Far Cry 6

 

Everyone knows Ubisoft's antics in the modern age. It needs no introduction. Every game in the Far Cry franchise since FC3 has been the same fomula with minor deviations.  It's not a formula I particularly enjoy. But when it's co-op, I can atleast stomach it.

So the gimmick with these modern Far Cry games is that every one has a villian antagonist that you eventually go up against. The plot is always setup in such a way where you're the savior of the world basically, and you have to go around these big open world maps working your way towards finally dealing with the antagonist. Of course FC6 is no different in this regard. This time, the antagonist is the actor from Breaking Bad the one that owns the fast food shop. Kind of a weird choice but ok, I guess it appeals to normies or something? Like "hey this game has an actor I know from that popular show, I'll buy the game now!" but it doesn't do much for me. This guys face and his son is plastered all over the marketing campaign for FC6 they really make it a big deal and try to make it this big important event. So the plot of the game starts off showing you this dictator and his son, and almost immediately theres no vaugeness in the morality of the situation. It becomes immediately obvious that the dictator guy is "just wrong" because from the get-go youre seeing him call his soldiers to pull civillians out of their cars and murder people in the streets and stuff like this. It's just annoying how a lot of these modern plots are so in your face without any ambiguity at all, its so base and one dimensional. So yeah in FC6 the gimmick is that its set in some third world spanish country I cant even remember where, and everyone is speaking in spanish lingo and constantly blasting loud mexican music which really sucks and is annoying, and youre some head of a revolution to take down this evil antagonist guy and his son. Enough about the plot for now, thats the basic gist.

The game thankfully has co-op, but you dont get access to it until like an hour into the game for some stupid reason. Why do modern games do this? Whats the point? To try to introduce each person into the game without outside influence? its just stupid. Let us just coop from the beginning. Anyway, the general gameplay loop is the same here as the past 5 games. It's a massive open world, with admittedly beautiful graphical effects such as lighting, draw distance, shadows, and water visuals, but it also feels like most of the map has just kinda been procedurally generated rather than hand crafted monuments, so a lot of the map is just forgettable or uninteresting generic dirt road side paths and generic village #400. You travel back and forth to the quest givers then spend another 10 minutes travelling to the actual quest location. Just like every other modern Ubisoft game and most modern sandbox game design, frankly I'm just sick of it. In previous Ubisoft games, it was kind of easy to spawn a Helicoptor to atleast make the travelling bits less tedious, but here in this game you can spawn helicoptors but theyre only at specific fast travel outposts, and even then half of the map has these red minimap radar No-fly zones where if you go into them they shoot down your heli so its almost more of a pain in the ass to even bother. Halfway through the game we pretty much just gave up on using helicoptors and instead the game lets you spawn a car almost anywhere using the weapon wheel, so we just kept spawning the default car and slowly driving to the next objective. The driving controls are alright, its fun enough, but sometimes the vehicles first person view is so zoomed in its hard to see what the fuck is going on . I guess its realistic, though right? Theres also a button you can press to enable 'auto-drive' where the car attempts to drive towards the location, but it doesnt work that great you still have to atleast put in some input yourself. Also, when you select objectives it doesnt automatically show you a line on the minimap, you have to manually go place a waypoint yourself to get the minimap line. Just why? give me the line when I select the main mission, its annoying.

Something very notable is how the weapons and 'level' system work in this game. In previous games, it was more RPG feeling, with level up's unlocking lots of new weapons and attachments, as well as having skill trees. However, In FC6, there is simply no skill tree! A bold decision, and actually I don't mind it. In this regrd, it's atleast something to bring back a more skill based retro feel to the gunplay. AT the same time, though, almost feels like it was due to just them being too lazy to properly develop new innovative skill trees so they just ripped it out entirely. The thing is, what does leveling up even do in this game? You still get experience from killing enemies, you "Rank up" but I dont even know what it does even after beating the game. You can apparently buy new guys from "Juans shop" but the only guns he offers there are these really gimmicky stapled together niche guns that I dont wanna use, I wanna use realistic regular weaponry not bullshit gimmicks, so I ignored his shop the whole game. I think the only thing leveling up does is add more shit to his store but I dont know. It just feels so pointless, why even still have ranking up in the game? Just take it out too. It seems like they just couldnt decide where to go with the mechanics in the game and half assed everything. Like, even in FC5 (if I recall correctly) you had these gun shops that had tons of weapons you could buy, but in FC6 you only unlock weapons by randomly getting them from chests in the world, which can be hours between new gun unlocks. Like for the first few hours of the game I was stuck using the default pistol and rifle because I couldnt figure out how to unlock any new weapons, the new weapon unlocks come in too slowly to be exciting or interesting. I eventually got new weapons like AK, Single shot rifles, bolt actions, snipers, and so on, but really none of them are that interesting or fun to use. Once I got the AK I just used that for the rest of the game because it seemed to be good enough. The game does seem to have a lot of weapons, because I can see which ones im missing, but theres also a lot of 'Unique' weapons you can unlock that have some sort of gimmick to them like they shoot fire or something, but I didnt enjoy using any of these because they look stupid and arent even that effective. You can put attachments on your guns, but it seems even more watered down than previous games, theres really not that much to choose from and all you do is stare at the statistics of your weapon and pick the ones that improve the stats, atleasts all I did, cause i didnt really give a shit at this point. Its even more confusnig the disconnect between the lack of skill tree, weird rank up system, lack of gun loot, but then you can still apparently find "Gear" in the form of clothing,  pants, shirts, gloves, boots. You have slots to equip different pieces of clothing, but even after 20-30 hours of gameplay and beating the game I maybe found 3 different hats, 3 different pants, and so on. Where the fuck is all the gear? Is it all side content optional shit? Yeah really dont care enough, I'm good. It's just odd and seems like the devs had no idea where they wanted to go with this game, none of it makes any sense.

