Game: Far Cry Primal
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Genre: First-Person-Shooter
Releases: 2016 (PC, Playstation 4, Xbox One)
When I start writing reviews for a gaming franchise, I have the goal of eventually finishing it in its entirety. It happened before, with series like “Borderlands” or “Just Cause” having an entry on this blog for every single game in the series. Which brings me to my current long-term project: “Far Cry”. So far, I have played, reviewed, and rated four titles the series has to offer and since its been a while since I last played an action-adventure-like game with lots of enemies to shoot and things to collect, I thought it might be time for another entry. Which brings me to “Far Cry Primal”, a sort of offshoot of the main “Far Cry” series since the premise plays in 10.000 B.C., back when civilizations started to form and sabretooths and mammoths still lingered around. It is an interesting departure from a game series that has gun usage as a core mechanic, but whether the transition into prehistoric times works is something that I will explore in the article to follow.
We play as Takkar, a warrior of the tribe of the Wenja. The Wenja people had it pretty bad as of late, and their luck is not improving during the intro sequence of the game. You and a few other hunters try to bring down a mammoth to feed your tribe, which eventually succeeds only for your group to be surprised by a sabretooth that kills two of the hunter party pretty much immediately. With only you and the leader of the hunting party left, everything comes down to the split-second decision of avoiding the tiger by jumping down the cliff behind you. Takkar is much worse for wear after the fall but is pretty much alive unlike his tribal brother. With his dying breath, he hands over his bracelet and tasks you to find the land of Oros and make the Wenja strong again; something that will inevitably get the attention of both the Udam, a tribe of brutal warriors with cannibalistic tendencies, and the Izila, who perform blood sacrifices to their sun god.
I have given “Far Cry” storytelling a hard time before, but in all the games I have played of the franchise so far (meaning “Far Cry 2” through to “Far Cry 5”) the writers actually tried to provide some story with a deeper meaning: In “Far Cry 2”, your character is part of a never-ending greed-fueled power spiral they eventually try to stop, “Far Cry 3” takes a American white dude and lets him trade his sanity for power with you as the player being the one who chooses how far he goes at the very end, in “Far Cry 4” you are confronted with the fact that none of the options are good for the country you are fighting for, and “Far Cry 5” presents you with a religious Doomsday cult to fight against and the question of how far forgiveness can go. There are more layers in all those games but this is basically how the story can be summed up. Now, I list all of that because “Far Cry Primal” has no underlying philosophical approach to begin with. Your tribe simply wants to survive, while other tribes are willing to kill in order to ensure their own survival. Yes, cannibalism and religious sacrifices are bad and since our dudes do not partake in something like that they technically have the moral high ground, but in the 10,000 B.C. scenario I can totally get behind a “survival of the fittest”-idea, which makes the other tribes just that: Simply other tribes trying to get by.
However, if anyone can help the Wenja thrive again, it is our mighty warrior Takkar. Not only is he blessed with knowledge about fighting with any primitive weapon you can find, but he also manages to be blessed by the spirits to be a beast master. Now, I understand that Ubisoft needed to change a few gameplay elements by going back in time since firearms are unheard of in 10,000 B.C. You cannot simply snipe someone with a scoped rifle since neither scopes nor rifles exist, and armored enemies cannot be blown apart by rocket launchers for the same reason. So, “Far Cry Primal” needed something to make up for the lost options; and gives you animal companions, which are actually much more busted than any firearm I can think of. You have constant access to an owl that can scout an area from above, permanently marking any enemies it sees, while being capable of throwing bombs once you unlocked those and going in for a sweep that instantly kills the targeted opponent; the last ability coming with a cooldown. There is no more need for finding an elevated position and marking enemies on your own (although you can still do that if you invest the skill points) since the owl costs absolutely nothing to use and is simply better, coming with a huge vision radius while the attack does not even alarm opponents since an animal did the attack.
