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Splitterguy

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Far Cry Ranked

There is no better illustration of where AAA games were at in the 2010s than the Far Cry catalogue. As a series, Far Cry only occasionally invents the 'new thing' that gets replicated in AAA games ad nauseum, but it always - always! - triples down on and streamlines the thing that is (or will become) standard issue fodder in big budget projects. The entire series is a barometer of popular opinion that way; from Far Cry 3 on, the series seems to intentionally evoke the popular aesthetics of the day in as provocative a manner as possible, to examine the big ideas circulating throughout the industry and ask 'but couldn't we do that bigger?'

The stories in Far Cry games follow suit, aping the work of other, better storytellers, but with bigger budgets and better marketing. They're the equivalent of the last guy in the room to espouse an opinion, but they're also the one who says it the loudest. Even the Far Cry stories which are commonly perceived as bold digressions from the formula are less flavorful adaptations of more singular projects. Far Cry: New Dawn, for example - that game simply doesn't end up looking the way it does without Borderlands succeeding first. Far Cry 3 doesn't digress into six different drug-trippy set pieces without a half-decade of comedic drug trips in film doing it first; it certainly wouldn't hang it's hat on the line "Do you know the definition of insanity?" without Heath Ledger's Joker capturing the popular imagination four years earlier.

At the end of the day, the big concepts the Far Cry franchise steals from end up enveloped within the recyclable FPS open world format, and they're all fairly friction-less and accessible. Because of that - because every game in the series (except the first two) is desperate for your attention and terrified that you'll grow bored of them - it's surprisingly easy to blow your way through the whole series.

Note: I haven't played the Far Cry: New Dawn or Far Cry 6 yet, so they're not on this list. Gave up early on during Far Cry 5 when it was free on Xbox for a weekend and couldn't get past the stuff I didn't like in Far Cry Primal, and basically stopped playing there.

List items

  • The only exception to the rule in the Far Cry series, Far Cry 2 was a genuinely radical game that invented/perfected concepts which would later be adapted by PUBG, Breath of the Wild, Metal Gear Solid V, and other big-huge, discourse-generating titles. Unlike most open world games which try to deliver a coherent story in *spite* of the fact that the player has complete freedom to undercut it, Far Cry 2 uses the dynamism of the open world format and the interlocking systems present in most Far Cry titles to deliver one of the most bleak, thoughtful, and affecting narratives I've ever experienced in video games.

    Far Cry 2 would probably be more widely beloved had it released as its own, standalone title. It's a complete outlier in the rest of the series, and would probably be better appreciated by someone who likes Pathologic than by someone who likes either Far Cry 1 or Far Cry 3. In fact, from what I've read, most Far Cry fans seem to disregard this game about war crimes for not making it fun enough to shoot people in the head, which...y'know. Gamers.

    Like the rest of the series, though, it's still very much a 'post-' type of game, in this case a 'post-colonial' game that very much mirrors the western conception of 'we feel guilty about what the west has done to this group of people but still can't bring ourselves to portray those people' thing present in movies like Blood Diamond. Still: if you're looking for an example of a title which intelligently uses its mechanics to illustrate cause and affect, or simply an example of a narrative which could only be told in the format of a video game, this is a stellar example of both the genre's and the medium's potential.

  • I can see why people liked this one even if it didn't fully grab me. Take Far Cry 3's open world and its many plunder-able territories, throw in a heavily simplified version of Far Cry 2's warring faction system, and feature a performance by Troy Baker when he's at the absolute apex of his popularity. Like Far Cry 3, there's no punishment for failure, so it's very easy to pick up and play, and the world design is still very beautiful.

    Far Cry 4 takes the open world trends of the mid '10s and correctly assumes that wide audiences will want more of that 'run to waypoint, kill things, earn XP' loop - except this time, they'll want a LOT of it, over a MUCH longer period of time. That's the biggest hurdle to enjoying Far Cry 4 in 2022 - it's Far Cry 3 again, almost *exactly* Far Cry 3 again, except this time it's thrice as long.

