Hi!
This is another essay from the vault, this time one I wrote about my experience with the latest (at time of writing) Ubisoft entry, Far Cry 6. It's another long one, around 12k words, and I will be coming back to this post in particular to add some images to break up the sheer mountain of text. Hope you enjoy!
OK, right off the top, I need to make some housekeeping rules clear. Firstly, Ubisoft, like Activision Blizzard, has been involved in lawsuits in France regarding sexual harassment and abuse in their workplace. That is a case that seemingly drifted back under the radar as Activison-Blizzard's case spiralled further and further as more information came to light throughout the latter half of 2021. As of time of writing (at least, the early morning of the 9/1/2022 in a brief glance at google, will come back to this) there's been no major developments since August of 2021. Game developers have a right to create a safe, inclusive workplace for ALL members of the staff and anything less is a disgrace. Just to get that up front. I'm covering a Ubisoft game cause, despite their shit workplace, a lot of the games created by their devs hold a special place in my heart and, personally, an outright boycott (which would only really affect the devs making the games and not the higher-ups responsible for creating said toxic workplace) wouldn't help. So here we are.
Secondly, Far Cry 6 is HEAVILY influenced by Cuba and its history of revolution. I'm not anywhere near an expert in Cuban history, nor am I a monolith on how to correctly protest, revolt or in general push back against a harmful state of governance. Far Cry 6 touches on the aftermath of a successful overthrowing of the government, but as I'll get into, doesn’t really do anything with it. There is certainly a conversation to be had about these topics, and I highly recommended your own research into them (personally, in terms of protest, I recommend the Philosophy Tube video on Violence) but for this piece, I won't be doing an awful lot of discussion beyond what the game puts forward. I'm simply not qualified for that, and I don't want to put forward any sort of uninformed opinion. In my OWN opinion, I'm firmly in support of movements like BlackLivesMatter who largely peacefully protest violence and injustice against minorities and also understand how these types of movements can be used as a cover for people who simply want to do some looting. Similarly, I also understand how, at a certain point, more action needs to be taken to bring about change. What that action IS, that's where I go into uninformed opinion territory because I simply have no fuckin clue. So, with that all being said, Far Cry 6.
Far Cry 6 is, despite the name, the 13th entry into the series, with a variety of mainline and side games buffing up the franchise's portfolio. Released on October 6th 2021, two days before Metroid Dredd and twenty days before Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. Both games took home awards at the Game Awards while Far Cry 6 was met with a resounding cry of "this sure is a Far Cry game" from the wider gaming community. Sitting with a metacritic score of 74 with a user score of 3.6 (keep in mind that two of the "preview" user reviews critique it based on it being a Ubisoft game and "Bad story based on wokeness, gender-politics and unrealistic colorful characters" which… ok jan. Which is to say, take user scores with a grain of salt), Far Cry 6 faded away from the popular conscious pretty quick. I was pretty interested in it as I put a lot of time into Far Cry: New Dawn and Far Cry 4 before it, enjoying the gameplay loops and aesthetic of both games, but held off buying the game for a while. Picking it up for cheap and finishing the main campaign very recently I can safely say that the wider popular cry of "Definitly a Far Cry game" was pretty bang-on, that the game's narrative is by FAR its strongest trait and, in my own experience, a fair amount of crashes combined with some… different design decisions combine into a game that is carried by its story and is let down by its lack of innovation, its bizarre live-service integration and annoying lack of customization in gameplay leads to an experience that at times is frustrating, boring and disheartening for a franchise that once prided itself of delivering some of the best open-world sandbox gameplay… however, there's pros to this game that I feel Ubisoft should take into the future. It's not all bad news, and I try to find the good in these mixed bags and lift them up while critiquing the bad. So, let's take a journey to Yara and talk resolver, supremo and being a guerrilla. Vamanos.
Story (aka: Sheep and Lions)
Far Cry 6's story is easily is best feature, but that isn't to say its some revolutionary narrative. I mean, technically it is, but you know what I mean, its not doing anything groundbreaking. You play as Dani Rojas, an orphan of Yara whose roped into becoming a guerrilla fighting against the ruthless Fuerzas Nacionales de Defensa or FND and it's leader, the dictator of Yara, Antón Castillo. Antón Castillo is portrayed by the one and only Giancarlo Esposito, who is on a TEAR recently of portraying sinister authority figures, fresh of his small but incredible role on the Boys season 2. He's accompanied by his son, Diego Castillo, voice acted by Coco star Anthony Gonzales, a thirteen-year-old boy who Antón is attempting to mould into his successor. See, Yara has a history of revolutions against Castillos. In 1967, a guerrilla army took down Antón's father when Antón himself was thirteen and his father was executed right in front of him. Yara entered a state of economic decline and was frozen in time technologically until Antón was voted into power off the back of promises to make Yara a paradise. What he failed to leave out was the slave labour, human experimentation, abhorrent crimes against humanity and general totalitarian fascistic actions it would take once he became El Presidente. As the head of a military junta, he wrapped an iron fist around the country and forced the country into the creation of Viviro, a revolutionary drug created from Yara's tobacco used in the treatment of cancer that became Yara's primary export and way back onto the world stage. With any detractors becoming Outcasts and thrown onto farms or into labs, any sort of counter to the Castillo regime is brutally shut down. That is, until, one Clara García, former journalist and daughter to a True Yaran family, begins Libertad and starts a fight back against Castillo, along with various other smaller groups fighting their own battles across the country. This is where the player character enters the picture.
Daní Rojas (who can be played as a male or female, depending on player choice but for the purposes of this review, will be referred to with she/her pronouns) is an orphan and ex-military living in the Yaran capital of Esperanza. She and her friends Lita Torres and Alejo Ruiz are holding a going-away party as herself and Alejo are to be smuggled out of Yara to the US, recognizing that its really only a matter of time before something bad happens to them in Castillo's Yara. Lita, meanwhile, is a member of Libertad and has decided to stay and fight. Before they can leave, the FND begin its round-up of False Yarans to send off to work camps and Alejo is killed when he shouts protests at the soldiers. Realizing the soldiers actually came for her, Dani sneaks with Lita to the boat smuggling them away, talking the captain into allowing a nanny and her ward onto the boat. Thinking themselves safe, they're suddenly interrupted and boarded by Antón himself and his right-hand, General Sanchez. The nanny is revealed to be the carer for Diego, her ward, who was also trying to escape his father. Antón orders the boat sunk and its occupants killed, with Dani and Lita surviving and washing up on Isla Santuario, a smaller landmass off the cost of Yara proper. Lita is fatally wounded and sends Dani in search of Clara García in hopes Dani can help Libertad. Dani, now with two less childhood friends, a machete she picks up on the beach and one extreme revenge mission on her mind, begins her journey as a guerrilla.
The game is split into 4 main "acts". We have the opening section on Isla Santuario that serves as an introduction to the world and gameplay mechanics of the game, followed by three provinces of mainland Yara that each offer their own group of rebels to recruit into Libertad and the members of Castillo's inner circle that these rebels are fighting against. In between significant story missions, we get cutscenes centred around Antón and Diego reacting to our escapades and Antón trying to bring his son onside to become his legacy on Yara. Once all four acts are completed, the final two missions wrap up the campaign. There's also a few Libertad missions in between acts, dealing more with Clara and Juan Cortez, Clara's second in command and super-spy guerrilla, resolver expert and all-around shitbag, that focus more on direct action against Castillo himself when golden opportunities arise. I'll do my best to avoid a beat-by-beat retelling of the story, and will instead cover the broadstrokes of each provinces tale, the characters you meet, the themes Far Cry 6 touch on and what they add to the overall story of Libertad versus Castillo. I'll be covering them in the order I completed them, but keep in mind that once you arrive at Libertad HQ upon escaping Isla Santuario, you can complete each province in any order you wish, and bounce between them as much as you want. BUT before that, a quick overview on what occurs on Isla Santuario.
