Far Cry 6

There's so much to say about Far Cry 6! My brain is pretty full of, well, not exactly what I'd call "impressions," since I just beat the game, but more a series of thoughts. Here we go:

The difficulty level seems far too lenient to me. Once you get a decent semi-auto rifle with a suppressor and armor-piercing bullets, you’re going to be able to clear out most camps and checkpoints with nothing but that; when you pair it up with a full-auto rifle with a suppressor and armor-piercing bullets, you’ll have another option that will basically make you a silent assassin in 90% of the combat encounters that you face. Everything else kind of falls by the wayside since you’re just a murder machine, and considering you can buy some excellent weapons from one of the camp buildings you construct (so long as you upgrade it and have the pesos to spend), you can get to a stage of relatively untouchability pretty early on.

After getting a couple of decently upgraded rifles, I pretty much never used anything but the 2 and 3 slots on my weapon wheel. The Resolver weapons all felt like various shades of pointless (I switched my 1 slot to a rocket launcher and liked it better than anything I bought from Juan), and the ults from the Supremos were useful but never necessary. In fact, the way that the Supremo ult button would flash at you from the UI to let you know it was ready was so distracting to me that I just turned off the Supremo icon in the UI menu and rarely remembered to use it after that. I’d say that I maybe used it 10 or 15 times in my entire playthrough, mostly early on. Even the melee kills are too unwieldy and laborious to be of much use compared to silently shooting people in the head. I never even bothered to summon my animal companion most of the time! No need when you can just shoot someone!

Honestly my thoughts here are probably related to my play style; I don’t think I ever bothered to even equip a shotgun or a light machinegun, and rarely switched to my pistol except when I was totally out of ammo. If you have the option to silently kill people from 100 meters out over and over again, I’m not sure why you’d bother doing anything else? And since the armor-piercing bullets are pretty much an instant kill on any enemy, whether they’re helmeted or not, I never saw the point in fooling around with the other ammo types. Sure, I could poison enemies and they might attack each other, or I could just shoot them both from a mile away and drop them silently. It’s kind of the old “what class am I going to play in Skyrim?” question: even when I intend to make a burly sword-wielder I always wind up going back to mage archer just because it’s quicker and easier to get through any given combat encounter that way. (I was playing mouse and keyboard, by the way, which made headshots extremely easy to pull off; the difficulty might be a bit more balanced if you’re playing with a controller.)

I usually play games on the default difficulty, so it’s weird that this was one of the few games where I probably would’ve flipped it to Hard...but that wasn’t an option. There’s only Story and Action difficulties, and Action might as well have been a story-level difficulty to me given the fairly rare death rate I had. It was only when I truly charged into an overwhelming amount of enemies that I felt any danger. I think I died more often from not opening my parachute in time or doing something stupid like that than I did to actual enemy fire.

That ties back into the surfeit of side quests and treasure hunts, etc. in the game. The two-star semi-auto rifle you get near the start of the game is perfectly adept at killing people until you can buy the four-star rifle that will last you the rest of the game, so the thought of bothering to hunt animals for gear that you might be able to trade in for other weapons seems kind of pointless. The treasure hunts are sometimes interesting (so long as they don’t involve swimming), but you never know if it’s going to be an interesting weapon or just some worthless charm, so eventually I stopped doing them. And you wind up with so many extra components for crafting gun parts that I also just never bothered doing the “race the army to the supply drop” missions, which were absolutely littering my map by the end of the game. I eventually got enough uranium to buy all of the resolver weapons and supremos, but barely dabbled with any of them beyond the rocket launchers. It's nice that they support a variety of gameplay styles but, again, I didn't see much point in dabbling with anything beyond the silent assassin route. That's probably my fault and not the game's, but still!

It’s weird to say that after all this, I still generally enjoyed the moment-to-moment gameplay in FC6. Shooting people in the head is fun! It’s fun to paraglide from a checkpoint right to your mission objective and shoot people until they are dead. Once I realized that I didn’t have to do basically anything other than the main story missions, I had a much better time with the game than otherwise. Eventually I started just skipping the cutscenes as well since you can’t skip individual lines of dialogue (Assassin’s Creed does a much better job of making it so you can skip through conversations and cutscenes on a line-by-line basis). The cutscenes also look dramatically worse than the actual game, for some reason.

I can't really say I was a huge fan of the story here at all. Giancarlo Esposito does a fine job as the bad guy but he's kind of a distant threat throughout most of the game since you almost never interact with them, instead focusing on his lieutenants. I didn't find any of the plotlines to be all that captivating, including the main story, and, like I said, I eventually just started skipping all the cutscenes to get back to shooting people more quickly.

This is a weird game overall! I enjoyed shooting people until there were no more people to be shot. I’d say it’s more of a game that I would pay 20 bucks for rather than 60, or maybe wait a few months for the first big patch and get Uplay+ and pay 15 bucks to play it for a week. Or you could skip it entirely! It's another Far Cry game in a franchise where you know precisely what that means. I hope Far Cry 7 changes up the formula a bunch!