It has taken a few iterations, but with Far Cry 6, Ubisoft’s open-world shooter franchise has finally broken the glass ceiling constructed by 2012’s Far Cry 3.
Fomenting then leading a revolution — which, as Dani Rojas, is what you do in Far Cry 6 — isn’t a particularly new concept for a videogame. However, no videogame revolution has ever been portrayed with anything like as much believability or authenticity as the one taking place in the game’s fictional island of Yara (loosely based on Cuba). Nor has any been as much fun to execute.
Dani’s journey from disaffected Yaran seeking to escape to Miami on a boat to fearless overthrower of Yara’s brutal dictator Anton Castillo – played with reptilian charm by Giancarlo Esposito – is an epic and tortuous one. On the way she (or he – you can play Dani as male or female, and both are given the same dialogue) must enlist to the cause of her Libertad guerrilla outfit various, often initially unenthusiastic, factions from three areas of Yara’s giant game-map, meeting an array of characters who can at times be total assholes but are uniformly memorable. By the time you’ve amassed the necessary guerrilla might to storm Castillo’s stronghold, the city of Esperanza, you feel like you’ve negotiated your way through an entire soap-opera.
A one-person army
Along the way, Dani evolves into such a fighting force that she begins to feel like a one-person army: indeed, that feeds into the game’s storyline, as she often has to perform all the dirty work to get less combat-oriented organisations onside, such as the entertaining flakes from Maximas Matanzas in Yara’s swampy Madrugada district, who are more interested in performing hip-hop gigs, spraying graffiti and DJing.
As a player, it’s hardly an imposition: Far Cry 6’s weaponry alone is among the best we’ve ever encountered in a game, and Dani acquires an array of accessories such as a parachute and wingsuit, cars fitted with improvised turrets, helicopters and so on – although to fly the latter unmolested, she must rid each area of the anti-aircraft rockets maintained by the FND, Castillo’s brutal military.
Emerging from the shadow of Far Cry 3
In a sense, the Far Cry franchise has, in recent years, been the victim of its own success: 2012’s Far Cry 3 was hailed as a stone-cold classic, and although Far Cry 4, 5 and the clever New Dawn — revisiting Far Cry 5’s game world after a nuclear cataclysm — were very good games, they failed to achieve a perception of greatness. Far Cry 6, however, appears to be a concerted effort on Ubisoft’s behalf to bury that particular ghost, and the extraordinary lengths it has gone to in order to craft the game have paid off handsomely.
Far Cry 6, simply, sets new games industry standards for its game-world – Yara is a beautiful place, yet perhaps also the most realistic depiction of a living, breathing country yet seen in a game – and its narrative. The game’s narrative team have cited Netflix series as an influence, and that shines through. Each of Yara’s three districts has a storyline of its own, a structure that lets you approach the game with a vast amount of flexibility.
A labyrinthine story
While you can work your way through a single district at a time, it actually makes more sense to flit between the storylines, or else you’ll find that you’ve ranked up so much that on moving to another area, the initial story missions, at least, will feel trivially easy. The storylines are pretty distinct, thanks to the differing natures of the groups you’re seeking to bring around to the Libertad cause. Namely, in Valle de Oro, the rural part of Yara, the Montero family – pretty fierce freedom-fighters themselves; in swampy Madrugada, Maximas Matanzas, an arty, rather prima-donnaish bunch; and in mountainous, jungle-covered El Este, the now rather sedentary Legends of the 1967 revolution, plus La Moral, a somewhat wide-eyed bunch of guerrillas which evolved from Yara’s street gangs.
There’s another layer of stories which crops up at crunch-points, or sometimes when Libertad’s top brass call you in to perform clandestine missions for them. They involve Anton Castillo and his son Diego – the former is grooming the latter to take over from him, but Diego appears to lack his dad’s ruthlessness. Dani’s moments of intersecting with their story make her struggle feel more personal, and ensure the great Giancarlo Esposito isn’t under-used.
On top of those storylines, and the side-missions categorised as Yaran Stories, Yara contains a vast wealth of activities. Including Treasure Hunts, clever puzzles that yield tasty rewards, which are much less trivial than they sound. Destroying and taking over military targets sometimes feeds into the storyline, but there are anti-aircraft missile sites, military bases and road checkpoints to take down, and military supply-drops to intercept. Then there are street races and, in true Far Cry tradition, exotic animals to hunt: when you cook up their meat, you get long-lasting buffs.
Levelling up through your kit
The latter is exactly the sort of thing you find in Japanese RPGs, and you can detect subtle homages to RPGs throughout Far Cry 6 – one gets the impression that the development team is a collective fan of RPGs. In terms of the size of the game-world and the diversity of activities within it, Far Cry 6 does feel very much like an open-world RPG, albeit with gameplay which is very much that of a shooter.
But the complexity of RPGs has been omitted. You do rank up, which brings more health, but very slowly. There’s no skill tree, but effectively, the game’s Destiny-influenced kit system operates as one, at least in that it enables you to adapt your play-style to specific situations. Every piece of armour, for example, comes with a specific effect – reducing your susceptibility to damage from different types of ammo, fire or explosives, or granting specific buffs like the ability to heal yourself more often or improving your stealth abilities.
As long as you buy and find a wide array of kit items, you can equip yourself to prevail in pretty much any situation; it’s an unconventional system, but works well. Another key concept in Far Cry 6 – which illustrates the development team’s willingness to think outside of the box, something which has been sorely lacking in recent Far Cry iterations – is so-called Resolver weapons. Resolver is a Cuban phrase which roughly means making do with what you can find.
At the start of the game, Dani meets Juan Cortez, a grizzled guerrilla who is the king of Resolver (and quite a character). He fashions a number of weapons called Supremos, each of which has a backpack element and a handheld element. They are magnificently cobbled together from junk, but hugely powerful and pretty much indispensable (especially when Dani finds herself pursued by helicopters or tanks). The backpack elements take ages to charge (a process which can be sped up by enacting quick kills) but then yield things like a barrage of guided rockets, an EMP blast or a blanket of poison gas; unleashing them at the crucial time in a mission is call-important. One works as a rudimentary jet-pack, and is particularly useful when Dani is indoors and surrounded by enemies, as its ignition causes large amounts of local fire-damage.
So choosing the right kit is paramount, and the conventional guns, which are powerful and upgradeable, top off Dani’s status as a one-person army. Add that to the complex, layered story (which contains some agreeable twists) and the fabulous game-world, and we finally have a Far Cry that sets new standards and is able to shake off the suspicion that Far Cry 3 represents the pinnacle of the franchise. If this is what revolution is really like, count us in – it’s way more fun than it has any right to be.