Isla Santuario (Is Tutorial Island a thing now?)
Daní meets with Clara after Lita's death. Clara gives Daní and the player a brief rundown of Libertad's situation. Libertad launched an attack on a Viviro farm on the island but were found out. The force of sixty was reduced to a team of six, with Juan running off to drink his sorrows away since he was the one who planned the whole thing. The Isla is now under blockade by the Navy and Libertad is trapped. Clara strikes a deal. Daní helps them off the island, she gets a boat to leave the country. After grabbing Juan and a quick lesson in resolver (the name Far Cry 6 uses for its DIY weapons), Clara sends Daní to meet Julio, Lita's lover with a grudge against Daní for surviving what killed his rebel girlfriend. The pair burn down the plantation (which is now such a Far Cry staple that Daní herself comments on it) before returning for the grand plan. The team is gonna take out the warships blocking the route off the island, blow em up and get outta town, which they do in an admittedly very fun mission. Clara picks up Daní while Julio goes back to set the final charges and sink the warships but is captured. Julio is then used as part of a life lesson for Diego, one about True and Fake Yarans and, when Diego refuses to execute the already suffering Julio, the man is beaten to death. The video of his murder is posted online and is the final push Daní needs to decide to stay and finish her fight.
The opening of Far Cry 6 is very much a "here's what you need to know about our cast, here's the plot threads that'll run through the Libertad missions" introductory segment of the game. Some characters, like Alejo, Lita and Julio, are rarely if ever mentioned again beyond being motivations for Daní to continue working with Clara, which does do Lita and Julio a disservice especially, given their previous work with Libertad. Some missions or even side quests involving missions completed by Lita or started and never finished would've been intriguing into fleshing out the character. The Shangri-La missions from Far Cry 4 come to mind, flashbacks to another character telling a parallel, if smaller, story to the main character. Beyond that, Clara is a genuinely interesting character given how integral she is to the overall success of the revolution. Flashbacks later into the story show how she wanted to involve a later ally, Talia Benavidez, into Libertad from day one, but was turned down given how Clara is always going to have her background as one of the True Yarans. (Just, as a quick aside, "True Yaran" never really has a correct definition in-game, mainly just a catch-all for anyone loyal to Castillo or of means.) Clara chooses to revolt, sure, but if she hadn't, she could've easily continued living a relatively normal, perhaps successful, life in Yara under the regime. Characters like the Montero family, whose way of life is under direct attack by the FND, never had a choice. However, despite this, everyone agrees that once the capital is taken and the war is said and done, Clara is vital in bringing the country through the turbulence of post-revolution politics. There's a very good segment after the blockade is destroyed where Clara and Daní talk about Clara's aspirations on their way to Libertad HQ.
When they first meet, Clara lays out Libertad's objectives. "Free Elections, Free Expression Free the Outcasts, Free of Castillos" (while also quoting a leading figure in the Puerto Rican independence movement, Pedro Albizu Campos). When Clara later asks what Daní's plan was once reaching the US and Daní replies with "work shitty jobs until we can open our own chop shop", Clara replies "The American Dream doesn't come in our colour". When Daní retorts with what Clara's dreams are once she becomes Presidente, she replies "The next president won't last six months before they're assassinated". Daní is shocked, and Clara continues with how she's fully aware that kicking Castillo out is only half the battle of truly fixing the systemic problems of Yara. Foreign coups, loyalist insurgency, civil war, all will be on the cards once Libertad is in control. The CIA is already working with Juan behind Clara's back. She knows that to truly fix Yara, it'll take the rest of her life at the helm. It's an interesting look at what is usually a naïve role in the Far Cry series, the rebel groups leader with wide eyes and promises of freedom but revealed at the end to come at a serious cost or to never had had a plan to begin with. I was expecting a Far Cry 4 ending, where depending on the person you side with throughout the campaign, Kyrat becomes either an authoritarian drug state where children are conscripted into the army or a patriarchal fundamentalist theocracy where opposition is executed, and women are stripped of basic political rights. While Far Cry has a bad habit of playing the "both sides are just as bad" card in certain circumstances, Far Cry 6 dodges that bullet early on by establishing that Clara knows it isn’t as simple as Kill Antón, free the country. She's got a lot of work ahead of her and she's not only aware of it, but its fully prepared to take that responsibility for the rest of her life. She's genuinely a pretty cool character. I wish we got more of her.
Juan Cortez, meanwhile, is a shitbag of a character that the game repeatedly tries to make into a likeable companion. A former KBG spymaster who worked for the previous Presidente and hero of the 67 revolution, Santos Espinosa, Cortez is sleezy, ruthless and extremely willing to do under-the-table deals to win the revolution. While also being responsible for the games DIY weapons and gear, he's generally out more for the fun of the revolution then the actual goal of it. He and Daní have frequent conversations about how only them two get what it's really about, that "a guerrillo's revolution never ends". The man is very much prepared to be overthrowing dictators for the rest of his days and wants to have fun doing it. He reminds me of a recurring character in past Far Cry games, Willis Huntly, a CIA agent, nationalist and general piece of shit who represents the US's interest in foreign revolutions whenever there's resources to be had. It's not subtle, especially given his role in Far Cry 4, but Juan feels like Huntly taken on board as a main character. Both are unlikeable, distrustful characters that the player is stuck with as they know more information than the player and are important to accomplishing whatever goal the player has. While Huntly has steadily lost screentime over the course of the series, from a main character in Far Cry 3's story to a few main missions appearances in the latter half of Far Cry 4 to a single sidequest in Far Cry 5, Cortez seems to be the new inheritor of his role. You would think that his dislikeablity is intentional and will eventually receive some sort of comeuppance, but alas, as we'll see later, that's not the case. Juan does have some funny lines here and there, but on the whole, he's just the resident ally dickhead.
Then, to wrap up this overly-explanatory intro, we've Miss Daní Rojas, former military discharged for throat-punching her officer, on the run from the FND and roped into becoming a hero of Libertad. Honestly? I kinda love her. Daní knows from the get-go who she is and her big arc for the game, at least in my eyes, is who she must become to free Yara. Daní is the first instance of Far Cry having a proper voiced playable character since Far Cry 3 and Nisa Gunduz does an excellent job of bringing the strong, caring and determent character of Daní Rojas to life. Daní is one of the moral compasses of the game's story, always opposed to the shadier aspects of the revolution Juan tries to pull, if forced to go along with it to keep the revolution on its feet. She's a decent sense of humour, able to make light of the more bizarre aspects of Yara's populace in the various Treasure Hunts and also has a bit of a spiritual side, with knowledge of the Triada, the old Yaran gods that are part of the game's Triada Blessing quest and Far Cry's staple supernatural fetch quest. Daní's an orphan, so a lot of the supporting cast she meets end up as a sort of found family to her, with each fallen ally affecting her deeply. She doesn't think of herself as a leader and is perfectly comfortable leaving the politics to Clara and Juan, as she keeps to her boots on the groundwork. Daní was honestly a pleasure to play as for me and I had a great time with her as she wreaked havoc on the FND and Antón's "paradise".
With all that now said, time we get into the narrative proper. First stop, as Clara recommends to the player upon the completion of Isla Santuario, is Madrugada and the Famila Montero.
