Far Cry 6

[Ferris]

It's a good laugh this, but yeah fucking hell it's exactly the same as every Far Cry game out there. Their dedication to the system is halfway between impressive and laughable.

Obviously I dropped the game after this, and forgot it was in my library. Booooring!

...but I had a few free evenings this week (quite rare) so blew the cobwebs off the PS4 for some mindless video gaming - I didn't want to buy anything new, so booted this up more or less at random from my library and got stuck in.

Here's a mad thing - I am loving it. It's brilliant! I've sacked off the story entirely (life's too short) and am having a whale of a time running about the island blowing up small parts of it.

It does a great job of making you feel completely powerless at the start, and completely daunted by the size of the map. I've gotta liberate all that?! Oh goddd. By the time you start getting a bit tough it's fun and you're empowered to venture out on longer and longer excursions, and I'm finding the towers/map clearing really satisfying for some reason.

The action is bite size and impressively addictive ("just got to hunt one more animal to upgrade my bag" or "I'll liberate one last outpost") which is perfect for a drop-in, drop-out player like me. The map is nicely done, and rewards exploring which I like. The AI is annoying at times but not awful, the stealth is nice and basic which is good because I loathe pure stealth combat, and it has enough variety and mini games to keep it interesting.

I'll get on to the story whenever I have time to play next and I'm sure I'll be back to earth with a bump cos it's likely complete shite, but I've enjoyed it massively for what it is.

[Ferris]

A big stupid grin on my face as I chuck Molotov cocktails about with reckless abandon and torch to their little outpost without any of them suspecting a thing. More of this sort of thing!

[Ferris]

Cleared the whole north island, so regrettably have been pulled into the daft storyline. It's fine, but I'm now laughably overpowered which is fun in its own way.

I suppose it's to the game's credit that it allowed me to do that, and also that I'm still not invincible or anything (fire in particular seems to kill everything stone dead in about 2 seconds), just a lot of the missions involve "go to place A and liberate it" but I've already captured it so can fast travel there. In a way, it means I can speed through the story while doing the actual content at my own pace as I like which is quite nice.

[madhair60]

just bought it cheapo cos of this thread lol. I do like a Far Cry.

[Ferris]

Just finished the story for Far Cry 3. It wasn't very good, but the rest of the content was great fun. The final choice was dogshit because you'd have to be a sociopath to choose Option B so if it's an actual choice being offered to you by the game, you can't really do anything except Option A.

I'd care more about that if I thought the story was any good but it wasn't and I was far more invested in taking over outposts and hunting and getting more stuff.

A solid 7/10 for me.

[PlanktonSideburns]

Obviously I dropped the game after this, and forgot it was in my library. Booooring!

...but I had a few free evenings this week (quite rare) so blew the cobwebs off the PS4 for some mindless video gaming - I didn't want to buy anything new, so booted this up more or less at random from my library and got stuck in.

Here's a mad thing - I am loving it. It's brilliant! I've sacked off the story entirely (life's too short) and am having a whale of a time running about the island blowing up small parts of it.

It does a great job of making you feel completely powerless at the start, and completely daunted by the size of the map. I've gotta liberate all that?! Oh goddd. By the time you start getting a bit tough it's fun and you're empowered to venture out on longer and longer excursions, and I'm finding the towers/map clearing really satisfying for some reason.

The action is bite size and impressively addictive ("just got to hunt one more animal to upgrade my bag" or "I'll liberate one last outpost") which is perfect for a drop-in, drop-out player like me. The map is nicely done, and rewards exploring which I like. The AI is annoying at times but not awful, the stealth is nice and basic which is good because I loathe pure stealth combat, and it has enough variety and mini games to keep it interesting.

I'll get on to the story whenever I have time to play next and I'm sure I'll be back to earth with a bump cos it's likely complete shite, but I've enjoyed it massively for what it is.

I recon this is what being an American bomber plane pilot in the Korean war must have felt like

OOH LOOK there's a farm down there BOMBS AWAY DICKHEADS

[oggyraiding]

I didn't beat Far Cry 3 but I liked the player character embracing his new life of killing bandits and the game actually acknowledging that change.

