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#Far Cry 6 Review – The Quintessential Guerilla Experience

#Far Cry 6 Review – The Quintessential Guerilla Experience

Reviewed on PC. Review copy provided by Ubisoft.


Far Cry has become one of those franchises where it’s changed so much since the start that there are different fan bases for the franchise. This is something that is common with Ubisoft’s franchises these days, be it Assassin’s Creed or Ghost Recon. This is why I feel Far Cry 6 is going to be a slightly divisive game in the fan base. 

Far Cry 6 builds upon Far Cry 5 while also changing up quite a few things. Things that have been there for quite a while. No more character upgrades, no more picking up enemy weapons, and no more radio towers (gasp).

Far Cry 6 Dani Point
Dani is politely asking you to read this review.

Is Far Cry 6 a good game? Yes, I’d say it is. But is Far Cry 6 a good game FOR YOU? That is the question I’ll try to answer through this review. I’ll talk about the aspects I loved, the changes I didn’t like too much, and the things that frustrated me.

Story and Characters

Far Cry’s villains have always been somewhat iconic and memorable. Even before Far Cry 3, it didn’t just start with Vaas y’all. But thanks to Vaas becoming an absolute fan favorite, the Far Cry franchise has leaned more towards marketing and getting folks enamored with villains rather than your own character. And how did they market and show off Far Cry 6? With Giancarlo Esposito front and center. 

Far Cry 6 Anton
Somebody gonna get hurt real bad

Giancarlo plays Anton Castillo in Far Cry 6. A brutal dictator who rules the country of Yara with an iron fist. Or so-say the fake Yarans, the ones running around with guns who go by the name of Libertad, who want to ruin the great nation of Yara. 

We all know what makes a good dictator. Charisma. And Giancarlo oozes charisma. He channeled his experience of playing various sociopaths and turned up to 11 in Far Cry 6. And oooooh boy does he deliver. I was always waiting for the next cutscene that would have him. If there was an announcement from him over the broadcast system, I would stop and listen. And if you’ve seen any of his performances, you know exactly what to expect. Otherwise, prepare to watch an ice-cold man turn you into a fangirl with his steely glare that could cut through adamantium. If it wasn’t obvious already, I couldn’t get enough of him in the game mainly because he’s not in as much as I had hoped or liked. Boo!

Dani Rojas, Dani Rojas, Dani Rojaaaaaaas

Far Cry 6 Dani with Car
Gotta enjoy the photo mode.

While previous Far Cry games have featured what I would call “blank slates” for characters, Far Cry 6 changes that with Dani Rojas. They’ve done a great job here to actually make a character that I enjoyed playing as. Jason Brody in Far Cry 3 was eh, Ajay Ghale form Far Cry 4 I couldn’t care less about, The Deputy from Far Cry 5 had no personality at all but Dani is fantastic. (Shoutout to Rex “Power” Colt from Blood Dragon who I absolutely love though.)

Dani isn’t just a simple “Player Insert”. Dani has personality and character. I feel the others just didn’t have that. For instance, if I’m driving and a song comes on the radio, I start humming and singing along IRL only to realize that Dani also sings the song. And Fem-Dani can belt those songs, let me tell you. 

Quests aren’t Dani just reacting to what’s happening but also because Dani is interested and wants to take action. Chorizo, the little sausage dog, doesn’t like Dani at first. How does Dani get him to like her? Dani makes him his favorite food. Why? Because Dani loves dogs and wants to be friends with Chorizo. These are just some of the things that made me feel connected to Dani and made me actually like her character. 

Far Cry 6 Dani
Hello there

Another reason is that she’s straight-up honest as to why she’s helping Libertad out by shooting almost 80% of the island’s military population. Because she finds the rush of combat, the adrenaline, the hunt, all of it fun. It’s not deep or a reason that makes sense but it’s better than “I’m doing this to save people even though I’m just a puppet”.

Besides Dani, the world is also filled with some really fun and interesting NPCs that you get to hang out with and talk to. Juan Cortez has got to be one of my favorite NPCs, straight up. That man is batshit crazy but also insanely talented at being a Guerilla. 