Madrugada (Cowboy Sh*t)
The campaign into Madrugada begins with getting in touch with the secluded and isolated Montero family, a family of farmers with generations of history in the region as they try to destroy the source of Viviro, the tobacco farms that they're stuck working. These farms are fertilized with PG-240, a substance that the locals have come to call the poison for how lethal it is to humans and animals. So you have farmland, being worked by farmers slowly getting poisoned, and that’s BEFORE we get to the slave labour being used with the Outcasts, the people Castillo "picks by lottery" but are in actuality just anyone he deems a potential dissident. The man in charge of this region is José Castillo, Antón's nephew, a psychopath and sadist with a love for the luxurious. As for allies, we've Philly Bariga, the Montero's groundskeeper and almost as much of a resolver expert as Juan. He's a bit quirky but can also make napalm from packing peanuts and oil so he gets a pass. As for the family themselves, we've Carlos Montero, the patriarch with a sincere distrust for outsiders and acts mostly in retaliation to José's atrocities as opposed to preventing them. In his mind, they're not guerrillas but farmers defending themselves, and he's aware of the danger that comes with openly fighting José. In contrast, his daughter Camila 'La Espada' Montero is fully invested in taking the fight to José where she can, earning her name for being an expert with her knife. She's a bit of a mirror to Daní and they form a strong partnership over the course of the Madrugada section of the game, both struggling with what fighting against Castillo means for their future. There's also Alejandro Montero, the estranged son who works in the laboratories of José, working on improving PG-240. See, the twist in the Montero tail is that they were actually supportive of Antón Castillo when he was elected, all of them voting for him, but once he started putting his plans for paradise into action, well, yeah, they turned pretty quick. Finally, we've an old friend of the family in Miguel Delgado, who we save from a political prison after a rescue from Espada went wrong and she was forced to choose between him and Carlos. I'm sure he doesn't hold a grudge at all-oh, he gets Carlos killed? Oh.
Yeah, after some missions for Carlos to earn his trust and some secret jobs with Espada to find Alejandro in a failed attempt to bring him home, word gets back to camp that José is staging a public execution in a nearby town square and Alejandro is among those on the chopping block. A rescue mission/assassination is staged, with Carlos going in person to save his son while Daní heads up a nearby clocktower to provide cover with a sniper rifle Miguel stashes up there. Espada, meanwhile, is in the wings and ready to take out José. Things go… poorly. Alejandro is going to be hung from the barrel of a tank, so the plan is for Daní to shoot out the rope, Carlos swoop in to grab Alejandro in the confusion and Espada to take out José before the FND can react. However, the sniper rifle backfires, knocking Daní senseless. José starts stabbing the other prisoners while Carlos swoops in to cut down his son. Espada tries to get a shot at José but he's run off in the chaos. Carlos tries to ride out with Alejandro but realises there's a bomb strapped to his back. He cuts the bomb off and throws Alejandro off his horse, making the ultimate sacrifice to save his son. After an absolute PAIN of an escape with José and Espada, the gang arrive home, where we manage to resuscitate a near-death José while Espada confronts Miguel who, while not outright SAYING he betrayed the family, voices his dislike for Espada and proclaims the Castillo's have already won, which earns him a slit throat from Espada. With everything falling apart at the seams, Daní convinces Espada to step up and finish of José before things get worse. With some insider knowledge from a regretful Alejandro and some napalm from Philly, we hit every major tobacco field at once with aid from the guerrillas, as well as some local FND soldiers who switch sides out of their respect for Carlos. Finally, we join Espada at a military airport to put down José, who's buzzing around in a helicopter. A brief boss fight later and José crashes just in time for a little chat with Daní and Espada, which ends with Espada, contrary to her name, shoving a grenade in José's mouth and- AND BLOWING HIS HEAD OFF??? GODDAMN OK FAR CRY. Not gonna lie, this took me off-guard in a BIG way the first time I saw it, it's by far one of the most brutal deaths I've seen in any video game. Afterwards, while the gang celebrate, Clara and Jose arrive to recruit Espada into the fold, to which Espada, thanks to her friendship with Daní, agrees to, with the concession of the family's independence. They're all in the same fight, but they ain't soldiers to be bossed around. Put a pin in that last bit, we'll circle back around to it.
The fight between the Monteros and José Castillo (who, by the way, everyone calls Lil Napoleon which is just, that got a chuckle outta me ngl) is probably the most direct and focused of all three provinces. We'll see later, but Madrugada is the only province where you have a singular villain to fight against and that lends itself to this "Us versus Them" narrative quite well. Everyone has their ire directed at one source, and that source is given enough time to establish itself as a threat. The actual change the Monteros need to win the fight against José is a bit unclear, or at least it was to me. The conflict between Carlos and Espada seems to be reactionary action versus proactive action, retaliatory strikes against the FND versus actively fighting the army. So when Carlos dies and we go on our revenge quest, it seems like Espada was right. Yet there's a moment before the final mission where Espada says "Carlos was right, I need to trust the rest of the guerrillas more" and, unless I missed something, I don't remember Espada needing help or trust being an issue? It's an odd one. With the other factions, you can point at a theme and be like "THAT'S what this arc is about, simple" but with the Monteros, it seems to be about accepting help when its offered, even if it may hurt your pride, but also rushing into things? Its odd. Espada herself is definitly one of the more fleshed-out characters personality wise. She ends up as Daní's second in command by the end of the game in the final assault on Esperanza and genuinely, if the game ended with the pair settling down somewhere, I'd buy it. They seem like they'd make a good couple, or at least a good partnership. The rest of the Montero cast is a bit forgettable, if I'm honest. Carlos dies just as he opens up to Daní, Philly is fun and has his sincere moments but mostly is running on vibes (which is fine btw, he serves his purpose) and Alejandro spends his time with the family just sulking in the house. Its really Espada holding up the story. Meanwhile, Lil Napoleon is, well… he's fine. He's a psycho slave driver who may or may not be queer and that leads into questions of the stereotypical queer villain trope and aaaaaaaaaaaaaah that’s a conversation I do NOT want to have in this piece about the Far Cry game but just know, yeah, I can see it and I do not like it. He gets a great death and that's probably what people will remember most about him. Beyond that, there's a few fun missions in Madrugada, most notably the finale that begins with bombing some tobacco fields in a custom plane from Philly. It’s a solid romp around the countryside I really enjoyed. Now, with the Monteros onside, next stop is the Valle de Oro for some tunes.
Valle De Oro (The Revolution will be televised)
Upon arriving in the Valle De Oro, we arrive at the last known location of Máximas Matanzas, a rap duo whose been staging protest concerts and whose lead, Talia, is an old friend of Clara who helped come up with the idea of Libertad. They've all vanished so we follow them to their new HQ, where Talia is about to be fed to crocodiles by FND. We kill them before they can call in their location and free Talia, along with her boyfriend and DJ Paolo and groupie Bicho. Their big target is María Marquessa, the head of the Ministry of Culture and queen of propaganda and media in Yara. She also runs the True Yaran Academy, which is essentially a re-education centre where she attempts to brainwash people. As you do. Also in that academy is a character with not an awful lot of screentime, but he does get his own title card so I guess he's kinda important, is Matías Alonso, a physician who was sent there for helping the Outcasts and also did Paolo's top surgery. Which is a wonderful Segway into the characters of the Valle De Oro.
