Vaas: Insanity, the first downloadable content for Far Cry 6, is an addictive, nicely balanced roguelite that marries memories of Far Cry 3 with modern technology.
It’s quite unusual for downloadable content to be trailed extensively in the run-up to a game’s launch, but Vaas: Insanity, the first item of DLC for Far Cry 6, is no run-of-the-mill add-on. It’s the first of three slabs of DLC for Far Cry 6 collectively entitled Become The Villain, which let you play as legendary villains from past games in the franchise. All of which abandon the tried-and-tested Far Cry template in favour of being roguelites: challenging you to carry out certain missions in a single run without dying.
That’s quite a departure for a Far Cry game – Far Cry 6 itself offered only the lightest punishment for dying, by respawning you more or less where you fell. But Vaas: Insanity proves that the format works well, even when applied to the familiar Far Cry 6 engine and gameplay blueprint (albeit tweaked in a fashion appropriate to a roguelite).
Vaas: Insanity’s premise is simple: you’re trapped inside the Far Cry 3 villain’s mind, and your mission is to escape. Vaas’s twisted psyche has conjured up an island – itself appropriately weird. It features a volcano, a beach lapped by a sea apparently constituted of blood, above which, rather messily, sharks hover, lava-infused crocodiles, a jungle and various memories from Far Cry 3 reenacted from Vaas’s point of view. Far Cry 3 protagonist Jason Brody features heavily (you often have to kill various incarnations of him to complete missions), as does Vaas’s sister Citra. Vaas’s unpleasantly psychotic nature is often explored in some pretty no-holds-barred ways, including more than a few references to the possibly incestuous and definitely complex nature of his relationship with his sister.
It’s Citra who sets Vaas’s overriding mission: to collect three pieces of a dagger by navigating three of Vaas’s memories situated at far-flung parts of the island. One is set on a ship, where Vaas must turn off four radios while being assaulted by waves of attackers, another one is set in a prison-camp, where Vaas must free three imprisoned versions of himself, and the final memory takes place in a temple that Vaas and Citra discovered in their childhood – Citra essentially takes on the role of a boss who must be eliminated, before Vaas returns to his compound and fights off waves of attackers whose power and weaponry escalates.
In typical roguelite style, there are many things you must sort out before you can make a serious bid to beat the game. Such as finding the right weaponry: each weapon can only be unlocked by passing a trial specific to that weapon, which involves eliminating a specified number of assailants without dying. Once you pass that test, you gain access to that weapon’s crate. Money can then be spent on upgrading each weapons crate, which adds useful mods.
You earn money in the game by killing human and animal assailants and raiding the plentiful chests dotted around the island. You also come across various survival-style challenges which are useful for grinding since, if you make it through, you will have earned plenty of useful money. As well as Vaas’s compound, there are three safe-houses on the island which can be opened up by killing the humans and animals that guard them.
In those safe-houses, you can spend money on improving your weaponry and, crucially, on opening new skills and attributes which will be permanently applied to your version of Vaas. As well as endowing him with more health, you can open up new gadget slots, increase the maximum number of healing syringes you can carry, acquire Far Cry 6 kit such as a grapple, wingsuit and parachute and increase the maximum amount of money that you keep when you die and respawn: crucial for buying your favourite weapons at the beginning of each run-through.
It’s a system which is nicely balanced and works smoothly: as you get to know the island and level Vaas up, it becomes easier to set up a virtuous cycle in which you make more and more progress with each run. You also find – either dropped by enemies or in crates – temporary perks which will last until the next time you die. You have to pay to open up slots for those, but once a perk-slot is unlocked it will remain unlocked.
Beyond the three missions that yield the parts of Citra’s dagger, there’s loads to do on Vaas’s imaginary island: there are two so-called Mindfucks: elaborate puzzles which cleverly reuse iconic locations from Far Cry 3, including Dr Earnhardt’s house, and loads of trials and challenges. Plus there are plenty of random cannon-fodder enemies dotted around the map, as well as a day-night cycle which brings a new type of wraith-like enemies that rush you.
There’s loads of replay value, too, even after you’ve managed to escape Vaas’s mind for the first time, thanks to five levels of difficulty and various rewards that you can take back into the main Far Cry 6 game, which you can only earn through high-level play. You’re awarded an overall points score for each run-through, for example, and to get enough points for one of the rewards, you would have to stretch a single run-through to well over two hours. Playing Vaas: Insanity on the Xbox Series X proved a major boon, thanks to that console’s Quick Resume, which let us pause play-sessions and resume them even after the console had entered sleep mode.
If we had one criticism it would be those sharks and boats floating in the sky over the water. We know the game-world is supposed to be a figment of Vaas’s imagination, and therefore weird and wacky in places, but rather than looking surreal, those sharks just look glitchy. Happily, actual glitches proved to be completely absent: there’s nothing worse than a roguelite containing crash-bugs.
Far Cry 6 has a surprisingly decent, if currently somewhat one-dimensional, end-game in the form of Insurgency mode, but Vaas: Insanity is a must-download. It’s refreshingly different, evoking a blast of nostalgia for Far Cry 3, expressed in spectacularly fine-looking style via the Far Cry 6 engine, and offering gameplay which, in the hallowed traditional of the best roguelites, is infernally addictive.
It will be interesting to see what the next two Become The Villain roguelite DLC drops for Far Cry 6 – Pagan Min: Control and Joseph Seed: Collapse – add to the solid framework established by Vaas: Insanity. Ubisoft has worked hard to develop a pretty meaty post-launch programme for Far Cry 6 and on the evidence of Vaas: Insanity, there should be plenty to look forward to as that unfolds.
