#Four Hours Gameplay! » OmniGeekEmpire

So I was lucky enough to get hands-on with Far Cry 6, Ubisoft’s next upcoming first-person shooter game. I got about four hours of hands-on so I’m here to share my experience.

I have to emphasize that this was a streamed event, so I wasn’t able to see the game at its full fidelity. However, the latency didn’t hinder my experience completely so there’s that. Naturally, that means I played Far Cry 6 on PC using a keyboard and mouse. The controller wasn’t working for me at the time!

The first hour had me playing the introductory levels, getting to know the character and the world of Yara. I played as the male version of Dani, who was trying to get off the country but didn’t go as planned. The boat he was on got hijacked and we learn just how cruel Antón Castillo (played by Giancarlo Esposito) is as a leader of his country, willing to open fire at his own citizens. Anyways, long story short, we somehow end up taking on missions for the guerrilla fighters known as Libertard, and that is when the game begins to introduce to us the game mechanics.

If you’ve played any of the previous Far Cry games, you’ll feel right at home with Far Cry 6! As usual, after the game holds your hand, it lets you go into this vast and lush open-world, brimming with culture and chaos. That’s the only way I can explain it to you. One moment, I’m admiring the atmosphere of a village, the next I’m fighting Antón Castillo military bullies. Speaking of Antón Castillo, we learn a bit more about his vision of how he wants to unite his country, using something called “Viviro”! Basically, it’s a drug of some kind that is the key to bringing his country to the big stage. Any time Antón Castillo shows up on the screen he always commands your attention which is great. The entire game is voiced action in third-person and it’s really done well and quite enjoyable to watch all these characters interact with each other. If anything, I feel like the story and narrative of Far Cry 6 will be its strongest trait.

However, that personally seems to be the only thing that I liked about Far Cry 6. The villains are great but take away that and you start to realize that there’s not much compelling me to keep playing. As I’ve mentioned before, if you’ve played any of the last few Far Cry games before, you’ll know that this new one plays very similar to them. The gunplay was fine (I would even say improved in some aspect), and I got a chance to try out a variety of weapons and I enjoyed the ones that I tried out. The enemies (keep in mind that what I played likely wasn’t the final build) weren’t bad but they weren’t great either.

Just good enough! In my playthrough, I chose to play the game in a sneakier approach which I actually found to be more fun than just running and gunning the place down, forcing me to learn the layout of a base and the enemy types. However, when I did get caught, it was chaos, bullets flying at me from all angles, doing decent enough damage that I felt like I had to take cover and take them out one by one. The enemies weren’t full-blown sponges in my opinion, but they could take a couple of shots before dying. Even a headshot didn’t kill them in one shot like I thought it would.

Other than that, there was also my gator companion that I could use to distract my enemies by seeking him at them. In fact, from what I could remember, there were other animals that I could have as a pet but I wasn’t able to unlock them. Speaking of unlockable things, with the premise of you being on an island cut off from the rest of the world, resources are tight. So picking up items and scraps are essential, since leveling up is tied to your arsenal. So you’ll be spending a lot of time in the workbenches scattered across Yara.

As the name suggests, you can use them to build the weapons that you need to face off against Antón’s army. So if an enemy is wearing riot armor, you’ll likely want to bring a piercing bullet with you and etc. Truth be told, it’s nothing out of the ordinary, and I barely even felt the need to use it unless the game told me to but that’s just the way I play. I rarely build or craft anything unless I absolutely have to. So from Assualt rifle, pistols, snipers, to the crazy ones like an electroplate gun or a flamethrower, there’s plenty of options. Oh, the weapons get crazy in the game, letting you get creative with what you find in the fields of Yara.

In terms of traversal, Far Cry 6 has your typical means! From hijacking cars, boats and helicopters to using horses, parachute and a glider, there’s plenty of options to get around! And you’d want to make use of the vehicles as the map is huge from what I saw! Of course, as you know a huge map doesn’t necessarily mean a great experience but for me, I’m going to be honest, it didn’t make me any more hype knowing that the map is huge, it just means there’s going to be a lot of minuscule side missions spread about. I managed to use all of the available vehicles except for the boat and they all controlled fairly well in my opinion. Now, let’s talk about some of the missions that I did during my playthrough.

As I mentioned, in the first hour, I mostly did tutorial missions, but after that and a bit of exploration, I was then let out a bit more further into the game narrative to experience everything that Far Cry 6 had to offer. The way I tend to play most open-world games is using stealth whenever possible! On one mission for Libertard, they had me infiltrate a base in order to acquire a key needed for another mission. Using my phone in-game, I’m able to tag enemies, weaponry, chests, and any other important things. Then, I had to plan my route on how I wanted to approach the base. There were a number of options, but I chose the one where I swam into the base from a cavern. Stealth is very interesting in the game as enemies react very oddly. When you get in the proximity of one of the enemies, they would come to investigate, however, the AI isn’t smart enough to be more alert around the place. Instead, they just stop there and just look around. Not to mention that they don’t alert their teammates to stay on guard to heighten the tension. Even when you kill an enemy with your knife and they yell out their death cry in pain, it never alerts the other guards.

Maybe it’s because I have been spoiled by other games, but I felt kinda disappointed by that. I know I’m expecting a lot from a Far Cry game, but I felt like if I killed someone mid-conversation on his walkie, it should alert people around the area that something is very wrong.

Overall, playing Far cry 6 felt good. Nothing crazy or anything like that, just your run-of-the-mill Far Cry game. The narrative is its strongest trait and the characters are very lively and would be the reason to play the game. However, that’s just what I got to play in the four hours playthrough that I had so there may be more to Far Cry 6 that I missed out. If you’ve played a Far Cry game before, then you’ll likely already be at home with this game. The characters are good to great depending on who you talk to but of course, the villain seems like one that most people will want to check out. Anyways, that’s my thought on the game, in the meantime, check out my gameplay to judge for yourself!