Talia Benavidez saw the term "fire-cracker", decided it sounded cool and then proceeded to nuke the term into the ground. Talia's a fckin Molotov, she's great. As the voice of Máximas Matanzas, she's passionate about her music and even more passionate about fucking with María after she forced Talia into the True Yaran Academy. She's genuinely one of my favourite characters purely for how passionate she is. Her boyfriend and DJ, Paolo de La Vega, is also really good character. An ex-soldier like Daní, he was thrown out when his drill instructor/father found out he was trans. Paolo is a natural leader and rallies the guerrillas in Valle de Oro, but is also doing his best to leave the country when Daní finds him. He's all for revolution, but a Yara without Castillo is still a Yara that won't accept him, which is the main conflict between Talia and Paolo early on. The former is hellbent on tearing down everything María Marquessa has built, while the latter is desperate to get the pair out of Yara because, in his own words, even once the revolution is over, his own revolution will just be starting. I'll talk more about Paolo at the end of this segment and much later in the final wrap up, but for now, the important thing is that he's in debt to a black-market dealer known as Bébé, whose also kinda part of this story arc but mostly in a "ooo I might betray you at any moment" way. He's a dick with few morals, simple as. Then, there's the most surprisingly likeable character, Paz "Bicho" Duarte. Bicho starts as just a groupie to Talia and Paolo, who really looks up to them and wants to help in anyway possible. So, with Daní's help, he sets up Radío Libertad to help spread the truth (which, ngl, I usually kept the radio off when driving around to listen to a video or podcast in the background, but its actually a proper radio station you can listen to that'll comment on events. It's neat) and it works! Bicho has a nice lil arc of realizing that any help is help, be it on the radio or out in the field, which is what leads to him being going by Paz by the end of the game. He does have a really odd moment where he's going after Bébé after the smuggler sells out Paolo in a later mission and aaaalmost shoots himself under duress from Bébé to which we talk him down, he leaves and…. We don't kill Bébé? This is his last appearance by the way, he's never seen again. We just leave him alone. Its very odd. Anyway, the actual plot. Talia does some guerrilla shit to mess with Maria, Paz sets up Radío Libertad and Paolo gets our help in settling his debt with Bébé. Talia finds out about Paolo's plans to escape Yara and convinces him to do one last gig first. Only catch? It's at Marquessa's villa. Her heavily guarded villa.
Ooookay, so we clear it out and set up their gear and Máximas Matanzas does their thing. Their thing is absolute bangers so its pretty enjoyable to listen to as we fend of the inevitable wave upon wave of FND reinforcements coming to shut them down. This, understandably, scares Paolo shitless for their safety while Talía is in full protest mode and wants to keep going. The pair essentially break up on the spot after a heated argument and Paolo goes AWOL, leaving us with a heartbroken Paz and a pissed off Talía. We've a brief mission with Paz that has some nice character moments for Daní and then we steal some press passes to infiltrate a press meeting with Marquessa at a museum dedicated to some Viviro propaganda. Also in attendance is Dr Reyes, the man behind the creation of Viviro who, after we bust in on a televised interview with Reyes and Marquessa, essentially plays dumb and runs off before Talía and Daní can realize "huh, maybe he'd be a useful asset". Buuuut Talía's in full protest mode again and sits Marquessa down for an interview, to which Marquessa's response is "Not only am I a propaganda queen and totally Diego's mom, I'm also a transphobe!" which gets her gunned down by Talía. With the televised murder of a member of government now under their belts, Máximas Matanzas are public enemy number 1 in Ville de Oro, so we go to find Paolo, last seen at a nearby airport… apparently fleeing by himself? Not totally clear but honestly, given how Talía committed an assassination on live TV after the break-up, the pair seem to make rash decisions in the heat of the moment. We find Bébé in his stead, seemingly having been caught by the FND and selling out Paolo to save himself. We track Paolo to an abandoned resort and shock, horror, the Doctor did it. Dr Reyes has Paolo strapped to a table like a villain of the week in Dexter and after drugging us, sews a phone rigged with a PG-240 dispenser into us to pump us full of the poison and causing hallucinations because he's a "Science before morals" type of evil scientist. Sorry, let me rewind, HE SOWS A PHONE INSIDE US. T his dude was literally running scared last mission, and now he's Mr cool calm and collected as he experiments on us. Luckily, Talía beaks in an undetermined amount of time later (cause being cut open and sewn shut without any anaesthetic will make you pass in and out of consciousness) to free the pair, but she takes a bullet to the throat from a surprise soldier after cutting us free. Paolo rushes her ahead to Matías while we suffer a hallucinogenic car trip over. Once we arrive and cut the phone out ourselves, Matías fixes us up and stabilizes a passed out Talía, whose essentially out for the rest of this arc. Paolo is now ready for some vengeance and after a brief chat with Clara and Juan, who are perfectly fine to pull out of Ville de Oro now María is dead to which Paolo gives a resounding "Fuck you", we start chasing down leads on Dr Reyes, starting with his second in command. After a chase across the beach, we corner him for Reyes's location and the millisecond he gives it up, Paolo executes him on the spot. Paolo is very much in for some guerrilla shit now and he organizes a raid on Reye's lab. After breaking in, Reyes does some more Dexter shit, some more hallucinations annnnnd we shoot him. Dude decides to try 1v1 solider. He gets got. Cool. Anyway, after escaping with help from Juan, Paolo gives his terms to Clara about his own revolution, to which Clara is more than happy to support. Talía survives, the two are back together and the pair show Paz more respect as a third part of the group. That’s a wrap on Máximas Matanzas.
Overall, Ville De Oro is a bit more volatile then Madrugada in terms of his characters. Máximas Matanzas are overall a better bunch then the Monteros, who're really help up by Espada, but their antagonists are a bit… well, they kinda suck. María Marquessa should have a LOT more impact, given how she's Diego's mother AND convinced Antón to even have a kid to secure his legacy (yeah, idk either, there's a lot of world-building in notes and stuff like that shouldn't be in a random shack on a lake) as well as the entire motivating factor for Talía wanting to go on a rampage. If we were rescuing Talía from the True Yaran Academy to begin with instead of clearing out their camp, that would've been a better introduction then "Oh yeah, my inciting incident happened off-screen". María essentially acts as the stereotypical Karen but with added fascism until she lets it slip that she's also a transphobe and gets mag-dumped by Talía on telly. Reyes is even worse. A cool twist villain, to be fair, but once the shock wears off, there's like two missions left and he only appears in one of them. It really sucks cause he does the most damage outta the two in Ville De Oro and his death does a serious number on Antón personally. Towards the end of the game, Antón reveals he was diagnosed with leukaemia thirteen years ago and that's what convinced him to have a kid in order to carry on his paradise plans after he's gone. Reyes was treating him with Viviro but now he's dead, Antón has three months to live. This does lead me to the Castillo cutscene we see at the end of the Ville De Oro section where Antón's struggling with writing an announcement, while attached to an IV drip and Diego needing to help with his wording. It's a nice culmination of what our actions have actually done in the Ville De Oro, Antón has lost his doctor AND the person in charge of his image, so he's been hit hard. Paz has a nice character arc, Matías is neat if underdeveloped and whole thing is kinda… fine. It-its fine. Paolo and Talía are great, Paz is great, but the overall arc and villains drag the whole thing down a few notches. One last province before the end, and this time, its gonna be a bit more… engaging. El Este awaits.