    I really don't care for Far Cry 4's narrative, which is my biggest hangup about it. The antagonist is Pagan Min, a flamboyant dictator whose personality is adjacent to the popular western understanding of a figure like Kim Jong Un: youngish for his position, celebrity-obsessed, and arrogant. Your job as the player is to topple his army and assassinate him. The player is given the choice to support two factions towards this end: one who wants to return to a bloodthirsty tradition of mass execution in the name of a bygone religion, and one who wants to upend the entire country and replace it with a nation-wide opium production facility. Both sides are willing to slaughter innocent people to accomplish their goals. The idea is that the player is meant to feel guilt (or at least doubt) that killing a genocidal dictator was really the best decision, considering the alternatives.

    In other words, Far Cry 4 gives you three arbitrarily psychopathic mass murderers who all aim to become (or remain) a dictator, and asks you to consider if taking a radical action against one of them *at all* was the right thing to do. And, uh - sure it was! Pretty nihilistic perspective for a video game to take, if you ask me. It's not really a historically-minded depiction of revolution, even revolutions which end in further bloodshed. You can't just fill your plot with different atrocities and then try to argue that maybe not all atrocities are that bad. Not an especially compelling ethical quandary!

  • The original Far Cry was a tent pole, PC-only release, which featured open combat environments on a lush tropical island during an era otherwise dominated by brown, corridor-laden war games. It's a trip to play in 2022 - the level design heavily encourages stealth tactics, but because the enemy A.I. is completely fucking insane, you always end up in a chaotic disaster of a shootout anyhow. The open environments work a bit better in CryTek's next title, Crysis.

    I think the compliments to this game's departure from the '00s FPS norms are overstated. Halo had already broken the seal on open-ended combat encounters in lush environments, and unlike that game, Far Cry is still filled with the same generic military dudes with generic military tactics as every other FPS from the 2000s - that is, until it's suddenly a game about blasting apart Quake enemies, except this time, they're worse.

    Far Cry didn't inspire any great thought in me, but it was still a fun, casual playthrough. It's worth it to stick around for the hilariously unhinged performances, at least.

  • Indulgent, aggressive, pretentious, and spiteful, Far Cry 3 takes Far Cry 2's premise, coats it with a pile of sugar, and laces it with cocaine. It is the exemplar of the contemporary open world game, a title which promises infinite potential violence of which there is no consequence, all the while gesturing towards a narrative promise it's not invested in fulfilling.

    Far Cry 3 gives players the ultimate fantasy of video game colonialism, but it also perniciously uses an unreliable narrator to wag its finger at players for having played the game in the first place. It's a story in the "Spec Ops: The Line" or the "Hotline Miami" mode of 'wow, you sure had fun doing murder in this game in which I made murder fun, didn't you, you asshole?' At the same time, it doesn't want the narrative to ever *really* interfere with the fun of blowing people up and taking their land for yourself, so it places this flimsy unreliable narrator device on the back burner for 80% of the experience, and as a result, the vast majority of the audience missed its shallow attempt to subvert genre conventions.

    This is a remarkably stupid attempt at satire. It's going for something like Starship Troopers, but it doesn't come anywhere near its target because the indulgence takes so much precedence over the story. Even if it didn't, I'm really not convinced Far Cry 3 would work as satire. It would be really hard to deliver a post-colonialist story with richly defined colonialists and cartoon caricatures of the colonized, for obvious reasons. Considering the fact that Far Cry 3 is also aping that early 2010s 'whoa, aren't drugs craaaazy?' thing, it only gets more embarrassingly freshman year with age.

  • Far Cry: Primal is fascinating to me, but for a reason I suspect is different than the way it might be fascinating to a series fan. See, Ubisoft gave themselves this huge runway to do something radically new in this game, but only ended up proving that the Far Cry series just isn't worth paying attention to any longer. Unlike other Far Cry games, which mostly take place during the year of their release, this game depicts the origin of man. It replaces the vast military arsenal of past titles with bows, clubs and tamed creatures, and yet it's *still* more or less exactly the same as any other Far Cry game, or really, any other Ubisoft game.

