Buy Far Cry 6

The newest iteration of Far Cry has a different level of swagger compared to previous games in the franchise. It's still an over-the-top romp through a vast open world, but compared to the previous games, the supporting cast of characters is not only more present in the story but are also fleshed out to a greater extent. The big villain of Anton Castillo has some honest star power to the role, with Giancarlo Esposito lending his likeness and voice to the character. It's another bombastic adventure through another stylized locale, but for better or worse, the gameplay remains largely unevolved from other entries in the series.

The plot of Far Cry 6 is set in Yara, a fictitious nation that is comprised of a group of islands in the Caribbean. The country is a dictatorship that's tightly run by Castillo at the expense of the livelihood of its citizens. You play as Dani Rojas, who grew up in Yara and served in its military but now wants to leave the country ahead of a pending revolution. Before Dani could leave, a crackdown enforced in the capital city of Esperanza ends with many people killed at the hands of Castillo's forces, and Dani's escape attempt from the country ends with them washing back up on its shores instead.

Reluctantly, Dani helps the Libertad, first to gain enough favor to get a boat off the island, but she becomes increasingly wrapped up in the Libertad's goals of freeing the country from the grip of Castillo. To do so, Dani is tasked with contacting three groups in Yara, each with its own region that it used to control before the Yaran military took over. The plan is to help them and gain their support to bring the fight to Esperanza and depose Castillo for good.

Once the "starter island" plotline is finished, you unlock the ability to travel to the main island and quickly learn that the world map is spectacularly large. To balance the island's imposing size, you also gain access to flying vehicles relatively early, so you can quickly traverse new areas of the map. Once you reach a new city or take over important points of interest, you can fast-travel back to them. Despite the larger map, traversal is rarely any more difficult or time-consuming than in previous games; it means there are many more places to visit — and where you can creatively murder people.

To help in this regard, you'll have access to a bevy of conventional weapons and some unique takes on what to bring to a firefight. There's a mix of assault rifles, shotguns, launchers, LMGs, etc., that all have their place in a respectable gunfight. If you want to relive Rambo's glory days, there's a regular bow and a compound bow, and the game lets you tote three main weapons and a customizable sidearm. Every weapon can also be modified at workbenches scattered around the island, and assuming you have the resources, you can do things such as change their optics or ammunition type, or add things like silencers or laser pointers.

Far Cry 6 gets a little wilder with its Resolver weapons, which take up a primary weapon slot. Flamethrowers, spike launchers, and … CD launchers can all be used to add some laughter to your manslaughter. These weapons are either useful in specific situations or when you want to have some fun. They can also be incredibly powerful because dudes on fire don't exactly shoot back very well.

Capping off your equipment comes the Supremo, a backpack that you can charge up by killing enemies. Once fully charged, you can unleash the pack, with the starter pack launching a volley of rockets that arc up and track enemies on the way back down. At the press of a button, you too can laugh maniacally as two soldiers, a helicopter, and even an alligator succumb to your explosively ballistic might. Other Supremo packs have other effects, such as an EMP blast to disable vehicles, so it's worth unlocking and experimenting with them to suit the fight ahead. Each one can also be individually modified to add traits, such as quieter movement, so you can build each one around a particular play style.

You have your own personal ride, which starts off with only a sweet-looking sedan with a turret on top, but you unlock three others during the game. Another option is what can only be described as a Bond car, a fast coupe with a flamethrower in the back and fixed guns that shoot forward, or a big SUV that can take an absolute beating. You can also summon your currently selected ride from anywhere in the game world and have it delivered, should you find yourself in the middle of nowhere.

Similar to how you can customize your weapons at workbenches, you can also customize your rides, changing and improving their defensive ability, swapping out its guns and the damage they deal, or simply improving their ability to ram things off the road. You can also change their exterior and interior colors, or things like what you want on the dashboard or hanging from the rear-view mirror. The latter bits aren't necessary to win your next occurrence of road rage, but you unlock more options for them by blowing up military vehicles or looting them from the world, so it's a win-win really.