El Este (The Kids Are Alright)
El Este begins with us being sent to recruit the old Legends of '67, the heroes of the revolution that kicked out Antón's father. After a phone call to an eager El Tigre, we climb up to their mountain village and meet the trio of El Tigre, Lucky Mama and Lorenzo. After the latter two essentially say "mate, we've already beaten this, we ain't in the mood for new game+" , El Tigre comes up with the idea of stealing some medical supplies from FND and "gifting" them to Mama on behalf of Libertad to soften her up. It there that we meet Jonrón, second in command of La Moral, a rebel group that’s largely comprised of students and young people, going for the same supplies. A compromise is made and, once the medicine is brought back, Jonrón gets to fangirl over the Legends for a second… until they speak poorly of La Moral's tactics. She gets pissed, storms off and we follow to meet the leader of La Moral, Yelena Morales. With that, lets run down the cast of El Este. Firstly, El Tigre. He's eager, he's perky, he loves his life and loves a good guerrilla. The man's pretty much the perfect grandad with an AK to boot. He's great, simply put. Lorenzo literally exists. I'll be honest, there WAS a sidequest from him, but i honestly didn't do it and all he does in the campaign is drive a tank around. He's fine. Lucky Mama is the mother of the group, extremely wise and even more cautious of La Moral and Daní, for good reason. She's not involved much until the latter half of the campaign, but she makes up for her lost time. On the La Moral front, we have Jonrón, a former sports star and general life of the party, she's all about boots on the ground and sticking it to the FND. She's a younger El Tigre in all honesty, and she's just as fun. Finally, hackerwoman Yelena is smart, passionate and a born leader for La Moral. She has plans and she's very good at making them work. Then, on the other side, we have Admiral Benitez whose as stereotypically "hard nose army person" as you can get. She's a True Yaran to the bone and makes war crimes her daily routine. We also have Sean McKay, a Canadian businessman who runs the import and export of Viviro for the Castillos and if I hadn't told you he was Canadian, you'd be right in thinking he's our "Oh yeah, America bad" character. Dude's a veteran of making profit in warzones and he's not afraid to talk about it. He's pretty calm overall though, its pretty run-of-the-mill for him until Daní's at his door with a gun.
So, with all that said, how do things pan out? Well, if I'm honest, it’s a bit of a bloodbath. We start doing most of our missions for La Moral, weakening Benitez's hold on the region until El Tigre, tired of hanging out on the mountain, comes down and officially joins La Moral. Afterwards, we rob his old tank, hit some convoys and clear out a hotel that the FND were using as a prison/torture camp that La Moral use as a backup HQ. After that, it's a full frontal assault on Benitez's island fort in one of the stand-out missions of the game, where we put the Admiral down for good. After a cute celebratory mission with Yelena and Jónrón where we learn some backstory, namely that Jónrón's brother and her were arrested early on in La Moral's run and that Yelena had to chose between Jónrón and the brother to get freed. The catch? Yelena and the brother were dating. And the brother got executed the next day by pure chance. Shit sucks. However, a night of partying later and the gang reunite at the hotel to plan the next move aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand they're under attack. Well, it's fine, they can handle it, nothing new- oh poison bombs. Oh god, El Tigre's dead, and so is Jónrón. That escalated quickly. Yeah, so we go right from a party with some backstory to watching El Tigre choke to death on poison gas and hearing Jónrón die on the radio. Nice. This is finally what gets Lucky Mama into the fight, as now everyone's eyes turn to McKay. Pipelines are bombed, jammers are destroyed, servers are hacked and we corner McKay like, two or three missions later on a ship trying to escape Yara. Until he turns his phone to us and Juan is on the other end, telling us to leave him be as he'll fund Libertad. Oh. Okay, so here's where Far Cry 6 decides to make a branching path thing that essentially comes down to "Do you want a unique item or 6k pesos that are literally gonna be worthless in the endgame?". So obviously you shoot the motherfucker cause fuck him and the gang celebrate back at the original Moral HQ. Clara and Juan rock up, Juan not mentioning a word about McKay, and La Moral promises to fight alongside Libertad, but ALONGSIDE is there in bold and underlined. La Moral do things their way.
If it seems like El Este was a lot shorter in comparison to Ville De Oro and Madrugada, it really isn't. The problem is that, well, by this point in my playthrough, I was just powering towards the ending. I was doing the missions, trying to process the dialogue but like with Ville De Oro, the villians don't do much for me. Benitez is literally just angry soldier and McKay isn't around long enough to be of any real impact beyond bombing the hotel, which to be fair, the dude is fun as hell, I do like his character, he's just not around enough. Another thing to note is how much character development is in the little phone calls you get with the cast. When you come across a new location, a village or a museum, you call El Tigre or Jónrón to ask about it and both give little bits of worldbuilding. Jónrón used to work at a museum dedicated to ruining the history of the '67 revolution, El Tigre had a friend in a fishing village that got razed by the FND, these little tidbits to make both characters that bit more fleshed out. Lucky Mama has a nice dialogue with you during the pipeline mission about how the 5th member of the Legends, Lobo, who El Tigre tried telling us in the tank mission but was cut-off because… tank, tried to have the leader of the Legends, Espinosa, assassinated during the final assault on Esperanza, who he believed would become a tyrant. Lobo felt the other legends were weak, Lorenzo not noticing one of his girlfriend's spying for the FND and Lucky Mama allowing prisoners to live. He planned to kill both as traitors once he took power and told all this to his one friend. El Tigre. Who killed him. And Espinosa became a tyrant. So that sucks. El Tigre claimed Lobo died in the line of duty and mourns his death every year, with a bust of him at the entrance to their mountain home. It's a tragic twist in the story and explains how Lucky Mama distrusts us, another lone wolf guerrilla like Lobo, to not get caught up in the bloodshed and try to take control. It's pretty nice and it's a nice sister story to that of Espinosa, who fell through on all his promises. Yelena has calls about how she got roped into setting up the McKay software infrastructure while she was still a student and, upon realizing what it was being used for, dipped and started La Moral. There's a LOT of dialogue in the phone calls in El Este and unfortunately, I wasn't taking notes of every single one and apparently, neither was anyone else as the fandom wiki for Far Cry 6 is WOEFULLY underdeveloped. Just trust me when I say, this area definitely had some of the best character bits. The weird "Do you kill McKay or Not" choice really feels pointless given how little it does for the story, but I guess its fine.
Now that we've done all that, time to wrap things up.