    The best example: other Ubisoft titles at the time were giving players drones to spy on and tag enemies before engaging in combat. It's standard fare in any Ubisoft open world game at this point for the player to have a drone. But Primal can't give the player a drone, right? This is a game set in 10,000 BC. So how does Primal solve this quandary? Does it boldly forego the established convention of tagging enemies with drones, forcing the player to use other tools to their advantage? No - it allows you to tame a hawk which serves the same function as a drone, and tags enemies for you. You turn a hawk into a drone. If that isn't the most damning piece of evidence that Ubisoft is bereft of creativity...

    I didn't finish Primal, FYI. Something about having played all of the other Far Cry games up to this point and seeing the origins of man depicted as roving bands of bloodthirsty lunatics was a little too depressing.

  • You're Ubisoft, and you have a problem: Far Cry *SHOULD* be a smash hit, but it can't run on console because of Far Cry's huge, graphics-instensive environments. That's fine - break the levels into tiny chunks, give the player superhuman abilities, and throw that shit on Xbox. The Far Cry series will be the next big thing for sure.

    Or...maybe not. Of all the "original" Far Cry games, these console-exclusive spin-offs are the least interesting. Adding what basically amounts to the powers of the Crysis suit to the original game's mechanics actually ends up taking away from the combat encounters rather than adding to them. A big part of the joy in the first game (at least for me) was how careful you had to be to avoid damage in the middle of all the chaos, but giving the player an extra edge over everyone else limits the potential outcomes of any given gunfight.

  • Not a ton to say about this one. Take Far Cry 3, but shove decade-old "Team America: World Police" bits in it, all the while doing the 'borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered '80s' thing. If you enjoy something like South Park, I imagine Blood Dragon would hit better, but for me, playing it was like hearing the four loudest guys you've ever heard tell you a joke you hate over and over and over again. Really irritating.

    If I'm being honest, I think I bounced as hard off of this one as I did mostly because it's so unapologetically ugly to look at. Really bland, chunky, throw together-looking game.

  • In an abstract, broad sense, making a game in which you fight an armed group of American militants with incomprehensible politics sounds kind of funny, but that's not what Far Cry 5 sets out to do, despite what you may have heard.

    Far Cry 5 depicts a wide-scale, psychotically violent, state-wide cult who all possess a series of incompatible ideological stances that Far Cry 5 wants you, the player, to also begrudgingly concede is partially correct. It wants you to go 'y'know, that guy had a point' moments before or after you blow his brains out, to think, 'these people aren't fully wrong, but it's the method in which they achieve their goals that's wrong.' But in a key, internal sense, Far Cry 5's ideology is frustratingly nihilistic and incoherent.

    The Joseph Seed cult are American religious absolutionists whose beliefs heavily draw from Catholicism, but they're not actually Catholics. Their leadership and aesthetics gesture towards white nationalism, but they're ethnically diverse. They're American nationalists but they're also anti-American separationists. They signal, in every aesthetic way they possibly can, that they're Midwestern Trump-fanatics, but the election of Donald Trump is implicitly one of the inciting actions that led to their anti-American radicalization. The antagonists in this game are a slurry of these functionally nondescript but aesthetically evocative qualities the developers hope just about any American will perceive as not unlike the people or socio-political movements they hate in their real lives. In an attempt to make antagonists which *feel* like everyone, Ubisoft instead made a series of blank caricatures for players to do a Two Minutes of Hate onto. They are punching bags, who look like people you might know, to be abused in a tantrum of uncritical violence.

    And in between all this, Far Cry 5 triples down on the same dumb-as-shit Team America humor they did in Blood Dragon. When I got to the sidequest where the game has you slaughter fornicating bulls so that you can harvest their swollen balls for a good old fashioned Midwestern BBQ - a sequence which is set to Marvin Gaye's ever-parodied "Sexual Healing" - I literally laughed at the screen, said "haha that's ok!" and stopped playing Far Cry games.
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