When Ubisoft announced Far Cry 6, I was really
skeptical about it. But the skepticism mainly came from my experience with Far Cry 5 and New
Dawn. With the former having one of the best villains in the series to the latter featuring
some of the worst decisions in the franchise’s history. Decisions such as the inclusion of
RPG mechanics and underwhelming antagonists...
All of these points had me worried about Far
Cry 6. I thought to myself: How can Far Cry 6’s villain beat the likes of Joseph Seed from Far Cry
5 or even Vaas and Pagan Min from older games?
But, seeing a great actor such as Giancarlo
Esposito taking the role of the game’s main antagonist had me really excited! I thought
this was going to be the next best thing that has ever happened to the franchise. And to be
fair I wasn’t the only one to think like that, as other gamers across the
internet thought so as well.
Time has passed and the game was released in
late 2021. My fears turned out to be true. It felt like the “lead development team” behind
the game, which is now Ubisoft Toronto instead of Ubisoft Montreal, had no idea what Far Cry
is about despite their previous experience with the franchise. When playing Far Cry 6,
No matter what angle I looked at the game, there was always something off about it and
after spending much-needed time in the game, I’m going to tell you, Why Far Cry
6 didn’t feel like a Far Cry game.
Far Cry 6 detached itself from previous
games by removing some of the factors that made those games unique. Factors such
as the presence of a persisting villain.
If I was going to point out what exactly made Far
Cry 3’s antagonist memorable, I would say it was Vaas’ insanity speech, or In Far Cry 4, Pagan
Min’s ruthlessness along with his manipulative powers made him special. Even in Far Cry 5 Joseph
Seed’s son of the god cult leader behavior made a terrifying figure out of him in my eyes.
The villains in the older games would either appear before you and threaten to kill you
directly or most of the time, they would talk to you over the radio. So, you could always
feel their presence throughout your journey. Every single one of them knew our protagonists
by their names, recalled their actions, and warned them about their future steps.
Each antagonist had that “it factor” in them. They’d always make you question your choices and
ask yourself “Whether you’re the bad guy or not?”. They could easily go under your skin and act as a
constant threat. But when it comes to Far Cry 6, none of those factors exist. The only thing I can
say about it is that Anton Castillo was a dictator in the most generic way possible, portrayed by the
same dude who played Gus Fring in Breaking Bad.
He is the most boring villain in the entire
franchise and the saddest part, is that it’s not because of Giancarlo’s acting, since that
is the only good part about this character that remains underutilized to the end. Anton Barely
exists in the game’s world. While you can see his statues scattered across the world, most of the
time you’re hearing his speeches from speakers, and occasionally when you wreak enough havoc,
you get to see him in a couple of cutscenes, which isn’t directly occurring during the gameplay
and you don’t even get to fight with him either.
His story is always told through a third-person
lens in a separate cutscene which takes away from the immersion and the atmosphere of the game.
You can’t feel the depth of his threats while he is sitting in a church talking to his son
about how Castillos are lions and the people of Yara are a bunch of Sheep. Anton acts as
if he doesn’t know anything about Dani Rojas, the protagonist of the game and the only person
responsible for uniting everyone to overthrow his regime. He cares more about Clara Garcia, the
leader of a guerilla group known as Libertad, than the actual person responsible for his downfall.
Aside from Anton, most of the other villains are incredibly bland and are portrayed in the most
cartoonish way possible. Far Cry 6 shoves a long list of villains in your face and the game
could work even with 2/3 of its “Bad Guys” completely gone. The disappointing part is
that villains such as “El Doctor” or “Bembé”, the most Far Cry-esque characters of this
game never get enough time to develop.
Instead, other villains you barely interact
with are under the game’s focus... Most of the time I didn’t even care about them and
just pushed myself to take them out for the sake of story progression. To make things even
worse, none of the huge cast of villains ever interact with one another... You’d expect them
to either help each other or learn how to defuse the ever-growing threat of the guerillas in
their own region. This makes every single region of the game feel self-contained and
disconnected from the rest of the world.
The same thing applies to the support
characters as well. There are far too many of them, most of them are extremely
forgettable, and they use lots of MCU-style humor. It would have been okay if these “jokes”
were only limited to Juan; but no, there are other cringe-worthy characters that steal the spotlight.
This thing single-handedly prevented the game’s atmosphere from remaining dark and gritty;
Something Far Cry 6 tries to sell to you in the first few minutes of its opening gameplay.