Combine that with Takkar’s ability to tame predators in the region. By throwing out baits with a carnivore nearby, he can lure them, wait until they eat and then tame whatever animal stands in front of you to do his bidding. You start small, having only jaguars and leopards to work with, but with only a small investment into the necessary skills you will be able to tame sabretooths, bears, and even the dreaded badger. All of those animal come with their own set of stats and therefore certain strengths to work around, with any feline normally being agile and helpful when going for a stealthy approach, while bears can take more hits and dish out more damage. Badgers might seem weak, but they come with the special ability of reviving themselves once when they go down, which means that they can wreak more havoc in the opposing outpost when unleashed. And all those predators work well together with the owl’s scouting abilities: When tagging enemies with the owl, you not only see their weapon of choice via a tag appearing over their heads, but you can also see their outlines through walls; which you can target with your predatory friends to make them storm that enemy for a quick takedown. It is perfectly possible to clear camps of any difficulty without actively using any weapon since animals do such a good job.
That does not mean that the weapon selection is bar though. I dreaded the idea of actively using bow and arrow as my go-to weapons since I cannot for the life of me determine how much the projectiles will drop off after a certain distance. The bad news for me was that I encountered plenty of situations in which sniping the opponent was simply impossible, but the developers made sure you have options to make up for that. The short bow comes with medium range and an incredible fire rate for a bow, allowing you to pepper anything getting closer with enough arrows to make them never reach melee range. The long bow is the sniper rifle of “Far Cry Primal”, albeit missing tons of useful features that a normal anti-material rifle could offer. And then there is the double bow, which shoots two arrows at once but introduces bullet spread to a bow. Spears can be used for close combat but are much better at being bigger, throwable arrows, while clubs can whack opponents with differing strength, all of which are also throwable if you need a projectile that drops to the floor like a stone but can instant kill non-elite enemies.
“Far Cry Primal” also offers a number of support options to deal with the enemy tribesman. Flints can be used as make-shift throwing knifes, and later on even exist as “Berserk Shards”, which cause enemies you hit with them to go on a frenzy and attack the first thing in their line of sight, regardless of friend or foe. The problem is that you cannot aim with those things, which makes hitting somewhat harder and, due to weapon fall-off, oftentimes guess-work. The bombs that you can give the owl can also be thrown, altough I normally did not do so since the bee version is only really useful against boss enemies, the fire version feels utterly useless since almost all of my weapons can be ignited as long as I have animal fat in my pockets, and the berserk bomb feels even harder to hit than the throwing knife version. You can also lay traps, which might be very useful but is also very much not my playstyle and therefore went completely unused over my 25-ish hour playtime of “Far Cry Primal”.
While the goal of strengthening the Wenja tribe is rather vague, the way of actually progressing the game is very much the same as in every “Far Cry” game since “Far Cry 3”. The other tribes hold bonfires and outposts, which you need to free from their grasp to colonize them with your people, turning them into fast travel points. The tribespeople of Wenja have multiple quests for you to do which range from freeing someone while staying undetected, over rescuing people but using your special senses to find them first, to killing X of target animal in an area because they cause trouble for the locals. Instead of climbing towers as the platforming portion of the game, you now need to crawl through caves in search of collectables. And main quests normally use some pretense to make you go somewhere, find something, or kill someone to unlock more features like new weapons, tools, more carry capacity for things, or new parts of the skill tree.
Talking about skills, there are lots of options which range from pretty useful to actually nigh unusable gimmick. More health and healing is always nice and unlocking the hunting skills as early as possible was a great idea due to the fact that I needed more wood for arrows than the forest could give me; something that was fixed by getting more arrows out of the same resources. I also invested heavily into taming more creatures and improving the owl for reasons I listed above. However, I have barely ever used special food since I do not particularly care about having more breath under water if everything can be reached without it, while seeing animals with outlines is pretty pointless when I am attacked by them every fifty meters anyway. And for some weird reason, the developers decided that some skills are mandatory to progress in the story, since you can only tear down a palisade wall by riding a mammoth into it.
To level up in “Far Cry Primal”, you need to get experience which you are awarded by doing pretty much anything in the game. Any kill gives experiences, as do quests, and the “Far Cry” series staple of finding collectibles. “Far Cry Primal” has five different collectables to find for you: Spirit Totems, Cave Paintings, Wenja Bracelets, Izila Masks, and Daysha Hands. Spirit Totems only come in a small number but every placed totem increases your experience gain by 2%, which is a nice bonus to have. Cave Paintings can only be found in caves, which means you normally need to solve some parkour-ish puzzle to reach them. Wenja Bracelets can be found pretty much anywhere outdoors and have a distinct sound to make it easier to find them. Izila Masks need to be destroyed instead of collected and normally hang on some mountain wall. And lastly, Daysha Hands are small rocks you can collect which glow in the dark and can be hidden on cliffs, under water, or in caves as a secondary objective alongside the Cave Paintings.
