There are few better ways to open a game than chasing a down woolly mammoth and then unexpectedly getting wrecked by a sabretooth tiger. This is happening because Far Cry Primal takes place in 10,000 B.C. Modern videogames don’t usually aim for pre-history because most (every?) open-world, combat-focused exemplar delights in brandishing a set of firearms. No one can escape from guns, so it’s immediately interesting that Far Cry Primal, by virtue of setting and design, declares them unnecessary.
Far Cry Primal throws out spoken language too. Even Assassin’s Creed, one of the more historically-adjacent game worlds available, employs English for the sake of its mostly English-speaking audience. Far Cry Primal’s cast of tribesmen and women speak in a language that’s either period-accurate or completely made up, relying on clever pantomime or raw emotion to sell their English subtitles.
These are the only two risks Far Cry Primal feels confident enough to take. The grandeur of its pre-historic environments could have been plucked from any location in Far Cry 4. Heavily armed and armored assailants with a menagerie of guns are replaced by heavily bone-armored assailants with a myriad of mechanically indifferent projectiles. Electronic alarms, which traditionally line bases and are tripped to summon reinforcements, are repurposed into animal horns that perform the same action. Everywhere you turn or look, Far Cry Primal feels like its adapting or relying on an existing (though proven) system. Differences feel like modifiers rather than original ideas; remember when you could like something on fire? In Far Cry Primal you can light everything on fire.
The core of Far Cry Primal’s design is in sync with previous two Far Cry games. A member of the endangered Wenja tribe, Takkar scours the landscape for like-minded specialists to join his cause. A combat guy, a hunter, a shaman, a guy with one arm who pisses on you, and a hilarious gentleman named Urki are lost members of the tribe and will provide Takkar with plenty of quests amid the land of Oros. Most quests focus on the task of eliminating two nefarious tribes also occupying the same space; the Udam, whom have a preoccupation with poison, or the Izila, who prefer fire with their chaos.
Finding and managing resources, while a major part of previous Far Crys, takes on an even larger role in Far Cry Primal. Takkar is responsible for maintaining an entire village, and every manner of rocks, plants, and animal skins can be collected and used to upgrade huts or craft new gear. As your village grows and population increases, so does your annual stipend in the form of daily rewards. Every so often your reward stash will fill up with resources or materials, essentially saving you the task of collecting some of the more trivial items out in the field. I went through hardwood (for crafting spears and arrows) and meat (healing tamed beasts or myself) like water, and, while I could get some in a pinch practically anywhere, it was nice to have a ton waiting for me in my reward stash.
Conquering outposts and bonfires (read: miniscule outposts) remains Far Cry Primal’s central sidequest and/or core tenant. Scouting out a heavily-guarded compound and finding a way to discreetly (or loudly) demolish everyone inside of it is still a ton of fun. It’s a testament to the strength of the design team, having planned Hitman-lite A.I. routes and intricate pathways that allow the player to orchestrate a chaos-suppressing ballet. Villages and caves full of people to assassinate is more fun before the end game when you’re ridiculously overpowered, but even then there’s a certain joy in lighting a large bear on fire and sicking it on the unassuming populace.
Attempts made to distinguish Far Cry Primal from its predecessors are fun, but fleeting. The most obvious and impressive of which is Takkar’s ability to tame and fight alongside some of the vicious carnivores roving Oros. You can accumulate a healthy assassin zoo, including jaguars, wolves, sabretooth tigers, and furious badgers. Beasts can be summoned with a whistle and revived fairly easily once they perish. I only sought their labor when I had blown whatever plan I had been attempting, often directing them to tie-up a heavy while I picked off a few lackeys. They also made short work of the random animals that would chase me as I trekked across Oros, essentially acting as a bodyguard.
Taming beasts imparts Far Cry Primal with an identity but it doesn’t change much of what makes it tick. Even taking control of an owl, which allows the player to fly overhead and mark enemies, feels like a quick take on the otherwise absent sniper rifle. After all, other Far Cry games boasted hyper aggressive animals that could burst out of cages and wreck shop. Expressing control over one feels like a clever mod rather than a system designed to alter the state Far Cry’s communicating systems.