Instead, the whole story feels like a parody of what a dictator regime would look like! I
believe when it comes to supporting characters, missions, and stories, the Máximas Matanzas group
storyline was the worst compared to other factions despite the point it tries to make.
The guerilla factions also suffer from the aforementioned self-contained problem
as none of these groups are willing to help Dani or other factions regain control of
another region from Castillo’s forces.
By now I mentioned Dani’s name a couple of
times, and let’s say I’m glad that Ubisoft went back to the voiced main character style; as
this was one of my biggest gripes with Far Cry 5’s silent Deputy. Let’s face it, The Deputy never
had enough depth to his character compared to other silent protagonists such as Gordon Freeman
from Half-Life 2. So, making him totally silent felt ultimately wrong, especially when other
characters asked questions from him, but he would only stare back with no actual response…
Dani on the other hand always reacts to everything. The voice actors of both male and
female versions have done a great job portraying feelings, and to add even more personality
to the character, Dani might sing from time to time. However, changing the perspective of
cutscenes from first person to third person, deprived the intimidating feeling
of interacting with characters for the sake of a cinematic experience.
Dani’s overall backstory justifies some of the actions the protagonist takes, but when it comes
to the finale, the story rushes to its closure, everything starts to fall apart, and the abrupt
ending makes everything seem pointless. Dani doesn’t have many choices in the story sequences
and even in the rare few moments that the game allows you to choose, your choices do not affect
the story in any meaningful way. The best example would be the McKay mission; where you get to
kill him or let him escape. The outcome for choosing either of those options is limited to the
reward you’re getting for completing the mission!
This could’ve been solved in creative
ways. Imagine if killing him would lead to a different outcome for La Moral group,
or if we look at the bigger picture, imagine if capturing every outpost would actually grant
us a different ending. Of course, in that case, the map size should’ve been reduced, since
it’d become extremely tedious otherwise. But at least in that way, there’d have been more
incentive for players to capture those bases and gave them more reason over simply
unlocking a new point to fast travel…
Also, you’re supposed to feel like you’re
trapped in a harsh world with limited technology, an extremely low number of supplies, oppressed
environments, and the constant presence of the oppressors. But to my surprise, controlling Dani
makes you feel like Rambo or an unstoppable tank that can solo the entire universe with a gun and
a knife… Therefore, I strongly believe that the alternate ending where Dani goes to America is the
canon ending of the game as it avoids almost every problem the game has and seems to be the most
reasonable outcome from the story’s perspective.
Since Ubisoft Toronto doubled down on some
RPG mechanics, enemies now have health bars above their heads. There’s also an active
level scaling system which grows higher as Dani levels up. You can also use multiple
different ammo types, unlock armor set skills, and craft a new tool called Supremo. Despite
all of that, Far Cry 6 lacks a proper skill tree system which is one of the major drawbacks
of the game compared to the previous ones.
To make it worse, it seems like the
developers really didn’t think it through while they were implementing these
systems. The clear case for that is that I managed to beat the game from start to finish
with the early game weapons and armor set; as I didn’t find any incentive for changing them.
There are also different ammo types in the game. For example, you can craft Poison rounds, Soft
Target rounds, Blast rounds, and more but crafting armor-piercing rounds is enough to beat the game
from start to finish without issues. This means even if you go to a higher-level area,
while enemies get spongier than usual, it’s still possible to easily take down enemies
with these bullets by targeting their heads.
This ultimately renders the “build system” which
comes with the armor sets, useless. For example, there’s a poison build that does a lot of damage
to enemies, but why would you waste your time to unlock every piece of that armor set when
you can easily one-shot every single enemy in the game from the beginning?
All of This begs the question, why did Ubisoft even bother with the level
system to begin with? Did they really think the combination of these mechanics is a
better replacement for the skill tree? Also, while you can choose the “Guerilla difficulty”
which forces you to use the game’s many different systems, no matter how hard you turn your
game, the AI is so dumb that no amount of minimal HUD elements or ammo scarcity can fix it.
The Open World in Far Cry games were never small, But Far Cry 6 goes all out to feature the biggest
map in the series. Yara is a tropical island with lots of jungles, villages, towns, and an actual
capital city which is a first for the series. But due to the sheer size of the game, there isn’t
much to do in the city and it feels very rushed. This city is also another factor that alienates
the game when we compare it to its predecessors. Since every previous Far Cry game took place in
a mysterious, wild, or uncharted piece of land, seeing a civilized country like Yara with cities
and highways doesn’t sit right with this game.
Someone at Ubisoft really thought bigger is
better, so they tasked the team with making a huge world with less interesting stuff to do.