Gameplay

As I mentioned at the start, there have been quite a few changes to the gameplay that make it feel less “copy and pasted”. The game features a difficulty select between “Action” and “Story” mode. This can be toggled at any time and is good for people who want a less stressful experience. Let’s start off with the gunplay because that’s what we’ll be doing most of the time and because that’s what most people find fun.

Weapons

The gunplay, in the easiest comparison, is a bit like Call of Duty Warzone. I say that because of how your movement works when in combat. Sliding in this game is freaking god-like so you’ll be sliding all over the place. And popping heads while doing so. There’s just that feeling that movement feels tight and responsive. 

What doesn’t feel tight and responsive is when ADSing, when trying to hold breath, when looting items and when you headshot an enemy. There always felt like there was a delay or that I had to press a button multiple times. Could just be me, but I did feel this on multiple occasions. 

Far Cry 6 Weapons
Guns Away

Weapons can be swapped at ANY TIME. And by that I mean, you can literally swap weapons for whatever you have in your Arsenal at any point. This is super intuitive and the game will hammer this into your head with people always saying “Right Tool for the right job”. You also have the Juan Cortez special, the Supremo weapons. A backpack that is a weapon? Yes please. Very early on you’ll unlock the Supremo which launches homing missiles at enemies. Supremos have a recharge period so they’re pretty much like using an ultimate ability. There are also different types of Supremo weapons that you’ll need to unlock. 

Gear Optimization

You will need to tinker with your weapon load-outs at workbenches because the game includes ammo types and enemy weaknesses. There’s a lot of different ammo types and scanning enemies will reveal their weakness. Each weapon sub-group(SMGs, Rifles, LMGs, etc.) has its own unlocks. So if you unlock a scope or armor-piercing in ammo in the Rifles section, you can only use it for the other rifles you own. You will have to spend resources to unlock it for other sub-groups. There’s also weapon mods (aka perks) which also need resources.

Far Cry 6 Arsenal
Gearing Up

I can see the reasoning behind this but in the early to mid-game, this is quite frustrating because you don’t have the materials required. And you will be constantly looting in this game. Thankfully, the game has auto-loot and no animation for it but prepare to spam E or the console equivalent of it to pick up Gasoline, Scrap Parts, Metal, Medicine, etc. These are used for weapon upgrades and camp upgrades. Camp Upgrades help you unlock more new items and weapons and info. And this is important because the game doesn’t have character upgrades anymore.

Yup, no more do you need to unlock Jump Takedowns or Multi-Kill Takedowns. They’re all just there from the start. What you will need to unlock though are Gear and Weapons. And these are found across the MASSIVE world. Gear improves your stats like better weapon handling, taking lower damage from blasts, etc. I wish there was a loadout system so I could quickly switch to a “Sneak” loadout and then to a “Rambo” loadout instead of needing to change Gear pieces individually.

How much Fluff?

And speaking of the massive world, it really is absolutely massive. There is so much to explore and thankfully, they’ve made traversal easy. You can quickly call a car to you at any point. You can fast travel or airdrop to locations HQs and checkpoints. The game has a huge variety of cars, bikes, planes, and horses. And you don’t have to worry about unlocking the map because there are no more radio towers to be climbed.

Far Cry 6 Mission Select
Getting a Mission is like speaking to another Civ character.

That being said, it is an open-world Ubisoft game which means there’s plenty of fluff. And I mean plenty. There are tons of side missions, races, checkpoints and you get the idea. If you don’t like the fluff, just stick with the main plot but for those who do enjoy spending time in Far Cry games, you have a lot to sink your teeth into.

Animal Instincts

Speaking of which, the game sees the return of companion animals. You got an Alligator, you got a cute as heck dog, you got a rooster, you got another dog and you got a panther. There’s also a robo dog and another panther if you get the Season pass and Vice Pack respectively. All of them have different uses and perks but honestly, I just let them do their thing most of the time. 

Far Cry 6 Dani and Guapo
My favorite dinosaur

You can also pet all of them and a majority of the domestic animals can be petted in the game. Yay for alligator scritches.

Multiplayer

Two-player co-op is in the game and unlocks very early on but sadly I couldn’t really test it out prior to release. 