Now, the “Far Cry” franchise seemingly loves drug trips as a gameplay feature, even though I feel like they are more miss than hit. “Far Cry 3” did it correctly as far as I am concerned, and then “Far Cry 4” created a stupid and frustrating mix of a boss fight and an exposition dump while “Far Cry 5” had Faith Seed going on, the weakest antagonist of the game due to her being illogical and quite frankly rather silly in design. “Far Cry Primal” might play thousands of years before any of those games, but the developers still wanted their players to be trippin’, which is why the shaman has some bloody brew in store that knocks you unconscious in order to dream of mighty beasts. The first time you need to do this is pretty straightforward, with Takkar chasing an owl that eventually becomes your companion. The other visits into this spirit realm were less fun though: Both times you need to play as a mammoth, with the first time consisting of you chasing a spirit rhino and defeating tons of its spawns for god knows what reason, while spirit journey number two asks you to free an elder mammoth from its captors; assuming you are not bonked to death by falling rocks or slip down a bridge into a game over-scenario and a restart from the beginning. I said it before and I will say it again: This drug stuff was interesting and good when it was first used, but making it mandatory is a terrible idea.
Gameplay-wise, this is pretty much a round-up of everything you can do: Collect stuff, tame beasts, fight enemies, and improve your village by adding more people and building better huts. The game lightly works towards the two showdowns that eventually have to occur when all the tribes continue growing and taking land. The leader of the Udam is called Ull, one huge beast of a man who actually tries to lead his tribe into the green and lush lands of central Oros rather than keeping them in the cold and fruitless environment that is the north of the country. Due to their Neanderthal-ish build, they are much more robust than the rather slim and “normal” Wenja, but they suffer from in-breeding and as brain disease referred to as “skull fire”. And then there is the leader of the Izila, Batari, also referred to as the daughter of the sun. Like I said before, they catch Wenja to sacrifice them to their god, Suxli, which is actually just the sun. They are also the faction that makes less sense to me since they fear a crystalline mask which they call Krati, which is apparently the name of Batari’s son who revolted against her mother for becoming too powerful; information that I did not really get from the game but from the wiki, and also information that seems mighty irrelevant since the person who should fear the mask the most, Batari, destroys the thing in the cutscene before the boss fight.
“Far Cry Primal” might not bring enough meaningful storyline for me to like it, but at least the game ran without any major hiccups; apart from a few examples. During the quest “The Great Beast”, you need to lure a mammoth into a circle of hunters to bring it down. I shot a few arrows at the thing, like the rest of my tribesman, but the actual kill came from it running up a slope “incorrectly”, which launched it sky-high out of the circle down into the riverbed close to where it originally stood, a good forty meters at least. In another scenario, the game once wanted me to protect some Wenja hunters from the local wildlife, but they were safe all along since the bear that was supposed to attack them spawned right into a sizeable rock, which made the rock much more noisy than normal but prevented the bear from doing any harm to my fellow tribesman. And some of the vines you can climb can also trap you since one spot near a campfire placed me behind the vines after using them, which happened twice but was easily fixable by just fast traveling somewhere else on the map.
All in all, “Far Cry Primal” gives players the exact same formula of a Ubisoft collec-a-thon, only with sticks and stones rather than guns and glory. I have to admit that the main idea still works for me, since running around to clear a huge map of objectives and seeing a completion rating going ever higher keeps me engaged for multiple hours. However, I think that the game itself is painfully average since I miss the interesting characters of “Far Cry 5” while I dread being attacked for the bazillionth time by a couple of wolves that do not manage to inflict any meaningful damage but will not go away until I smacked them in the face. And as I said before, the story lacks any twists or interesting tidbits, making it feel more like a Bethesda game where people just brainstormed about ideas for quests in 10.000 B.C. At the end of the game, “Far Cry Primal” is a game that I played for around twenty-five hours, at which’s end I felt the repetitiveness sinking in and was “rewarded” with an ending scene in which some people of my tribe are happy and dancing, without any else being hinted at or shown. The game is available on Steam for 49.99€, but I would wait for a sale if you like “Far Cry” games and probably not even recommend it if this style of game is not something you normally look for.
Cubic Creativity 