Esperanza (Truth or Lies)
After completing each province, we get a Libertad mission to complete. The first has us planting bombs to trap Antón in a hotel he's supposed to give a speech at but turns out the only Castillo there was Diego. We've a brief conversation, but Diego let's us escape through a secret door. After that, there's a mission where we learn about Juan smuggling Viviro to the CIA, but as we deliver the dead drops, we're captured and tortured by Antón and General Sanchez. Diego kills Sanchez and convinces Antón to let us go for not killing him back in the hotel, which Antón agrees to while slyly throwing a grenade back into our cell, setting off a chain of explosions for us to escape. Finally, there's a small cutscene where we meet Clara. She's been invited to parley with Castillo to avoid further bloodshed and we get a small flashback of Clara and Talia discussing the beginnings of Libertad, with the latter talking about how the revolution "doesn't come in her colour". We'll come back to that. Finally, Juan calls us, demanding we meet him off the coast of Antón's private island. He tells us that Clara was captured on the way to the parley and that its now or never on both the rescue mission and the final assault on Ezperanza. So we sneak onto the island, past the elite of the elite to find Antón, Diego and Clara sitting around the dinner table. Juan is outside on sniper support. Antón admits to his leukemia and, noticing we have a connection with Diego, makes a proposal. Become a general in the FND and an advisor to Diego and Clara gets to live. Juan can't get a clear shot at Antón so he goes for Diego, but Daní jumps in and saves the kid. Antón, in retaliation, executes Clara on the spot. We then clear out the island after the Castillo's flee back to their homebase, a skyscraper in Esperanza. Juan and Daní argue which goes pretty much nowhere and Daní rallies our allies to the island for the final assault. There's some time to listen in on our allies interacting with one another, Lucky Mama and Paolo being a highlight. The assault is planned as everyone gathers to the boats and launches a full scale attack on the capital. It goes off pretty much without a hitch, everyone playing their roles well and, most importantly, no deaths! Damn, that was easy. Daní hits the tower solo and fights to the top floor where we have our final encounter with the Castillos. Daní promises that Diego won't suffer like Antón did as a child when his father was executed and Antón, like a totally normal person would, shoots his kid and slits his own throat. Diego dies in Daní's arms with the final words "you were the lucky one". Espada, Paolo and Yelena all arrive and wonder what to do now, to which Daní essentially says "sort it out among yourselves" and goes to bury Diego. We flash forward to Juan and Daní at Clara's grave, saying a farewell and going off to begin the endgame of fighting the Insurgencies left over of the Castillo loyalists. There's a credit stinger of Juan delivering some Viviro to a """""Smuggler"""" as payment for his support. Said """""smuggler"""" comments on how crazy it is that Antón killed his own kid and that's Far Cry 6. So! Final round up of the story before we get into the gameplay.
Juan fucking sucks. If there was any character I felt SHOULD have died by the end of the campaign, it's the guy smuggling shit to the CIA for no apparent reward. We never see the results of Juan's dealings and during the dead drop mission, he talks about skimming some off the top of all his dealings with various political figures and secret services. Hell, the dude was working for Espinosa during his downfall, Juan ain't an angel. When he takes the shot at Diego and gets Clara killed, Daní takes a swing at him afterwards and he essentially dismisses the ENTIRE thing and switches it to "You need to be a leader Daní" and that's the end of the conversation. Juan gets out scot-free and honestly, I hate that. Personally, I would've hoped for the stuff with the Legends and Lobo to be foreshadowing, with Juan trying to take power and us being the El Tigre in the situation, which could have offered a meaningful ending choice of taking power for ourselves or killing our "friend" and saving Yara. Likewise, the ending where we leave our three allies to bury Diego and say "Sort yourselves out" really seems to be dodging the hard questions the games been asking the entire campaign. So many of the antagonists throughout the game ask "what are you actually gonna DO once you take power?" and there's a previous revolution in the country's recent history that had such terrible long-term effects that the country is still technologically in the 1960s, with only the military having any vehicles or weaponry from the 21st century and even THEN, their air force is mostly comprised of world war 2 fighter planes. The country barely has 2G internet and they willingly voted back in the family they overthrew. So you would think, after that boat conversation with Clara back at the beginning of the game, after Paolo's motives of wanting to make sure queer people are looked after, after Antón's family being racially discriminated against after the '67 revolution and Talia's comments about the revolution not coming in her colour, all with that conversation in the back of our mind from Lucky Mama and Juan stating that Clara was essentially the only hope for the long-term health of Yara…. Nothing. It's just "Welp, have fun friends, I'm off to do the Ubisoft gameplay loop for eternity". And I know, its pretty hypocritical of me to ask why Ubisoft didn't answer what the correct course of action for a rebel group whose taken power is when I started this piece absolving myself of the same responsibility, but the thing is, Far Cry has done this already. Far Cry 4 had those two endings where Kyrat is either a patriarchal fundamentalist theocracy or an authoritarian drug state which is a complicated way of saying "Hey, your revolution buddies are psycho, actually." Like, we DID the "Revolution leaders end up running a shit show" and, while I have thoughts about Ubisoft and their habit of both-siding so many of their stories and never doing anything with it, I'd rather a definitive ending then just not addressing it at all, ESPECIALLY after so much in-game conversation about it. It honestly feels like there's a cutscene or story arc missing at the end, like I said above, some sort of final second choice. As for Antón and Diego…well…
Antón Castillo had the potential to be an amazing villain. He's an interesting philosophy and backstory, he's played by a PHENOMONAL actor and Daní and Clara are great foils for him. But we just don't interact with him enough. Daní and Antón interact 4 times throughout the entire game, the boat at the start, the torture scene, dinner on the island and the final scene. Compare this to Far Cry 5 where Joseph Seed is constantly on the radio and is just THAT charismatic and interesting of a villain to hold his own or Far Cry 4 where Pagan Min is constantly calling you to ask how your days been. We get those scenes of Antón and Diego, but they really don't amount to much as Diego ends the game in pretty much the same mindset as he begun, not really hating his dad but definitly not down for the fascist stuff. Instead the big character shift comes in Antón, who goes from confident, in control and vicious to desperate and weak once Reyes is dead and María is gone. The man is trying to ignore the rebels at his doorstep and planning a new building while one of his last generals is like "WE GOT TO GO MAN, SHITS FUCKED". Diego plays along in what seems more like pity then any sort of agreement but Antón's coughing his lungs up all over the blueprints and dioramas. He's broken and pathetic and he ends the game killing his son in some sort of last act of vengeance, but all he's done is ending his legacy that he was so desperate to maintain at the cost of a kid who was FAR from a lost cause. This all could've been so much more fleshed out, but instead its mostly other characters talking about all the fucked shit he's done. Antón was voted into office, he didn't take control like Pagan or Joseph, he was elected to it and then solidified his grip on the country, that has so much potential. If this dude, whose father was such a dictator that it warranted a revolution that in turn, failed so badly that the people willingly voted him in, I wanna see how charismatic he is, how he turns people, what he promises those who help him. Like, I cannot stress this enough, he was ELECTED TO OFFICE after his DICTATOR FATHER was ousted from power. It's insane how much potential that statement holds in terms of Antón's power of persuasion, fuck Joseph Seed's apparent supernatural ability to brainwash folk, Antón should be out here wheeling and dealing to get everyone on-side. Hell, Daní's an orphan, why wouldn't Antón have access to some sort of birth records? Anything beyond "Hey, be my general and I super-duper pinky swear I won't kill your girlfriend" and then suicide. Oh and that smuggler at the end is Vaas, surprise, Vaas isn't dead. Cool. Woo. I won't lie, I understand the hype with Vaas but I really don't feel like he needs to come back. It’s a bid odd and is either a once-off thing to advertise the DLC rouge-lite mode where you play as the villians of the past 3 games, or as set up for the future. However, I lean towards the former as the ending of the Pagan Min level appears to be teasing both his involvement with Far Cry 5 and Joseph Seeds mission, but that is TOTALLY off topic so we're instead gonna go into the gameplay. In conclusion, Far Cry 6's story has a lot of high points, almost equally as many mid-points and a lot of missed potential but is definitely the high point of the game.