Visuals and Sound Design

Before I got my hands on the game, I was incredibly skeptical about the visual fidelity of the game. In some shots of the trailers, it looked fantastic, in others, especially cutscene shots it looked quite bad. I wasn’t sure what to make of it and waited to make my final judgment once I had my hands on the game. To my pleasant surprise, the game looks absolutely phenomenal with one issue I’ll get to a bit later.

Far Cry 6 Scenic
I love shots like this

Yara has a lot of different landscapes and environments packed into its islands and they all look and feel fantastic. The vegetation is brilliant, the cities look great and the water is to die for. Even with a day-night cycle, the lighting is pretty much always fantastic with some of my favorite moments being during the sunrise and sunset. I played this on 1440p Ultra and 4K Ultra with HDR and it always looked so fantastic.  

However, my one complaint about this is in the cutscenes department. For whatever reason, cutscenes are locked to 30fps. Even though they seem to be rendered in-engine and not pre-rendered, they’re still locked to 30fps. This feels a bit jarring when playing at 100fps and suddenly it just goes down to 30 for cutscenes. And if the cutscene is a pre-rendered cutscene, there’s horrible compression. I’m not sure what the actual cutscene resolution is but on my 1440p panel, it looked really blocky and messy.

Far Cry 6 City
Big City Lights

When it comes to sound design, it’s pretty spot on. Weapons feel hefty, explosions pack a punch, animals sound like animals, alarms are loud and scary. The OST is well made and fits the mood almost perfectly every time. The licensed music selection is also quite good and I genuinely enjoyed driving around with the radio on. 

Performance

I played the game on a PC with an RTX 2070 Super, a Ryzen 3600 CPU, 16GB RAM, and the game installed on an SSD. With a mix of High and Ultra settings with Ray Tracing off at 1440p, the game ran quite well and was above 60fps 95% of the time. After the first couple of hours, I turned off the performance metrics because I didn’t really need it. The game ran smoothly, with no stutters, no random frame drops. 

Far Cry 6 Graphics Settings
The settings that I use

I also ran the game at 4K on an LG CX. With the same mix of High and Ultra, I saw an average of around 45-50fps at native 4K. However, with FSR on and set to “Quality” or with the resolution scale set to 0.7 I was able to hit 4K 60fps consistently. The choice between using FSR or regular resolution scale is yours, depending on your resolution and distance from the screen. At 1440p on my monitor, I don’t think I would use FSR because of the loss in detail but at 4K on my TV and my seating distance, I found it to look pretty good. Playing with screens that have G-Sync also helped since I never noticed frame drops below 60fps if and when they happened. 

All in all, a solid experience EXCEPT one thing. If you plan on using the “HD Texture Pack” on PC then you better have a GPU with more than 11GB of VRAM. On my RTX 2070S at 1440p, the HD Texture Pack led to a lot of textures not loading because I was hitting the VRAM limit. So save yourself the disk space and bandwidth and don’t download it if you don’t have the VRAM.

Accessibility 

One of the things I absolutely loved about Far Cry 6 is its accessibility options. On your first boot, the game starts with the accessibility options menu which is something I feel every single game should do. And the options in this game are plenty.

Far Cry 6 Accessibility Settings
Far Cry 6 Accessibility Settings Menu

I’m really happy to see the amount of time and effort they’ve put into the accessibility options. There are even presets for major accessibility settings. I personally don’t need to use these settings but for those who do rely on these options to play games, this is outstanding. The amount of depth and customizability here is something that I hope more games try to recreate going forward and I would love for the developers to get proper recognition for this.

Conclusion

I had an absolute blast playing Far Cry 6. The start is a bit frustrating but as you progress, things start to click together. Otherwise, you can always turn down the difficulty. The world of Yara is packed with things to do, the characters are interesting, the story is fun, the gameplay is addictive and Giancarlo is just the best. There’s also a lot of content being added to the game like Danny Trejo and Rambo-related content so it isn’t just one and done. Not to mention the missions where you play as the villains from Far 3,4 and 5.

Far Cry 6 Beach
Take a break and smell the flowers

So if you enjoyed any of the Far Cry games from 3-5, you will enjoy this one as well. If you’re looking for the Far Cry 1 or Far Cry 2 experience, then you might be left a little disappointed. 

The post Far Cry 6 Review – The Quintessential Guerilla Experience appeared first on Spiel Times.

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