Compare to the Tomb Raider reboot where Lara often gets sad about having to kill bandits, but in terms of gameplay she's headshotting dudes with a bow and mutilating them with a pick axe, but she's still sad and scared.

[Ferris]

Yeah they made an attempt, but it did feel very firmly from another era of video games. The lady characters were put to work staying at home cave cleaning the boat (which was never used), while me, the white bloke, goes out and kills the equivalent of several villages.

Good point though, at least he sort of acknowledged he'd become a violent nutter. None of the other Far Cry characters bothered, from memory.

Also while most of the FPS play is decent, some of the "down the barrel" aiming feels dogshit and the occasional level is frustratingly difficult. There's a stealth mission where you have to get into a massive network of caves and then escape without being seen. Fucking... why? Sometimes several guards would just stand looking at the doorway you have to go through (because there's no other way), and spot you immediately which made it functionally impossible, even if you chuck rocks and do all the distraction stuff from the tutorial. Ended up just sprinting through the doorway while 3 blokes looked at me but their "noticing" bar didn't quite fill up so I got away with it. From a real world perspective that means 3 guards on high alert saw a bloke run through the doorway they were staring at in their secret cave base but let it go.

I pushed through because I wanted to finish it but for fucks sake, don't put me through that again, Far Cry.

[Ferris]

Re: Tomb Raider, I liked it (I think?) but the cut scene deaths were so over the top and unpleasant it really put me off.

I don't want to see a young woman impaled on rebar, in fact I don't really want to see anyone impaled on rebar so why do you keep showing me that every time I don't get a QTE button press combo quote right, game?

They were trying to be all edgy and raw but it ended up feeling gratuitous and a bit grubby, frankly.

[Ferris]

This is exactly the kind of "thinks it's AAA but probably isn't" game that will be on PlayStation plus in a few months so I won't bother until they're dishing it out for free or heavily discounted.

And lo, it came to pass!

Purchased for ~18 quid with all the bonus content or whatever the fuck they're calling it. Played the first few missions, it is exactly what you'd expect.

Being dead stingy with the weapon upgrades though.

[Ferris]

And lo, it came to pass!

Purchased for ~18 quid with all the bonus content or whatever the fuck they're calling it. Played the first few missions, it is exactly what you'd expect.

Being dead stingy with the weapon upgrades though.

God this game is fucking boring.

Nothing feels fun or interesting to do, and the unwritten Rules Of The Game are unfathomable. Oh you've captured a base? Blow up the anti-aircraft cannons! No, not the radar asset even though that's next to the anti-aircraft cannons and looks the same. What? No, you can't blow that up. Why? Because [reason not given]! Sorry about wasting all your explosives though, you really should have saved those for the next story mission because you actually can't complete that without them (though there's no way you could have known any of this). That's going to be a real slog now, whoops!

Oh by the way, that base where you are literally the only person still alive? It's not "captured". Search all you want mate, there's no one left because you've put them all in the ground - you just can't capture this one because [reason not given]. You can stealth your way about the base for an hour killing auto-spawning chump after chump all you like but it won't change matters - 2 steps outside the fence and every one of them will spawn back! And we won't tell you which bases you can capture and which are a total waste of time, just figure it out using a few hours of your own time! Presumably you have plenty of it spare to piss away otherwise why would you be playing our stupid sandbox. Weapons? Yeah you can have them all pretty soon, sort of, but with the caveat that none of them are actually good until you've unlocked a branching map of dozens of byzantine upgrades*, and the ones you got and unlocked stuff on before getting a better base weapon? Well none of that carries over - sorry for wasting your time haha! It's ok because you'd picked the wrong thing to upgrade anyway so you sort of dodged a bullet!!

And on and on.

