Far Cry 6

Far Crying out loud, this is a great game in a great series, but…

- Luke Kemp

INFO

FORMAT PS5 (reviewed), PS4

PRICE £59.99

ETA Out now

PUB Ubisoft

DEV Ubisoft Toronto

PLAYERS 1-2

LENGTH 20 hrs approx (campaign)

ACCESSIBILITY Menu narration; scalable UI and fonts; enemy outlines; pickup outlines; customisable subtitles; speech to-text, trigger effects on/off, colourblind mode; much more

This is a game with an awful lot of similarities to the fictional country of Yara in which it is set. Both are beautiful; both display an odd mix of being stuck in the past and keeping pace with the modern world; both are broken in places; both thrive on violence; and both offer journeys that are not easily forgotten.

Yara is a Latin America not seen outside pulp fiction. Almost everybody is either a guerrilla or a government soldier and, despite the abject poverty visible throughout the islands, its people have access to and deep knowledge of complex technology when convenient for the story.

In truth, Far Cry 6 doesn’t get off to a great start. It opens with a compulsory stealth section (we know! In 2021!) which is at least fairly brief. It does its best to shock, trying to establish what a military dictatorship looks like from the ground, but succeeds only in looking like… well… a videogame doing its best to shock.

The first few hours are essentially an extended tutorial, unsubtly introducing game mechanics through missions and largely keeping a tight rein on what you can do. It’s not bad, but it is awkward, and doesn’t feel very Far Cry-like. Once this section is over, however, and you realise that the island you begin on is a comparative speck on the map, the true experience begins.