Far Cry 6 is a sandbox single-player/co-op game that is set in the fictional country of Yara, terrorized by Anton Castillo and his insurgents. The sixth installment of the series follows a similar formula to that of Far Cry 3, Far Cry 4 and Far Cry 5; however, with a much weaker development and unmemorable story that doesn’t make use of some of its best characters.
You start off as Dani Rojas (Male or Female), who is an orphan, ex-guerrilla and later turned freedom fighter for Yara. The story starts off in a very dark setting as our protagonist rushes out from one deadly situation to another in a war-torn Esperanza, and finally makes her way onto a boat that’s leaving for America. Due to certain things going south, she ultimately decides to become the chosen one and protect her people and the land she was born in by taking down Castillo and his forces.
It’s all pretty standard stuff that follows the basic Far Cry formula. As you move on from that main point in the story, you’ll be liberating different areas in Yara, and moving to break Castillo’s hold over different territories and essentially foil any of his profits that might otherwise give him more power. Throughout your journey, you’ll meet several different characters, most of which feel very uninspired and just ‘there’ for the sake of the story except for some exceptions. This is what brings me to my first issue with Far Cry 6. Don’t worry however as I’ll be getting into what the game did right shortly.
The very first people you meet, are ultimately the ones that end up inspiring you to fight for La Revolución are Clara Garcia, Juan Cortez who are a part of a group known as the Libertad. They’re fighting for peace in Yara, and hoping to come to either an agreement with Castillo or eliminate him.
Clara feels like a very generic character with dialogue that almost never ends up resonating with you. Most of the foundation for her character is left completely left undiscovered except for like one flashback which fails to give any weight to her motives.
Juan Cortez on the other hand, while interesting, still leaves a lot to be desired for. He, however, is your primary source for fun toys like the Supremo backpacks.
There are other characters that you’ll meet down the line that are actually really great and seem to put a good spin on the story, but it feels like none of them were properly written and utilized to their full potential.
At one point, you end up meeting veterans of a past revolution in which they had to kill Anton Castillo’s father; and they were basically the heroes of their time who ended taking up Yara back. I found it really hard to believe that you had to actually win them over to get them on your side. Shouldn’t someone who has already fought for Yara be already aware of everything that’s happening in their country. It just feels like lazy writing.
On the other hand, there are some amazing characters like Bembe, which feel extremely underutilized. Almost criminally underrated even. You get to meet Bembe barely three times during the entire game, and each time he’s in a scene, he absolutely steals the show. Which makes me wonder as to why we didn’t get more of him.
Heck, I would be on board if they would just replace Juan Cortez with Bembe and made him the main guy that our protagonist could consult with. He’d even work perfectly as a villain. The guy would make far better of a villain than how Castillo was portrayed.
Anton Castillo didn’t exactly make too much of an appearance in the game either. You see him at key points in the game, and he isn’t really explored much. I remember Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 and how brilliantly Vaas and Pagan Min were explored in those games. When you were playing through the specific Far Cry games I just mentioned, it always felt like there was a lot of pressure on you, because there was this sense of ultimate power and influence that these guys had on their respective regions.
Since Castillo was never even properly developed, and there was only a surface-level of information about him in the game, he never really felt like a threat. Just a character that barely had any scenes throughout the entire story.
That’s kind of my main gripe with Far Cry 6. It dwells over the surface of the entire world it built, and never really goes in to explore a deeper connection with these characters like it did in previous games.
I’ll say this, aside from Bembe, there was one character that I’ll never forget, and its name is Chorizo. We love you Chorizo the Sausage Dog, you cute treasure-hunter and don’t let anybody tell you anything otherwise.
I’m guessing you already know how I feel about the story with my above discussion of the characters. But, let’s just say the story wasn’t something phenomenal, which is what you can say about most Ubisoft games these days considering they’re just churning out more in terms of quantity than actual quality.
It isn’t bad either. It’s in a middle grey area. Playing through the story was a fun experience thanks to the gameplay that saved Far Cry 6 ever-so graciously.
The revolution doesn’t really feel like a revolution at times. Bear with me here, you’re in possibly one of the worst experiences of your life, and it feels like you’ve got Mario by your side happy as ever to just go racing in his kart or play golf for God’s sake.
The game does take some disturbing turns where things get dark, but then it just goes right back to, “Hey Dani! Let’s get a drink, it’s time for celebration.” It all feels so unnecessarily forced. At one point, you’ll be finding a Barbecue Grill, and the next moment you’ll be getting your teeth pulled out.
Far Cry 6 is struggling with what it wants to be. In my playthrough, it never really felt like there was something big going on. There was no pressure and no substance that added value to the struggle for Yara’s Revolution. Heck, the transition to finally achieving victory felt so short-lived and unearned that it didn’t even feel satisfying.
The map is pretty amazing. Probably the BEST out of all Far Cry maps that I’ve seen up to this point. Esperanza is absolutely beautiful, along with other points of interest found in the game.
There’s no endless jungle with nothingness, instead, there’s always something new and beautiful for you to discover in this map of Far Cry 6, which really is the heart and soul of the entire game.
Playing through the main story of the game, you’ll see a lot of these locations, but still not most of them. As you begin to explore, you’ll see a lot of places that are just worth going on your own to find collectibles, to play certain minigames, or just for a stroll if you feel like it. Some of them are a little tougher, but the difficulty isn’t really a problem.
You can simply go out to these areas after you’ve captured them alongside Libertard and do side-quests that utilize these areas with seamless platforming and fighting which really adds to the gameplay.