Gameplay (And the other shoe drops)
That title implies a lot, so lemme just rip the band-aid off straight away. The core gameplay you'll be engaging with from moment to moment is the EXACT same as every far cry previous. You've got your takedowns, your gunplay, your healing animations, your variety of gadgets, your wingsuit, your parachute, your grapple hook et cetra et cetra. The driving is the same, the stealth is the same, the outposts are the same. The only sizeable difference to the gameplay is the bits surrounding it, how you get new stuff and what you spend the resources you collect on. In short, its kinda shitty. Previous Far Cry games kept things simple, as you level up, you can unlock more health or various takedown modifications such as throwing knives, pulling the pins of grenades or just straight chain takedowns, more stamina and so on. Now, pretty much all of that is tied to your arsenal. At the start of the game, you have a single charge of healing. At the end of the game, you will still have a single charge of healing. You will have the same stamina, the same health, the same movement speed, the same takedown abilities. The only difference being made is what gear you will be wearing. They removed the RPG skill tree elements completely along with any sense of character progression and replaced it with scavenger hunts. To get new weapons, you open FND caches scattered throughout Yara. To get the gunpowder material needed to add attachments and modifications to these weapons, you need to open FND caches scattered throughout Yara or do some activities, like ambushing supply drops. To get gear like armour, you need to find Libertad caches scattered throughout Yara. To find the supremo-bond needed to upgrade the new Supremo equipment, you need to find Libertad caches scattered throughout Yara or do some activities, like ambushing supply drops. To UNLOCK the Supremo equipment or Resolver weapons, you need to go to anti-aircraft sites and find the depleted uranium materials which, you guessed it, are scattered throughout Yara. You want to equip your starting pistol with a suppressor? Go find some gunpowder and random materials you can pick up literally anywhere. You want to upgrade an AK with a red dot sight, a compensator and a laser sight, that's about 6 gunpowder. Keep in mind, you only get a single gunpowder per FND cache, or activity. There are no ways to get more then a single gunpowder or bond at a time, beyond buying it with microtransactions. AND there's always the chance you get a gun, or, once you unlock all the guns, just some more random scrap used to make more expensive upgrades, that you can't make anyway without gunpowder. You see the problem here? Its the same thing with the Libertad caches except now, you might get some armour you'll never equip because why on gods green earth would I ever wear some gloves that gives me more money for killing poisioned enemies when 1: Money is literally worthless (which we'll get back to) and 2: there are just better gear available… IF you get lucky. Maybe you'll get the gloves that make your throwing knives lock onto bad guys or you'll get the gloves that slightly increase your armour piercing defence. Which leads me onto my next point. The ammo types.
There are now five different ammo types in the game, besides the starting ammo each gun has by default. Soft-Target, Armour-Piercing, Poison, Incendiary and Blast. In reality, its Worse Armour-Piercing, Armour-Piercing, Bad, Bad and Blast, because every enemy dies in a single headshot. In theory, its an interesting concept. You can truly customize your build into whatever you want, from a pure stealthy ninja to a pyromaniac to a hulking behemoth with poison LMGs and a gun that shoots CDs. The PROBLEM is you NEED to have an answer for every situation. If you're running around as a stealthy ninja, at some point you're going to need something to deal with tanks or helicopters. If you're running around as a pyro, you'll need something to deal with other pyros. You always need to have armour-piercing for the elites, you always need explosives for vehicles. Soft-Target is supposed to do more damage to lightly-armoured soldiers, but it doesn't seem to make much difference from armour-piercing, especially since a headshot with either does the same thing. AND its just another slot on your gun that requires gunpowder to change. It is, needless to say, a fckin LOT. Compare this to previous far cry games, where you just get money to buy guns, their attachments and camoes. You want a better gun? Keep playing, level up and the shop will sell more. You want a unique gun? Go find it. Now, literally everything to do with them is "go find it". There ARE some buildings you can build at guerrilla HQs that allow you to buy weapons and by-pass the entire RNG of FND caches. But also, if you're lucky, you can find an RPG almost immediately and just throw the balance of the game out the window. You would usually not get the more modern, military weapons until the endgame but I'm running around at the 50% completion mark like Sam Fisher with the latest and greatest weapons. And once you have all the gear in the game, shops become useless. They don't sell gunpower or bond, they just stand empty. You can sell materials for money or trade animal skins for materials, but the hard stuff is still all chance. Or of course, a few quid in the microtransaction shop. Which, mentioning skins, brings me to my next point.
Hunting is worthless. You can't craft bags to hold more ammo or equipment, as that's all in the gear section now. It's all just for materials and some unique outfits. I literally never used the bow for the entirety of the game and by the time I built the dedicated hunting building in a HQ, I had a surplus of materials to upgrade it and unlock the ability to kill animals with any sort of damage and not ruin the skins, so I never needed to use the bow. There's a fishing building that I genuinely have no idea why it exists because who the hell is gonna go fishing in Far Cry when the hunting isn't even rewarding. So you have shops that are worthless, hunting that isn't rewarding, fishing that shouldn't be a thing and an upgrade system that highlights everything wrong with Ubisoft's game design of "find thing to upgrade thing to find thing". It is not fun. You would think "oh ok, then maybe I'll just go get the unique guns, they're always great". Nope. They're just the same guns with a set loadout you can't change, and once you find them, you can apply their skin to its non-unique counterpart. And in a lot of cases, the unique gun's skin is just a recoloured version of a default skin you can just unlock with spray cans, a unique material that appears in cases scattered throughout Yara, except when they actually contain weapon charms. So much of the game is tied into finding a box and hoping you get what you want. Levelling up does, as far as I can tell, literally nothing beyond what supremo or resolver you can unlock. I've not even talked about supremo or resolver due to how little they really add. Essentially, they're a super ability or just another gun. You want to fire a bunch of rockets, use that supremo. You wanna use a harpoon gun, take that resolver. They aren't really that interesting and for gear that was such a big part of the marketing (and in the case of supremo, a massive fuck off backpack that ruins ANY semblance of fashion) it’s a real let down. I never felt like I had the advantage with a resolver, and the supremo's outside of the rocket launcher backpack are extremely underwhelming, with the exception of the Trida supremo/resolver combo that lets you see and shoot through walls with a golden gun straight outta Destiny, I do quite like that.
Now, with all that being said, what are you doing in Far Cry 6 once you've spent years of your life trying to find materials to make a suppressor? There's the usual Ubisoft staple of "Take control of Outpost, destroy Object impeding your progress across the map, collect Item to create and upgrade equipment" element that they popularized with Far Cry 3 and the Ezio trilogy of Assassins Creed that now has the open-world genre is such a headlock that Breath of the Wild was deemed revolutionary for… not having these features. (Not to discredit BOTW, games still incredible). There's one new edition to the mainline games coming from New Dawn's Expeditions that are the newly renamed Special Operations. These take Dani to an entirely separate area of Yara to track down a bioweapon and steal it from the FND, with little intel on where it is and how to traverse the area. These range from military auctions in old Conquistador castle ground to abandoned dinosaur theme parks. These earn you Monedo, a unique currency that allows you to buy high-end materials and some unique gear, with a weekly rotation that includes items from the Ubisoft store. Yes, they're keeping that around, you can fast track all the gathering and exploring by simply forking out some cash for in-game materials and maps to collectibles. Monedo is also earned from the end-game Insurgency mode, in which the remnants of Castillo's loyalists take over a province of Yara every week and reset all the checkpoints, outposts and anti-aircraft guns you've captured and destroyed, and now you gotta go take it all back, alongside completing a special operation, to unlock to location of this Insurgency groups leader. Kill them, you get a nice unique gun, although given how you only have to complete a certain number of Outposts and etc to unlock the boss, there will still be Outposts outside your control that you have to go clear, even once the Insurgency of that week is beaten. These Insurgency leaders have zero personality beyond a literal bulletpoint list of their traits in the Insurgency menu that tells you what you gotta do to find them. These activities, by the way, there's no new twist on them beyond a new flag on the map. Same enemies, same alarms, same everything. They've just a big number on their head saying "these are tough!" before yet another armour-piercing round takes them down in a single shot. The MOST variation is a higher number of elite enemies, who might do something crazy like an elite sniper using a shotgun at close range instead of a pistol, or a rusher using an EMP grenade that just stuns you briefly instead of a frag grenade. Small, almost insignificant details that you would think had an impact on how you engage with them, but again, most of them go down in a single swift headshot that, look, Far Cry isn't Rainbow Six Siege, hitting NPCs in the head is not that hard. This brings me to the actual combat of the game.
