Far Cry: Primal

Far Cry: Primal is an open world fps made by Ubisoft and is the fifth entry into the Far Cry franchise. This iteration takes the setting back to 10,000 B.C. Europe. You play as a man named Takkar who came from another land. Soon, you meet up with a woman named Sayla and many others soon after. You then spend the rest of the game hunting, fighting, building up a village, do side missions, crafting, and exploring a land untouched by modern civilization.

In the world there are three main tribes: the Wenja (you,) the Udam, and the Izila. The Wenja are normal hunter-type people, the Udam are cannibals who live up in the snowy north, and the Izila are doomsday cultists in the south. Going deeper into the story, you play as Takkar, who is travelling from another land to Oros with a hunting group when they were attacked by a saber tooth tiger and left all but Takkar dead. You soon enter a cave where you find a woman named Sayla, who is traumatized by Udam attacking her camp. You decide to build your village from that cave not long after, you meet other characters who teach you new items to craft and give you main and side objectives just like Sayla does. Dah is a captured Udam who teaches you stink bombs, Jayma who is about hunting, Karoosh who is about fighting, Roshani who teaches you about fire bombs, Tensay teaches you how to tame beasts, and Wogah teaches you about everything else. The story is rather weak, as for the game is essentially about entering into a three-way power struggle and you fighting to have your side dominant over the other groups. What doesn't help with that is a mediocre start to the game. I say this because the other Far Cry games have had great intro scenes, but Primal was rather anti-climactic for me. Also, the language used in the game is a fictional language that was creative yet poor. I could hear and see character emotion, but the language itself made me laugh more than made me feel that same emotion the characters were feeling.

But Far Cry isn't a big story kind of franchise. Far Cry is much more of a gameplay kind of game. And Far Cry: Primal, just like the other Far Cry games, has a good amount of content to play around with. Outposts to capture, places to explore, animals to hunt and materials to gather, main and side missions to complete name a few of the things that can be done in the game. But what makes this entry different from the others is the setting. This Far Cry has a bigger focus on taming beasts and hunting and gathering. Where the other Far Cry games have a focus on guns, this game leaves you with bombs, spears, clubs, and a bow and arrow. This aspect is good for some items and bad for others. Taming beasts was surprisingly easy. I thought the system would be a complicated mess, but it was as simple as throwing meat, taming the beast, then clicking on the beast when you need it and commanding it to attack people. The beasts were kinda fun to use against enemy outposts and proved even more useful when I unlocked the skill that allowed me to ride them. But the change in weapons was where things fall flat for combat. While it was fun using a bow and melee attacks in the game, the combat was very basic. In the end, it was just me swinging a bat at the dude's head until he died. Their isn't even a block button, which made the combat feel repetitive. Also, since the game takes place during a time when there were far deadlier animals than now, fighting the animals turned from frightening to annoying. Seeing bigger animals early on in the game made me run for my life scared. But now I just deal with them. The reason why this is annoying is because they attack so frequently that I feel I can't even walk one hundred meters before being attacked by an animal. Now I run because I don't feel like attacking yet another animal. But going beyond the effect of the time period, I found some other aspects of the game to affect my experience, for better or for worse. One of those aspects is village building and the missions surrounding village building. I found this aspect to be pretty fun to play with, and it actually got me a little interested in random encounters. With the village, you can upgrade the buildings of the other characters, which will give you missions, item recipes, and xp. Also, you can pick up side quests from certain villagers. But what makes it really interesting is growing the settlement. Every ten villagers made gives rewards, and villagers are obtained by side missions, random encounters, capturing outposts, and others. This actually gave me an interest in growing the village to hundreds of people. When it comes to the main missions, side missions, and random encounters, they had a good amount of variety to them, but they still followed a similar format each time. So despite the variety, the missions soon got repetitive as for that variety eventually ran out. But one set of particular missions I had to point out are the mammoth missions. In the game, you can go into a dream where you play as a mammoth doing various objectives. These missions are terrible. The mammoth is hard to control, I was constantly dying from glitches, and rescuing other mammoths gave me even more pain. If it was one mission, I would not have mentioned it, but I believe their were three separate mammoth missions, so I had to say something. One final thing I have to say about gameplay is about the cave of progress bars. At the village, there is a cave that shows all of your progress in certain areas as well as total progress. It was a small thing that I still enjoyed walking through and seeing how far I have progressed. But one thing that I will say that is lacking from the game is other modes. Other Far Cry games has had co-op and multiplayer modes in the game, yet this iteration has neither. Despite being rather small modes, the fact that those are peeled back from the game is still upsetting.

Their is one other aspect that Far Cry shines in and that is in the graphics and the colors (minus Far Cry 2.) This Far Cry is a beautiful game. It's like a giant nature walk, except you are constantly being attacked by equally beautiful and dangerous animals. One part that I saw looked the best was the weapons. The weapons look really good. And when you light your weapon on fire, you can actually see the parts of the wood burnt on the weapon. Even though graphics aren't a big factor in my reviews, I still wanted to mention this.

Final verdict: Far Cry: Primal is an fun open-world game that goes to a time relatively untouched by games. But repetitive gameplay, lack of a decent story, and missing parts of the game makes this a weaker entry into the Far Cry name. I would say play Far Cry 3 or 4 if you want a true Far Cry experience, but still play this game if you want more of that kind of experience.