Far Cry 6 is a playable identity crisis.
Sure, the most recent entry in Ubisoft’s series of open-world shooters retains many of its core gameplay competencies, however the design and storytelling surrounding that core feel more strained and less surefooted than ever. In some respects, the game feels like the culmination of the franchise's recent history, as it’s grown much less certain of what it really could or should be. Is it an open-world sandbox shooter, or an RPG in which you need to constantly manage your loot, crafting, and resources? Could it be a zany, over-the-top playground, or a serious undertake its chosen subject matter? Is it a game you play towards the end, a treadmill you play forever?
Ubisoft's response to each one of these questions is yes-all of that, all at once. It cannot be, but it is, here we are.
Set around the island nation of Yara-really only a lightly fictionalized version of Cuba-Far Cry 6 places you in the role of Dani Rojas, a woman (or man, when you purchase) attempting to flee the island's dictatorial regime for a new life in America. One ill-fated boat ride later, Dani ends up fighting for a guerrilla organization called Libertad, trying to bring down the federal government and free Yara.
This is, at first glance, a reasonably serious story. Within the intro, Dani witnesses the slaughter of her close friend and a number of civilians during a crackdown on dissenters. She encounters the island's dictator, Antón Castillo, face-to-face and nearly dies when his forces wipe out an entire boat of would-be refugees, leaving her because the sole survivor.
Nearly as soon as Dani meets up with Libertad, however, the trademark Far Cry goofiness begins to creep in. She meets Juan Cortez, a profane, hard-drinking guerrilla who fashions silly weapons. The 2 soon connect over their shared understanding that, actually, killing people during a revolution is fun-clearly an effort to bridge the space between the absurdity of gameplay and of many of the characters you encounter and the more severe tone and subject material of the main story. But it is the same as putting scotch tape on the gash in the Titanic. The gap in tone is but unbridgeable, and drawing attention to it simply causes it to be worse.
It's certainly true that previous Far Cry games juxtaposed uncomfortable topics and graphic violence with ridiculous antics, however the mismatch between what you do and just what you're facing feels a lot more incongruous this time around. Whereas Far Cry 3's Vaas was larger-than-life and unhinged, and Far Cry 4's Pagan Min had the panache and short fuse of a comic-book baddie, Far Cry 6's Antón Castillo is a comparatively grounded villain. He's not a kook. He's an unsettlingly composed fascist. If he's operating in a heightened reality, it's only in the extent to which he's violent. He doesn't feel like he could possibly appear in the same world like a rebel who sings along to “Livin' La Vida Loca” as she squashes a soldier together with her flying car before hopping out to shoot at a tank with a gun that fires “Macarena” CDs. Call me crazy, however i suspect there's a good reason Inspector Gadget never fought Hitler.
Even ignoring the problems of tone, Antón mostly seems like a missed opportunity. Actor Giancarlo Esposito brings the smoothness to life quite brilliantly, but he's not an excellent character. He does not have enough screen time for you to convey the real depth you'll want from a great villain, and far of times he does have is wasted.
A good 75 % of Antón's presence in the game (discounting the speeches over PA systems as well as on TVs) comes via short vignettes that cut away from the main narrative, usually showing him interacting with his son and future heir, Diego. But rather than use each one to show another side of him, these scenes just hit on the same beats over and over again. The writers clearly attempted to recapture the spark of Esposito's turn as Gus Fring on Breaking Bad, however in doing so they broke it down to an equation that kills all of the magic: Antón gives a speech about his values, then-surprise-does something super violent. Probably half of his scenes in the game, and the majority of the early ones, are simply variations on that same pattern. Later on, Esposito gets some better material to work with, but it seems like too little, past too far.
In fact, virtually every aspect of Far Cry 6's story and world seems like a pale imitation of the items it could happen to be. I'm no expert on Latin American culture, let alone the specific Caribbean version that Ubisoft mined to produce Yara. But in an attempt to improve my Spanish, I do frequent a few Latin American online communities, and i have got some small feeling of how much of an authentic, insightful portrayal might include, such as the distinctive attitudes towards family, the teasing rivalries between different countries and regions, and the complex, cynical, and frequently self-deprecating identities which come from living in “un país tercermundista.” I didn't spot anything near to any of that in Far Cry 6.
Most of the time, the sport just settles for a hodgepodge of easy stereotypes: rum, cigars, dancing, cockfighting, dominoes, old cars, quincea~neras, Santería-style mysticism. I discovered myself craving depth in the world and never finding any. I don't necessarily know if the shallow portrayal crosses the line into offensive, but I would not be surprised if people in a better position than I'm to make that call do take offense.
At the very least, I don't think the characters are simply stereotypes. Most of them seem like distinct individuals-just not particularly well-rounded or compelling ones. Ultimately, the only real character hanging around I really enjoy is a chicken. Originate from that what you should.
In its defense, Far Cry 6 does do a little bit of try to explore the major tensions within contemporary Latin American culture, like problems with sexism, colorism, homophobia, and transphobia. However this is generally a few briefly acknowledging these things exist, or existed at some unspecified amount of time in yesteryear, and then moving forward so that you can shoot more stuff. They're more often than not problems characters talk about having encountered, not problems we have seen them encounter. Inside a game about young, college-educated revolutionaries and old-guard guerrillas uniting to construct a better country, there's no real generational tension or interpersonal conflict. No “good guy” ever expresses a retrograde view.
In fact, none of the revolutionaries really discuss politics at all-which is fairly shocking considering Dani is essentially trying to unite Communists, anarchists, and agrarians under the banner of Libertad, that is ideologically hard to pin down but vaguely trying to develop a liberal democracy.