Unlike previous games, Far Cry 6 doesn’t exactly rely on skills to get you cool new abilities. Instead, you can boost certain aspects of your character with respect to what you’re wearing at that moment.
Throughout the game, you’ll find a lot of cool stuff through treasure hunts, military base raids, side missions, main missions, and base upgrades. As you get these new gear pieces and weapons, you’re buffed up in one way or the other. It can be greater mobility, greater defense or a weapon that lights people on fire. All kinds of crazy fun stuff.
Most of the weapons felt really underwhelming. I did change up my assault rifle and explosive alternative quite a bit, but I stuck to one DMR the entire game and really felt no need to upgrade. Of course, I did anyway, since the attachments and gear made you more powerful. But it felt like there wasn’t really any need for decking yourself out. I only changed my weapons when I found something unique from a treasure hunt that could light people on fire or reload all my weapons instantly.
Now, I know that Far Cry games aren’t exactly known for their difficulty. This is completely fine, but I just wished that Ubisoft had finally perfected their AI up until this point.
The AI in this game is so wonky and dumb, that it’s funny. The only real difficulty you’ll ever face is if 10 to 15 enemies spawn at your face and start mowing you down. However, even then, AI just tends to glitch out very often and have no idea where to find you even though they just saw you like 3 seconds ago.
I played at the hardest difficulty that was available to me initially, and all I needed was a DMR, a suppressor, and just headshots. Enemies take like 6 seconds to be able to spot you properly, which if you just run away into a bush, everything goes pretty much back to normal. You can just clear out a base pretty easily with headshots, and no one would be the wiser. It’s pretty satisfying to wipe out a base, but after a while, you really start to notice a pattern.
When I first dived into infiltrating certain enemy-infested areas, it was fun because I was calculating, and just planning out my attack through stealth one way or the other. But then, I realized that all I needed was a vantage point and it was game over. Just headshot the 8 to 10 enemies in the area, and boom. You’re done. It would definitely be more challenging if enemies reacted better to seeing dead bodies instead of “Must’ve been the wind”.
Ignoring the AI, there is definitely a lot of fun to be had from the side-content, which brings me to my next point in this review.
A lot of the Ubisoft games follow a pretty similar formula when it comes to side activities. It’s just one task copy and pasted throughout the map. While that’s somewhat the case with Far Cry 6, there are enough side activities to keep you occupied for a considerable amount of time.
The side-missions are definitely fun to play and bring a lot to the table. Other than that, the most enjoyable task that I often found myself getting side-tracked with were Treasure Hunts. They were an absolute blast to play through. While some of them were relatively simple and involved me connecting a generator, or simply finding the mystery box in a small area, there was a lot that stood out.
In a few of these missions, I found myself exploring beautiful caves, classical cases of ghost-infested areas (Which, spoiler alert, weren’t really that haunted). And, just in general, they were really fun to complete, and the gear you got for completing said activities is definitely very rewarding and worthwhile in the long run.
All the resources you accumulated from your main and side activities ultimately go into base-building, which is a pretty prominent feature in the game. As you build certain aspects of your base, you gain access to better and more improved tools for specific tasks. I was able to get my hands on a Parkour costume that significantly increased my movement speed. I even got a cool new AKM that I immediately decked out and began to just run guns blazing into every situation I found myself in. When you begin to upgrade these bases, that’s when things really start to open up and you find yourself moving towards the end-game in terms of what gear you can get.
You can’t really become an overpowered guerilla without going towards base-building. It helps you in getting better things to hunt with, more locations and even cool new fishing spots that you can farm for money.
Everything was easily acquirable in the game, and no process was tedious, all of it was just a treat and fun to get to. I found myself side-tracked with activities so much that I completely forgot about the main story. The journey to acquire all of these different items scatted across the lush Yara was truly fun.
Let’s not forget the minigames. You can go racing, flying, or even cock-fighting! All of which have different strategies and mechanics worth exploring. Yara really does feel alive, and it’s an amazing experience to hang out on the island just doing different things that pop up.
I was playing on a build that is prior to the launch build, but with barely 10 days left to launch since when I got the copy, I don’t think there can be many changes. I do hope though that many of these do get fixed prior to launch, however.
I didn’t encounter TOO many bugs, which was apparently a huge problem with Far Cry 5. Far Cry 6 seems to do things right. There were a few instances in which NPCs simply refused to move in order to progress further through the story, to which I had to restart from the checkpoint.
Sometimes if I airdropped from somewhere, my game simply refused to take any inputs from me and I was stuck in a slow descent to the ground with my parachute deployed. This is definitely annoying, considering the only fix to this issue was restarting my game.
As I discussed before, the AI is very buggy, and most of the time they don’t even know what they’re doing, which is a huge turn-off. If this game had more threatening enemies, it would be a 10/10 on the gameplay from me.
Other than that, there weren’t any major bugs. During my playthrough, I barely encountered any and the game seems to be optimized pretty well.
The Far Cry series peaked in terms of story with Far Cry 3. The villain, the setting, and all of it were just absolutely perfect. Ever since then, they’ve been trying to replicate the same formula with a deranged villain, but it doesn’t seem to work anymore.
You always start off as a freedom fighter who initially doesn’t want to get involved, and then all of a sudden everything blends in with the story. The series really needs to find its ground in something else, and after so many games, the formula’s quality has seriously watered down.
Story problems aside, there’s decent gameplay, great mechanics and there’s a lot of fun to be had from a bunch of different activities within the game.
