkward when someone accuses the game of glorifying violence against women.  The only NPC who is guaranteed to be male is the slave who fetches your car.  Of course if you yourself identify as a progressive you will say that I'm misogynist for noticing this. But how can I not notice when it stands out like a sore thumb? I never shot so many women in the head in all the games I ever played before as I did in this game.

And why is Dani always dirty as if crawled out from a garbage pile? The rest of the guerillas are never that dirty. And it's not as if you are some jungle dwelling guerilla, you have access to civilization, have a bath once in a while.

They also made sure the wearable costumes (even the bonus ones) are well distanced away from fan service. You can choose between looking just plain or completely awkward.

Graphics and technical stuff

At first glance the game didn't look that impressive, there is a certain lack of variety in the environment, but occasionally it does shine. Unfortunately the high resolution texture pack is bugged at this time meaning some textures don't load properly. That said the game is amazingly well optimized it runs very smoothly without stuttering and very high FPS with maxed out graphics. This is probably the best running AAA game I've ever seen.

There were some server issues during launch weekend but those are gone by now, the game is stable enough to play. Last weekend it would crash every 10 - 20 minutes.

Otherwise bugs are quite rare, I've seen a few weird spawns like a soldier spawning inside a rock, or some conversation not triggering. But in general this is certainly a decent quality launch.

Pros and cons

+

• Runs great
• Decent graphics
• Large open world with no artificial barriers and level walls
• Plenty of activities
• Basic gameplay loop is enjoyable

-

• Dumb afterthought of a story
• Badly written characters
• Too easy for the most part
• Supremos and special weapons are quite useless
• Cheating AA guns
• Missions where enemies keep spawning right in front or behind you
• Third person view in camps, WHY?
• Backpack supremo visible in every cutscene (at least helmets can be turned off)

The raw numbers

Graphics/Design: 7/10
Bugs/Realization: 9/10
Story/Writing: 2/10
Gameplay/Controls: 8/10

Overall impression: 7/10

I don't recommend buying the game, just subsribe to ubisoft+ play it, then forget it. It's quarter the price, and in one month you can get the most out of this game.