This single design choice had drastic consequences that affected the gameplay in unpleasant ways.
Firstly, it’s not fun to move around the map for multiple reasons. Running and walking around is
painfully slow, so you’re left with transporting options such as horses, vehicles, and aircraft.
In terms of performance, there aren’t major differences between cars. There are tons of
checkpoints on the road that either require you to capture them, or slightly change your way.
However, choppers and airplanes are genuinely the best way to travel around the map, but there’s a
catch. To use them, first, you need to take down anti-aircraft guns. And each region is packed
with AA Guns and if you don’t destroy them, they will shoot your aircraft down… unless you’re
flying very close to the ground. This mechanic by itself is very clever since it creates an
incentive for the player to explore the land, but it turns into a staggering chore rather quickly
due to the number of AA Guns you have to destroy.
Secondly, the game immediately screws every
single traversal mechanic with another odd design choice. In almost every open-world game,
and I don’t necessarily mean the Far Cry series, the player must first discover a key location
to be able to teleport back to it later on. Therefore, a first-time discovery is mandatory in
every game. But this is not the case with Far Cry 6 as you can purchase hideout maps and fast travel
to them without ever setting foot on any of those lands before! You can even air-drop Dani on some
of those hideouts and use the wingsuit mechanic to get to your desired location quickly without
the need for any vehicle or aircraft! This way you don’t even need to destroy the AA guns…
Amigos are the companions you can summon to help you through the game, but I don’t really
understand Ubisoft’s angle with this companion list. There’s zero human companion that you
can unlock and the list includes a rooster that can attack and kill enemies. If this
game had taken itself a bit more seriously, things would’ve been in a much better state…
But it’s worth noting that except for Chorizo, I hated these companions so much that
I didn’t bother using them at all.
The game also lacks some of the memorable missions
that made the series stand out. There used to be missions in the past games where your character
hallucinates and you’d do tons of weird and fun stuff. Sadly, there’s only a small glimpse
of them left in the game and even then, they aren’t as cool as the ones in previous games.
I remember in prior games; Hunting specific animals would allow the protagonists to craft an
important upgrade that would either increase the size of their pockets or improve their equipment.
In Far Cry 6 however, the lack of a proper hunting system bothered me a lot as you don’t need to hunt
animals for those reasons. Killing them would only allow you to trade their meat or skin with
crafting material such as circuit boards.
And you can shoot the animals with any weapon. As
long as you have unlocked and upgraded the hunter lodge building, there is no need to be worried
about damaging the animal meat with your bullets. The fishing mechanic is extremely simplified but
at least it’s a different mechanic compared to animal “hunting” system. But let’s be honest, the
mechanic was already introduced in Far Cry 5. So, I guess we should just be happy that
this one wasn’t cut out or changed.
The final nail in the game’s coffin is the endgame
content which is called “Insurgency”. No matter how many areas you liberate during your normal
playthrough, as soon as you finish the game, a weekly quest begins and resets the state of the
game’s map and makes Castillo’s loyalists take back those regions you have already liberated and
you have to fight back and recapture them again!
By now we learned that there’s no need to use
better equipment. Hunting and looting materials are pointless, and there’s no need to drive
or fly around the map. If I wanted to sum up Far Cry 6’s open world in two words, I’d call
it an “Anti-Exploration Game”. This is a video game that actively tries to prevent players from
using its mechanics, and everything is rendered useless within minutes of their introduction.
Far Cry 6 doesn’t Feel Like a Far Cry game, because it deliberately removed all of the
factors that made the older games fun. Instead, they are replaced with soulless RPG systems,
a boring but visually stunning world, and lots of questionable design choices.
There are far too many characters in Far Cry 6. The lead bad guy is a forgettable villain
which is a waste of the actor’s potential. There are lots of goofy things that break the
immersion and don’t fit the overall theme of the game. While in previous games, the goofiness
was usually found in a character such as Hurk, this time around it’s all over the place.
If you enjoyed the previous games, I don’t recommend playing Far Cry 6. I’d go as
far as to call this game a Just Cause sequel since it shares more similarities to that
franchise instead of the one it represents.
While it is important to implement new changes
to keep a long-running series stay refreshing, it’s a hard task that can end up disrupting
the game’s image and identity, and result in losing fans. Let’s hope Ubisoft fixes these
issues in the next entry of the franchise.
Thanks for watching! Feel free to Subscribe, like, and share your opinion in the comment Section.
Till the next one, I’m The Phoque, signing out...