So the whole main mechanics of the game are just totally uninteresting, the actual combat is just OK. The shooting feels polished, the controls are decent enough, but thats all I can say. Of course its decent, because its just the same combat thats been copy pasted from the previous 10 years without much change. I guess the health system is a bit different, you die pretty quickly, it has regenerating health, but (it took me hours to understand this) - you get One instant heal and then its an invisible cooldown you have to wait to get the instant heal back. Bit of a stupid and confusing system, but it works. The guns have a lot of recoil on them by default, but when you put on the compensator attachment it gets more managable. I guess I can compliment the game on having more 'realistic' tactical combat because you can die pretty fast, and atleast the enemies dont look like bright colorful cartoon characters like previous games, but its still just average combat. Your friend of course can pick you up, its all the standard generic shit you can expect. Its just middle of the road completely in the combat and driving compartments.

So the game has really lackluster mechanics, halfassed loot and RPG implementations, a forgettable map, middle of the road combat, well it gets worse. The objectives are just awful for the most part. Not only will you have to constantly travel across the map and look for fast travel points to get closer to even starting the mission (Thankfully the UI isn't as bad as Breakpoint) but the actual content of the main missions is just either downright awful, or completely mundane and boring. Youll be doing stuff like "Blow up the yellow tanks" , but then once you blow up the tanks the minimap will still be Red, as if theres more shit to do there, but its just bad game design in that youre actually supposed to leave the area and drive 2km somewhere else, this confused us time and time again. Other objectives are just forgettable mundane meaningless shit like "kill X person"  "Retrive X object"  "Steal the truck or plane and bring it back"  "Secure the area"  "Survive"  "Escape the room full of gas"  its just stuff like that and all blends together to be a completely boring forgettable experience. Sometimes theres 3 different objective markers on screen and then its like "ugh this shit? I gotta drive all over the map?"  like it doesnt feel fun at all most of the time.

The actual plot/story/writing...its just bad. The game has an overly political tone , but even worse its like a moralizing tone where it tries to make the answer "obvious"  and is shoving down the players throat what they ought to think. Its not like you have any choices about anything. Theres even one mission where the objective says "Stop the propaganda bullshit" or something. Like, can I decide for myself if its bullshit? No, of course not. Theres no thinking allowed in this game. I'm not a political guy either or take sides generally but I was constantly cringing at how the game is just blaring this loud message of far leftist kind of Marxism at the player nonstop... like, bro, I'm just here to play a video game. Stop trying to send some "deep meaningful message" about society or whatever, I don't give a shit. It falls completely flat at sending any sort of meaning behind its ineffectual moralizing, all of the characters, dialogue, and writing, is just stereotype after stereotype of spanish culture from the loud music blaring all over the place, to the people themselves. If I was hispanic, I'd probably be annoyed at how stereotyped they made me seem, its that bad.

Sure, a few cutscenes here and there are sort of entertaining and interesting featuring the main antagonist and his son, such as these torture interrogation scenes, how he deals with basically trying to groom his son to become the next dictator (is this supposed to be about Fidel castro or something?) but beyond that, all the cutscenes are just BORING especially basically anything involving the main character. The main player character is just utterly boring, I dont know what else to say about him. Hes just some generic hispanic hero character whos bog standard in every way possible to be least offensive and appealing to common denominator audience. Its bad. All the supporting characters are equally the same, except of course it shoehorns in more moralizing political crap such as having a transgender character which you have to do missions for about how they got their breasts removed or something, like what the fuck am I playing? Makes me wish I was playing Super Mario or some shit, fuck this.
It's also weird how the game is co-op, but theres no character creation, so the whole game youre just looking at a copy paste of the same main character for each main player, its lazy and stupid.

Dont know what else to say about the game, theres a few missions in particular which just sucked, one of them was this "follow the pipelines to the main objective" one which just wasted tons of time going to the wrong place. The game took us 24 hours to beat, most of it was once again, driving back and forth to the main objectives. The actual content of the missions is lackluster, and all the writing just sucks. Theres even one mission where you do nothing but walk aruond some beach and collect random shit for a BBQ. Thats the whole mission. Yawn.

The game also shoehoens in other random mechanics such as having a pet aligator the whole time, apparently you can unlock other pets but we never unlocked any, I'm guessing its from optional side content shit. Who cares. Towards end of game it teleports you to some random island and takes away all your guns and gives you stealth guns, but theres not even any enemies around so you just walk into the main mansion and then it gives your guns back. What was the point? Stupid. Fight your way through the antagonists main mansion, run past all the enemies on the streets, theres like not even any final boss. We just like ran past everyone and triggered some ending cutscene of the antagonist killing his son because he didnt want his son to live in a world where he "Lost" or something, i dont know. Side characters dying left and right but we never gave a shit about any of them. Game ends, roll end credits, then it pops you back into the world about some stuff about doing daily missions with some 'endgame' content. Yeah, I'm good. No thanks.

If the next Far Cry game doesn't drastically change up the formula and innovate then I'm just done with this franchise and Ubisoft in general, for fuck sakes I'm sick of this slop.

4/10