Here's the thing: I get it. On a boring white-board design-concept sort of level, I understand the decisions that were made and why. I shouldn't get the best gun right away, and I understand that some designer somewhere really wanted to make this the Far Cry story we all care about. Problem is I don't care about the story in far cry games. No one does - they're far cry games. There's a baddie but you're the outmatched fish-outta-water goodie, you grind your way through hundreds of henchmen, final level confrontation with the baddie at their secret evil volcano base, there's a twist QTE cutscene, baddie dead, end game.

Great, whatever, don't care.

But for me to go along with all that, the actual other gameplay (you know, the bits that are worth playing) have to be good or at least engaging - the crafting, the levelling, weapon upgrades, capturing the outposts and bases; I have to feel compelled to do that because it's fun or useful or satisfying or whatever. Well the crafting is unsatisfying, the weapon upgrades are complex and stingy and shit, and the enemy outposts don't make sense. The kicker is the story elements I actually engaged with (because I was forced to) were just as bad as ever for reasons I won't bother to go into.

The bases in particular feel like a complete waste of time. Worse than that actually - a waste of time implies something happened. I spent a lot of time clearing a base without a single alarm or guard being notified: PHEW! Hard work but I bet the reward or achievement will be worth it! However, unbeknownst to me, it wasn't the right kind of base so it was fruitless because you can't capture it - after 40 minutes of my free time spent clearing it, then getting confused why these jabronis were still spawning and googling it, I realized the issue. I left and they all spawned back. I might as well have spent the time firing into the air. What an impingement into my free time - fuck you, game. Am I supposed to play with my phone open to google which baddies are worth gunning down and which are meaningless target practice for the entire game? Or just guess and hope my time isn't utterly wasted. That refusal to respect my (limited) leisure time is something that I reckon is unforgivable in video games.

And that's before we get onto other stupid mechanics like "capturing" vehicles and taking them to stations before you can use them. Cool idea (I mean, not really) in theory. In practice, it means if you get anything interesting during free play you have to immediately turn around from whatever you're doing and drive for 10 minutes in the opposite direction to a captured base if you want any guarantee of having a fun vehicle again. Even having that as a consideration is bad game design: "great fun raiding this base, but oh this is a way better jeep, shit, guess I have to abandon whatever I'm doing and go for a drive back to the lockup from a few hours ago or push on and not have a fun vehicle to have fun with later in this game that is supposed to be fun".

It's been a long time since I had this opinion, but I think I actually hate this game, and that's quite rare for me. There are cash-in games that are cynical but work well enough (Tony hawk's pro skater remaster), and bad games that are at least trying (the latter Sherlock Holmes story games) and even though they aren't good I rarely hate them. Far Cry 6, however, is just a massive, massive waste of effort. The FPS combat works fine, the level design and graphics are fine, I'm sure the story is fine too, eventually. I just look at what I've done so far, and the effort it took, then the size of the map still to go and I think "absolutely no, thank you". I have no interest in going any further. Bear in mind I'm a drop-in/drop-out player who's in the market for mindless gaming and I'm tapping out? Brrr. I like mindless games (or at least, understand there's a place for them), I wrote a glowing review for Far Cry 3 based on its sheer commitment to mindlessness (or at least the ability to play it mindlessly which suited me at the time).

It all just adds up to less than nothing and I mourn the effort put into this that could have been spent planting trees or on blood donation drives. This is the longest thing I've ever written on CaB and it's more words than I wrote at work today in 7 hours for my job that supports my family and pays my mortgage - that's how much I hated this game. Dogshit.

A generous 2/10. Do not play this game.

^{*Unbelievably, the first sniper rifle you get takes 4-5 headshots to down an enemy. It is less powerful than the starting pistol. You could spend hours upgrading that rifle and maybe it would eventually be useful, but I just gave up and never bothered with a long range play style because (despite how it appears with the amount of time I've put into this comment) life's too fucking short.}

[Jim_MacLaine]

Just been added to Gamepass and I have no desire to play it, even for free.

This franchise needs a radical shakeup or putting out of it's misery.

[Ferris]

Not sure if I mentioned it earlier but I hated this game. Ok cheers.