Took me a total of 40 hours to finish, it is kinda muddy because I didn’t do all of the side stuff and it seems like some of the side stuff you have to find, so I don’t know how much my overall completion percentage is. But I did see some suggestions the main campaign on it’s own is around 15–20 hours, so that should give you an idea as to how much side stuff, exploring, gearing etc I did outside of the main campaign.
Overall, my feelings are fairly mixed. I think complaints about it being too similar to previous games are fairly redundant. You change too much, you change too little, either way, people complain. However, I will say across almost all Ubisoft titles, the combination of unnecessary bloat and unnecessary looter/RPG elements is really hurting their games for me. I get there is a modern mindset of length = value. And while there is some weight to that argument for sure, I just don’t think any modern Ubisoft game particularly justifies the length of their titles.
I mean I really liked FC5 overall, but playing that in a similar way to how I played 6, that took me around 25 hours and that still felt too long for what the game offered. I mean I guess we should be glad it isn’t like a 90 hour Valhalla style slogathon but I just think 6’s map is too big, the campaign too unfocused and there simply are not enough activities or at least not enough variety in activities. I was just really ready for this to be over and I was only about half way through.
I think the story hits some real high points across the way, but it is filled with pretty insufferable characters, cliche sequences and just a really muddled tone. I’m not saying things can’t go to really dark places and be pure goofball in the same text, but whoever put this together just wasn’t skilled enough to blend it together. As a result, at times, the game is simply too dark and other times too silly, never finding a healthy middle ground.
And all of this feels a shame to me, because I do think there are some really interesting locations in Far Cry 6, but the game never requires you to stay in them very long and puts huge amounts of basically dead space between each interesting location. Had you shrunk this map down just to it’s key areas and had us spend more time in each of those locations, I think I would have enjoyed this world more.
I also think Far Cry 6 exists in a weird space where it seems like they predicted people might complain it is too much of the same, so they added a bunch of stuff over the top of the experience to show there are some changes, but I just feel almost every change is to the game’s detriment. Whether that be the ludicrously lopsided stealth side of the game, the boring looter elements or the oppressive ammo system, all it does is take something we already enjoyed and just add a bunch of limitations to the player into it. I would rather a beat for beat replication of FC5s set pieces, than whatever this is trying to be.
And I think what makes this a shame, is much like with New Dawn, the ideas aren’t inherently terrible but the implementation is. Well actually, that ammo system is a terrible idea, that couldn’t be salvaged even with good implementation. Chuck that shit in the bin. Just stupid how poorly implemented and balanced this is, where AP rounds on any gun with a silencer can just carry you through the whole game. Save for the occasional helicopter, where the damage you do without blast rounds is so stupidly small, it is only a hindrance to the player and adds nothing to the experience whatsoever.
I always came to Far Cry for the chaos and the prospect of having a gear system with crazy perks on them, allowing you to obtain insane powers and make overpowered builds sounds like it would be perfect for the usually versatile sandboxes these games offer. But here, it is just boring stat boosts that do less than the skill trees of past games.
After a while it was like, why am I even going out to find new gear pieces that don’t add anything to my experience or purchase these Resolver weapons or hunting Uniques, when often they’ll be worse than the guns I got at the start of the game and modded. You can’t add silencers, or change the rounds, so I ended up tossing most of them back in the toy box straight away. Like what was it, the disc launcher they marketed loads? Just fucking useless that thing in the context of this stealth heavy, ammo type limited, system. Oh and I definitely think there is a place for the Supremo backpack in these games, but in 6 it ultimately adds so little I forgot to use it half the time.
I also think despite what people have said, people really undersell just how hard Far Cry 6 actually is. Dani is so fucking fragile and every enemy is an aimbot, I can’t tell you the amount of times I got downed by an enemy I couldn’t even fucking see. Like three shots and she is down, from some dude shooting me around a corner from a rooftop. Fuck off with that shit.
The problem is cheesing the game is so easy, it can make FC6 seem a lot easier than it is. The AI is basically not even coded it seems like at points, usually with that rifle you get at the start of the game, with a better silencer and AP rounds, you can capture every base (not checkpoint, the full bases) with about six headshots. You can shoot someone next to someone else and they basically won’t do anything. But heaven forbid someone gets to an alarm, the game will spawn like 15 waves of enemies, a dozen helicopters, they’ll all be hitscanning you from across the map. You’ll be running around like a headless chicken trying to work out where the fuck you are getting shot from, but you can’t stop for a single second because Dani is just disintegrated in the blink of an eye. Then, you’ll probably run out of blast rounds before the helicopters stop spawning and you just curse yourself because you could have cleared this in 15 seconds with a stealth approach. The balance is just completely broken and this is now how I want to play a Far Cry game.
And yah, the Story Mode difficulty does exist and it certainly gave me the freedom to play the game how I want to play a Far Cry game. I did flick over to that difficulty a few times, so I could just have some fun, without all the oppressive systems weighing me down. However, the divide between Action and Story is just way too large. Do you want to die in two hits or do you want to be at the centre of an explosion and take chip damage? I think both difficulty settings need an extensive balance pass and I think the AI of the enemies needs to be completely reworked. Neither of those things will probably ever happen to 6, but I hope they are focus points for 7.
Oh and I really miss Guns for Hire too, while we talk about mechanics and gameplay. They finally give us a protagonist with a real personality, voice and face in Dani. She isn’t always consistently written, but she is beautiful, charming, funny and badass. Between her and Kassandra, Ubi really knows how to write protagonists I can just fall in love with. But in the end, this just seems a shame because out in the wild, she doesn’t have anyone to share all this charisma with. In 5, it was always a joy when you had two Guns for Hire interacting with one another and musing on the world and I just couldn’t help but wonder at just how much fun Dani, Sharky and Hurk would be together. Like don’t get me wrong, having Boomer come back and have him be able to ride around in cars with you got a legit pop from me in a way games don’t do for me, but just feels like a wasted potential.
I think probably the best place to close out is on speaking about Giancarlo Esposito’s Antón Castillo. As we know, the villains in this franchise have effectively become the main characters, but I’d definitely rank Castillo on the lower end of Far Cry big bads. Esposito adds a certain gravitas to Castillo, but the actual character is about as generic a big bad you can find. No touch on the likes of villains that have come before him. It is also odd because I never really felt his presence quite like I did with previous villains, in a lot of ways this is set up very similar to 5, but with five, Joseph and his generals felt like they were always breathing down your neck. Castillo always feels at arm’s length away from the game, with characters telling us all about how evil he is, without ever getting us to really experience and feel this ourselves.
And in a way, that is a good summary of this game for me. A Far Cry game always held at arms length away from being truly enjoyable and engaging, despite having the same shape as things that came before and worked terrifically then. A real shame, honestly.