A couple of years back, when Ubisoft, after much public flogging, clarified that its games could be political although not didactic, since-ousted Ubisoft exec Tommy Francois said the goal was to showcase multiple perspectives and let players decide. “If my game was set throughout the Vietnam conflict, for example, we'd want the Viet Minh, the Viet Cong … basically everyone’s perspective,” Francois said at the time. Well, Far Cry 6 is about as close as Ubisoft has got to creating a game title concerning the Vietnam War, and you won't find a lot of anyone's perspective shining through.
Sure, Antón gets to make one insightful, interesting speech critiquing the function of slavery in America's founding, but I'm not sure that counts as ideology when he's doing it to justify their own use of slave labor. “The guy instituting a caste system, executing a large number of their own people, and poisoning the land and waterways makes some good points,” isn't really the best way to present players having a diversity of views.
But hey, maybe you're not for a compelling story or great characters or tonal consistency, and you will be happy if that Long way away gameplay you know and love stands up its end from the deal. No shame for the reason that, but the news isn't all that great there, either.
From a pure gameplay standpoint, Far Cry 6 still features the same solid core the series has honed throughout its previous iterations. Gunplay, stealth, and the freedom to pivot between the two on the fly still act as along with always. Pulling off a lot of quick headshots with a bow to capture an outpost undetected continues to be a fantastic little 10-minute chunk of gameplay. The sandbox side of things still results in memorable and hilarious moments, as the physics, vehicles, and AI all smash against one another in unexpected ways. New ingredients just like a car that can transition on the fly right into a paraglider, imaginative “resolver” weapons like a firework cannon, and also the new Supremo backpacks (essentially different ultimate abilities that slowly recharge with time) meaningfully extend the fun, too.
But everything around that central gameplay-the systems, the economies, the mission and narrative design-feels a lot more like a disorganized, indecisive hodgepodge than in the past. It's like Ubisoft keeps trying to assemble the same puzzle to make a different picture. You are able to sort of see the things they were targeting, but there are plenty of jagged edges and pieces that clearly don't fit together the way they should.
These aren't new problems, per se. For me, the disconnect first surfaced in Far Cry 5 and became much more blatant in the post-apocalyptic spin-off New Dawn. But Far Cry 6 seems like the culmination of this aimlessness. It's bigger, more ambitious, and eventually more awkward than either of these games. Its new toys are almost universally great. Its new ideas are almost universally misguided.
Ubisoft has attempted to weave together concepts from pretty much every previous game, with some new ones, so that they can freshen up the series, but the result is hardly cohesive. The resource and crafting system are afflicted by most of the same problems they did in New Dawn. If you're a completionist doing exactly what pops up in your map, you're going to have far more of everything than you could ever use. If you're not, it should be likely to feel inconvenient to need to scrounge around a lot, holding down a control button to get gasoline or medicine a thousand times an hour or so.
Some returning elements now feel almost vestigial. There is no substantial incentive to fish or hunt anymore, for example. New additions, like the menu-based idle missions in which you send commanders out, wait a couple of hours, and also the return to recption menus to click some buttons, are so boring and contribute so little that I can't understand their inclusion whatsoever.
Ubisoft's oddest design choice, by far, is its decision to strip the leveling system of previous games and split it into two pieces. You'll still collect XP and level up, but any stat increases are totally automatic and opaque. You'll do more damage (I believe) and obtain more health, allowing you to better hold your own against similarly scaling enemies. Obviously, since all the regions increase in difficulty as you sort out the story, you aren't really accumulating a meaningful edge, just keeping pace.
The more mystifying half of that change is that Far Cry 6 entirely does away with the perks you'd unlock to build your character in earlier games. The replacement is a gear system with various slots of clothing that grant you different buffs or abilities. Whereas before you might choose to spend a perk point on a new ability that allows you to, say, sabotage security systems, you now need to find or buy a special set of gloves to achieve that. And if you've those found on, you're losing out on other abilities or buffs from that slot.
The sheer inconvenience of tracking what the items does-you have to open a menu, then go into a sub-menu for that gear slot, then move a cursor over every choice to read its description-means tinkering with different builds is an enormous pain. There are almost 150 individual pieces of gear. It's essentially impossible to keep track of what everything does in your mind.
In theory, the game wants you to be constantly swapping between different choices based on the kind of challenge you're facing. But I just don't believe the Far Cry formula works if you are constantly micromanaging your loadout. No one wants to pause the sport to put on their anti-explosive gear whenever a tank turns up, in order to swap out their gloves every time they wish to booby-trap an alarm. Maybe having all those perks accessible in one character led to too much power creep, but this is an overcorrection. No single loadout feels particularly powerful for most situations. If you really wanted to make use of the machine to its fullest to optimize your play, you'd be making much more frequent gear swaps than you would in even a dedicated RPG like Skyrim. In practice, I just threw in the towel and used exactly the same set, a parkour outfit that allow me play faster, because it wasn't worthwhile. You can get by pretty much ignoring gear if you want to, but that is not exactly a sign of good design.
The the fact is, I could continue at length in regards to a dozen more granular complaints. Too much side content seems like transparent busywork. There is a bizarre, live-service endgame that undermines whatever change up the story might have had. I encountered numerous, significant technical issues of virtually every stripe. There is a hilariously unbalanced gun and Supremo combo that lets you one-shot all enemies through walls for 30 seconds. The much-touted “urban environment” of Esperanza is actually mostly boxed-off corridors that lock you out of trouble of nearly everything fun about the rest of the game. But I'm not sure piling on more and more detail would actually strengthen my argument much.
At the end of the day, it'd you need to be a lot more words to say the same thing: Far Cry 6 is a lesser form of a once-great series, stumbling forward in an attempt to evolve without a clear vision of the items it should become.
