Ubi-Cry 6: Lost the magic.

Punching bag: Acquired. 

When it comes to my admonishment of what it is that Ubisoft has become and how their lacklustre approach to video game design has erased their heart, it can be hard to really present that to a public still caught up in their nostalgic memories of how the company used to make them feel. I mean, Assassin's Creed Valhalla was a commercial and critical success despite the bad taste that game left in people's mouth as a perfect amalgamation of all the things wrong with the obvious design trends the Ubisoft machine has been treading towards for years now. Bloated narrative, ceaseless busy tasks, challenge represented only by damage numbers and limp RPG-lite levelling structures. What you need is something overtly bland and empty coming out of the company. A presentation so unashamedly soulless and paint-by-numbers that it defies the nostalgia centres of the brain in how blatantly 'modern Ubisoft' it has become. Oh, hi there: Far Cry 6: Lost Between Worlds!

Seemingly based on a similar naming convention to Disney's worst performing animated movie of all time, Lost Between Worlds is a DLC that follows the convention of the other Far Cry 6 offerings. "Screw building upon the base game, let's do something different!" An approach that Far Cry has been desperately chasing for years now ever since the release and success of 'Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon'; A game which outlets are now telling me 'perfectly nailed the Ubisoft gameplay loop without dragging it out'. (Huh, and I thought 'Blood Dragon' was mind-numbingly boring; guess I'm just not cut out for the Ubisoft style.) Far Cry 6 has spent it's time trying to psychoanalyze the many villains of it's franchise and call it DLC, to varying results; but their latest DLC offering is perhaps the purest distillation of the Ubisoft vision. An undiluted liquid embodiment of exactly how creatively empty Ubisoft is at a deeply core level that cannot be rectified. They went the 'Survive' route.

If you don't remember, back when Hideo Kojima had his falling out with Konami and was forced to leave his Metal Gear franchise behind on his way out the door; Konami took to try and immediately prove why they didn't need the help of the auteur to make their games. So the suits rushed to Metal Gear to pool their ideas, and then immediately took to snatching all the most overdone and tired industry tropes to be guidelines for their next big MGS entry. As such, a franchise formed around spy-action narratives that intelligently explored wider themes that sometimes went as far as to touch on pertinent political issues through the lens of fiction suddenly became a Survival game about base building during a alt-dimension apocalypse full of crystal-head zombies. I get whiplash every-time I think of that genre switch, and so did the audience given that Metal Gear Survive has widely been rejected as the most pathetically soulless entry to a popular AAA game franchise ever conceived.

Well, Ubisoft ensures none of it's franchises can ever gain something of a unified creative lead that could instil a personal heart and identity inside any of it's series; so there's no real over-arching vision to betray with any of their design choices. Still, Far Cry has been a franchise that largely explores mostly everyday people being thrown into environments or circumstances that are a 'far cry' from the world that they are used to. (Yes, that is why the franchise is called that.) Large crosshairs that could theoretically touch on anything; yet somehow even then a limp dimension hoping narrative with colourful crystal-headed enemies and a conveniently weak 'shattered geometry' aesthetic feels just that bit too far. In that, it feels just unrepentantly and irredeemably bland. Something that I'm sure Ubisoft is getting very familiar with hearing of late.

The world of Far Cry 6 was, surprise surprise, it's greatest asset at launch. The Ubisoft development team in charge of creating the worlds of their games are always underserved by the games built around them, and it's almost as if those teams are kept in a total vacuum away from the rest of development. But I digress. Lost Between Worlds drags players out of the revolutionary land of Yara and throws them into 'generic land' with crystal shards, island fauna and bright colours everywhere. Now on paper, that actually somewhat visually interesting, doesn't it? Yet in practice it deflates like a popped balloon and I just can't figure out why! Everything you want is there, surely; you have bright colours, broad tropical fauna and... and... Man, I felt the same way about Far Cry New Dawn...

There was another game that sought to shake up the base Far Cry experience with a totally out-of-left-field journey, although that time it was in a mutated apocalypse that tried to mix the chaos of Mad Max with the colourful whimsy of Fallout and fell short of both. I think the difficulty with really identifying the key issue is identifying everything obvious is in the recipe that made both of these concepts work, from which we can distil that New Dawn's problem is more intrinsic. As superficial as it feels to just say, I think what Ubisoft's modern games are lacking, even in what should be their most creative ventures, is the charm and soul of these worlds. Splashing colour on a canvass is going to light it up, but without the intelligence of impassioned design and purposeful intent, these settings feel kitschy and synthetic.

Which doesn't even go into mention the absolutely laughable proposition of enemy types, as though Far Cry has envisioned any new enemy types since 3. Every outing brings us the standard units and then the heavies, and every thing else in the entire game is just additional bullet fodder. I don't think the FPS model of Far Cry provides enough dynamism in it's design to allow for meaningful enemy types. Sticking different colours on the AI heads doesn't bridge that gap or fill in that maw of design; it just makes them easier to spot and shoot against the scenery. And again, it just reeks of that lack of creative and intuitive spirit which shackles the entire Ubisoft line-up. Has the development team ever been reckless enough to really test the limits of their gameplay to find new avenues of fun? Of course not, and they won't; not in this DLC, and not in any future release of any key Ubisoft franchise.

I know I'm making these analytical dunks on the nature of Ubisoft pretty often, but I feel the need to remind myself just what exactly we're missing out on with all the wasted talent at Ubisoft. My review of Watch_Dogs Legion was born of the frustration of a company that have been making the same mistakes for years now, on every single on of their entries, and the bitterness of realising what everything that their games could have been. Right now the only game they have which is pulling any weight for them is Mario and Rabbids; which still felt like a bit of a weird award win for them when paired next to it's weighty competitors. Ubisoft lost the magic of the dreamweavers long ago, and more and more I see their dead, animated husk callously shovel out mediocre trite and it just breaks my heart, year after year.