At various locations on the map, you can summon vehicle types: road, water, helicopters, and planes. You start with one of each, so right off the bat, you can find yourself in an unarmed but otherwise relatively quick helicopter or plane. The vehicles are unlocked either by scanning one with your phone if it's a civilian vehicle or commandeering it and bringing it back to a camp if it's a military vehicle. These vehicles can't be one of your "rides" and can only be summoned at those stations. On the flip side, some of them are literal tanks, and that's always a good time.

Much of the game revolves around the missions you undertake for the various characters, and Far Cry 6 does a great job of getting creative with them. In one mission, you skulk through a hotel looking for information about the whereabouts of some lieutenants you need to kill, and in another, you may end up in the back of a speeding dump truck while fending off waves of enemies. In between, you might steal a tank, burn down a tobacco farm, survive a chicken-themed survival-horror encounter, or chase a mongoose around a village. The game does a great job of mixing things up, and it doesn't care if you do it stealthily or as loudly as possible.

One area where the game struggles is in the sense of progression. As you play, you loot various special crates to unlock new weapons, armor pieces, or resources. Looted pesos can be used to buy new weapons or armor, and resources can be used to upgrade the weapons and armor — or build new structures for additional benefits. One building can enhance the fighting prowess of friendly guerrillas in Yara, while another choice bolsters the Los Banditos operations, which means sending guerrillas off to do missions on their own.

The issue is that beyond getting better gear and modifying it, you're as powerful at the start of the game as you will arguably get. At the outset, you can chain stealth kills, carry corpses immediately after doing so, etc. While you level up in the game through experience gained, the result is … the option to buy new gear at vendors. It's less that you gain skill points to build your character in specific, permanent ways such as in previous games and more that it revolves around which mods you have in what gear, all of which can be swapped out at any of the near-omnipresent workbenches.

Far Cry 6 expect you to do swap out mods, almost to a fault. On the one hand, it sounds like a great way to mix things up when you hear that you can replace a weapon's standard bullets with things like soft-target or armor-piercing ones instead. Other types, like blast, are a great idea when you need to shred vehicles or pierce bulletproof glass. The problem is that shooting enemies with the "wrong" type ends up making them hilariously tanky. I don't care if it's shooting rounds meant for "soft" targets; continuous fire from the turret of a military vehicle should drop a soldier long before he takes dozens and dozens of rounds.

It also means that unarmored (or "soft") enemies take less damage from armor-piercing rounds. As the player, it means you have to make sure that one of your primary weapons is good versus most soft targets and another is similarly good versus armored ones, since using the wrong type against an enemy results in an unsatisfying time. The game lets you tag enemies with your phone, and while doing so, it tells you what types they're strong and weak against, but I'd rather a gunfight in a first-person shooter not involve such a heavy-handed dynamic in the fight before you can be effective.

There's also a simpler issue that is pervasive throughout the game, but arguably, it's one that is easier to overlook; if you've played the most recent games of the series, to some extent, you've already played Far Cry 6. The combat plays out in the same way, the stealth gameplay is almost entirely unchanged from the last few outings, and some mechanics are kept so intact in the new game that it's the same animations. This is fine in these instances, as I'd argue that it's a solid gameplay loop that needs few improvements. With that said, nothing this well-worn is going to keep that fresh new smell for long, and some of these elements have been left untouched since Far Cry 3.

More likely to interfere with your enjoyment are the odd bugs. Even with the HD Texture pack downloaded, which doubles the install size of the game, some textures (like vehicle dashboards) seem so low-resolution that it is likely a bug. During the course of my review, I had times where the game would crash to the main menu and refuse to load my save until I closed the whole thing down. Helicopters still handle very much like an invisible floating car with a helicopter-shaped turret attached. Aiming up and down while piloting one is such a "notchy" affair that you may as well write off using their machine guns and just use rockets or bombs instead.

If you had a good time with the previous games in the series, you're likely to find the same level of enjoyment in Far Cry 6. However, many of the gameplay elements in this new game are awfully like the versions that were first established in Far Cry 3 and reused with minimal changes in every subsequent game. There's certainly more than enough content to validate the game as its own, full entry into the series. I wish for a future Far Cry entry that I can play without being able to pick out which things are exactly the same as the previous title.

Score: 8.1/10

Reviewed on: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, 32 GB RAM, NVidia GTX 2070 Super