I chose to play through most of Far Cry Primal with my bow as a primary weapon. Melee combat, while effective, is too inert and limp to feel satisfying. With Dead Island (and to a lesser extent, Dying Light) first-person melee brawling took an important step forward by communicating a sense of weight and urgency in any given context. Swinging clubs and poking spears in Far Cry Primal, by comparison, feels Spartan and obligatory. Bashing a guy’s head in looks and sounds like it hurts; why does it feel so apathetic?
With Primal’s primitive setting and focus on managing resources, I figured Far Cry had taken a lesson from popular survival-focused games like ARK or Rust. Instead, I found a game smitten with the least interesting parts of The Witcher 3. Far Cry Primal is obsessed with sending the player off on line-chasing quests, even going as far as copying The Witcher’s contrast-inversion with Hunter’s Vision and assigning red foot prints or an otherwise non-descript red trail to the beast in question. This isn’t hunting; it’s following a line and it’s as tired and antithetical to player engagement as it ever was.
If nothing else, Far Cry Primal is adept at creating radiant quests. The game is filled to the brim with content, both in the form of marked-red sidequests and yellow markers for quick insta-quests. These are entirely optional and the player isn’t penalizing for skipping them, but early on it’s a worthwhile opportunity to save some wandering Wenja and add a few more people to your bustling village.
Conquering rare animals continues to be a problem for which there is no identifiable solution. Each beast in Far Cry Primal has a pallet-swapped variant which cameos alongside its normal brethren. Tracking them is a bit easier, each rare beast leaves a yellow scent for Takkar to follow, but getting them to appear can take ages. Before I rolled credits I had to finishing upgrading a hut so I could receive my final quest. Doing this took two hours because a Tall Red Elk, who’s skin I required, refused to appear. I was retracing a tract of land in Northern Oros and Tall Elks, Sabretooth Tigers, and four huddled members of the Udam tribe respawned with remarkable consistency. I get the concept of creating rare animals, but tasking the player to find one and then rendering their appearance up to an infinitely repeating dice roll seems like a bad deal.
Action doesn’t demand a strong set of characters, but it’s tough to say Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 would have been better off without Vaas and Pagan Min, respectively. Far Cry Primal’s pair of independent villains rely on the implications of menace and sport interesting thematic ties to their tribe’s fighting style, but feel void of an appreciable personality. Takkar’s friends fair a bit better with the starry-eyed Sayla and overzealous shaman Tensey, but the star of the whole show is Urki, and insane man with no identifiable purpose beyond co-opting Takkar into his dumbass schemes. He only has three or so missions, but his redneck caveman attitude, relentless enthusiasm, oddball behavior, and idiotic self-confidence won my heart. Treasure your time with Urki because there will never be another one like him.
This review has been highly critical, but I still enjoyed my time with Far Cry Primal. Being analytical of a game demands I harp on certain aspects I felt were either underdeveloped or poorly executed, but it doesn’t require complete abstinence from embracing its relevant set of skills. Modern Far Cry games and their collaborative powerhouse of developers are battle-tested for mass consumption, and while I’m disappointed in the game’s ability to stay on the rails, I can’t deny how effective it is in repeating its mission. At its most basic level, it’s fun to go and take over outposts. It’s satisfying to eliminate everyone in the immediate area and witness that sweet slow-motion exclamation point of your final kill. This works for the same reason fast food does; it’s tested rigorously for maximum appeal and only suffers through its moribund refusal to take significant risks.
It doesn’t hurt that Far Cry Primal is one of the prettiest games on console hardware. The brute force and applied talent of Ubisoft’s massive development team creates a promise of visual perfection, and the photorealism underling Far Cry Primal is an exemplary showcase of their talent. A subdued soundtrack punctuates moments in-between authored calamity and culminates in a track borrowed from Fever Ray. I don’t often get a chance to write about Karin Dreijer Andersson’s fierce vocal range, and I’m proud to report it’s wonderfully adapted inside a closing mission of Far Cry Primal.
Far Cry Primal is neither a relief nor a disappointment. Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4, in spite of their mechanical similarities, were really good at being violent open-world base-conquering simulators and it has a smattering of neat toys. Far Cry Primal is another One Of Those with a few wild tangents stretching and searching for new limitations. It’s a predictable, albeit competently constructed, status quo machine humming along through another entry.