The thing with Far Cry 6 is that, while its absolutely just another Far Cry game, the combat is a bit…worse. Guns are essentially just skins and its very hard to tell what the actual difference between an AK-47 and a AK-M is besides fire rate and the amount of resources you can spend to customize it. The sniper rifles are almost all the exact same besides which can fire faster. Pistols? You have 5 identical handguns and a revolver that, for all intents and purposes, is the worse option as you would think the trade off of less ammo for more damage would apply, and yet, I used an M9 from the early game all the way until the last bit of Ville de Oro because, again, armour-piercing ammo. So you have a bunch of weapons that are more or less identical beyond a few outliers, hows the armour? Not… terrible. The designs are quite nice, I do like the DIY aesthetic. In terms of actual usage though, very hit or miss. There's waaaay too many "reduce [INSERT DAMAGE TYPE] damage" armour sets, especially when you get a set of armour towards the end of the campaign that covers all bases if you wanna be a run-and-gun type player. As said previously, some old skills you'd unlock as you level up in previous games, such as the sidearm or grenade takedowns as well as sabotaging alarms, are tied to gear, as is reducing detection speed and increasing movement speed. So you can equip a set that has a bunch of movement speed buffs, do your best Barry Allen impression across Yara and then, once you arrive at a base, throw on some stealth armour and sneak around. It's an interesting idea, but is held back by the same problems as the guns, bound to randomized drops. Plus, you can't actually upgrade these armour pieces, only the Supremo's passive effects which… aren't very good, mostly small things like ammo capacity increases or resistances. Which brings us to the enemies of the game, the FND themselves.
There are about 5 to 7 enemy types in Far Cry 6. You've your default solider, the sniper, the heavy, the medic and then the two "thrower" variants, flame and poison. Every single one of these guys can be hit once, in the head, with a armour piercing shot, and die. Now, if you DON'T do that, that's when things get a bit more complicated. The throwers have a big tank on their back you can hit and explode, the soldiers have grenades, snipers snipe, medics can revive guys you've downed but not killed (what the trigger for this is, ive no idea) and heavy's have a lot of armour and carry LMGs. There's also the elite version of these guys, who are more armoured and usually add another trick to the arsenal. Heavies now have a Rainbow Six Siege deployable shield (I am not joking), Snipers have shotguns as a backup, the throwers have an assault rifle back up with the matching ammo, Soldiers have better grenades and elite medics literally don't exist as I never encountered one. There's also a new addition to the franchise, TANKS. Yup, since you're fighting, ya know, the army, they'll throw tanks at you from time to time. You've two ways to deal with a tank, either spend a lot of time and ammo brute forcing it while it almost one shots you with its main cannon or throw a single EMP grenade at it and jump on top to either one-shot it or hijack it. We've also the helicopters that come in light and heavy forms, the only real difference being health and whether or not you can snipe the pilot out of the cockpit without blast rounds. Now, what do all of these bad guys have in common? They spawn in like mobs in Minecraft. I cannot begin to count the amount of times I've cleared an area only to turn around to grab a collectible nearby, come back, and found a whole new gang of guys just walking around. Helicopters just appear and chase you down sometimes, I've watched military boats just appear in the sea. It is shameless how much the game allows you to see it just dropping more bad guys into the world. Of course, previous games had this same mechanic, but the difference is that bad guys didn't just appear on your radar over the ridge when you were being chased down, they drove in or got airdropped. The ways they arrived were diegetic, they made sense in the world. If I dip into the jungle to avoid a manhunt, I shouldn't have a squad of special forces already just wandering between the trees. It really makes the game feel a lot cheaper than it is, after clearing out so many guys only for the game to just dump two choppers and a tank like "ok cool". It doesn't help the player feel like they're overcoming the odds when the game never seems to make the odds matter.
Honestly, there's a lot more I could go into with Far Cry 6. Some of the Treasure Hunts, the replacement for the Survivalist Stashes from Far Cry 5, are fun. There's a whole bunch of racing challenges tied to upgrading your personal rides, there's a bunch of various animal buddies and the actual world design and art direction of the game is solid. But there's always a caveat to each of these. Treasure Hunts offer nothing more than a gun or more materials, both of which I've covered already. Racing challenges offer some neat upgrades, but I never found a use for them, and you can just destroy a bunch of military vehicles to get a variety of different turrets. I only ever found use for one animal buddy (the ghost panther) as the others simply didn't do much worthwhile, and the world design, while solid, is just MORE Far Cry. More open fields and mountainous terrain, more jungles, more islands. The one potentially unique spot, the capital city of Esperanza, is extremely streamlined with very few routes through it and a permanent, much more aggressive anti-air state disabling any sort of rooftop exploration. Far Cry 6 is more Far Cry, and personally, I did enjoy my time with that because I do genuinely enjoy the gameplay loop, sneaking through outposts and shooting up military bases, and the characters you interact with during the story are mostly engaging and likeable. But there is barely any change beyond bad tweaks to how the ecosystem of the game works, with terrible material gathering and customization, money that serves zero purpose and the exact same activities you've been seeing since Far Cry 3.
Conclusion (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V)
Ubisoft have been attempting to reinvent their franchises over the past couple of years. the most recent Assassins Creed Trilogy of Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla going full RPG open-world collectathons, the newer Ghost Recon games essentially being Far Cry Lite, Watch Dogs Legion featuring multiplayer raids and Hyperscape…. Well, it exists. But its resulted in a LOT of their games feeling extremely samey. They're all live service, they've all microtransactions and they, in some cases, are crossing over in big ways. Ubisoft feels like they're trying to build its own interconnected universe which, while cool, means nothing if all their games boil down to the same gameplay, but with slight tweaks in perspective and movement. Personally, as much as I adore Odyssey for very selfish, I-read-a-lot-of-Percy-Jackson, hot women go brr reasons, I do miss the Assassins V Templar conflicts that made up the older entries, as the new games focus on the precursor organizations. As much time as I put into Ghost Recon Wildlands, I had zero interest in touching Breakpoint once I played the beta and realized how much of a mess it was, never mind the non-entity that was it's story (even though I am a sucker for Jon Bernthal). Watch Dogs was never a game series that intrigued me, but for how much attention the whole "play as anyone" system got in marketing, all reviews and feedback say that it came at the cost of story as well as generally not being that interesting. Hyperscape…. Well, to be blunt, fucking died the millisecond the launch week ended. Ubisoft, to give them some credit, IS trying to innovate in some areas, but it is ALWAYS at the cost of what people play their games for. Far Cry 6 is no different. I am always going to support a developer trying new things with a franchise, again, Origins and Odyssey are great games that I thoroughly enjoyed and The Division 2's gameplay loop, loot system and, on a lesser note, world-building and story range from solid to great and I wish it got the resources to truly match up to Destiny 2 in the online looter shooter market. But Far Cry 6 is an example of innovating the wrong things and keeping the stalest product untouched. It's story, while enjoyable and full of colourful characters, has an equal amount of mediocre missions, slow pacing and boring NPCs. Its gameplay, while the classic Far Cry shooter, is held back by an atrocious material economy and upgrade system. It is, and I say this with the most sincere disappointment, the most Ubisoft game I've played in a while, and that sucks.
Comments