The other day I sat down, duties of the day put to a swift and lasting rest, and loaded up my list of games on Xbox (The computer I'm using currently being somewhat preoccupied for the time.) and clicked up Far Cry 6. I found myself loading into a cave wherein a quirky mad scientist with a dog in a wheelchair told me to gather up three somethings-or-others in order to get his napalm machine up-and-running, that being where I had left the game some month or so beforehand. And do you know what I did? Do you know what my course of action from there was? I turned off the game. Just like that. I sighed, somehow instantly exhausted from that 5 seconds of simply realising what it was the game was asking me to do, and I suddenly became too tired to play games. That, in itself, is an achievement for which I award only a very few games in my life- Far Cry 6 makes gaming unappealing.
To be fair, though, I can't pretend that Far Cry 6 is the only game which has done this very same thing to me over the past few weeks. I also found myself affronted with the very same insta-exhaustion after loading into Assassin's Creed Valhalla once and being faced with a 'clear the camp' objective, but I came around on the chore eventually. Far Cry 6, I've been unable to come back and pick up again- and it's starting to worry me somewhat. I always knew that Valhalla was going to be a challenge to endure after the road-rash that was playing through the entirety of Odyssey, but Far Cry has never dragged for me before. Hell, I finished Far Cry 5, my previous least favourite Far Cry game, twice for some reason. Once on the hard-mode. Why is it that I can't stomach even a preliminary playthrough of 6? Where has the magic of Far Cry got lost?
I found the very start of Far Cry 6 to be very awkward, in the way that the game seemed confused about the fantasy it was attempting to perpetrate. The context and narrative wanted to tell me it was about a rag-tag guerrilla army squaring off against a fascistic military dictatorship, but the game's idea of deliberate and ramshackle home-made assault landed me a back-mounted missile launcher pretty darn quickly. And a one-shot armour piercing rifle, which seems to totally invalidate the new 'ammo type based' gameplay system, as my literal second weapon in the entire game. And from there, almost 10 hours later, the game never really found it's footing. Far Cry 6 hasn't really gotten around to enforcing it's premise, or enriching it's fantasy, really at all. It kind of feels like the game just wanted to push me out into it's open world as quickly as possible and pray that everything came together from there. It didn't.
For me the real problems with Far Cry 6 start with it's characters, none of which seem to fully grasp the world they're currently living in save for your soon-to-be-dead friends from the very intro. Everyone seems just that tad too extreme and archetypical, silly, overdramatic, incomprehensively grumpy and largely annoying. They all seem to want to be my friend, which contrasts wildly with the Far Cry I know wherein most of the cast are self-driven and potentially suspicious. Where it's sometimes difficult to tell if that CIA agent is really working with you in this moment of aligned goals, or pushing you into deeper into a hole you can't escape so they can walk over you to get what they want done. Characters in those games were sometimes deranged, sometimes duplicitous but never so obvious that I figured out who they were in a single conversation and then filed them away under (cardboard cutout) before the game could get anything out edgeways.
Now I don't want to pretend that Far Cry 6 doesn't try with it's characters, because rather uncharacteristic of the Ubisoft brand- they actually did. These people have character moments and emotional pitfalls and actual professional voice acting performances! (God I missed effort from all my time playing Valhalla.) The problem is that none of these characters are interesting, or different, or note worthy. They all feel like trace-jobs over various 'break out' characters from popular franchises, ripped from their context and slapped in the middle of a Far Cry game to hopefully stand out. They aren't products of the cruel Cuba-analogy world they inhabit, they're products of the pithy Marvel Universe or a zany James Gunn production- they swear, fully embody their one quirk and undergo very basic arcs that basically just further affirm their own personalities even harder. They're one trick ponies, to a man.
And then there's the presentation, terminally confused I would call it. For some unexplainable reason every time you enter a mission giving camp the game shunts you into third person mode, something no other Far Cry game has ever done, forcibly subjecting the player to the fashionable disastrous visage of whatever crude selection of armour you've chosen to don yourself in. Again, for no reason. It adds nothing. And then there's the actual mission briefings themselves. Presented like it's an MMO, with a control-arresting context screen whilst the quest giver talks lifelessly at the camera and explains the context behind the mission. Of course, this somehow respects your time worse than your average MMO given there's no written summary of the trash they've got to say, skip it an you'll have to figure things out on the go. (The plot is largely paper-thin anyway, you don't need a PHD to guess without the brief.)
Then there's just the lack of cohesion between the world and the gameplay we're supposed to engage with. Fascistic dictatorship that stamps on our freedoms? How, with those increadibly rare outposts that are so sparsely manned you can drive right through them without picking up a tail? Jungle pathways and horse hitching posts, presenting the resourcefulness of underdog as an alternative play style? Why bother when I can summon a bullet-proof turret mounted car at any time for no cost? The game utterly fails to reinforce the guerrilla fantasy in it's characters, it's world, it's systems- (the guerrilla weapons are all laughably useless in general play) it's only really the narrative desperately insisting that we're playing as scrappy cave dwellers to remind me what this game is even supposed to be about- which makes it hard to bring the disparate pieces of the game's construction together into something, well, cohesive.
I don't want to play any more Far Cry 6 because, to be honest, there's nothing really to it. Far Cry 6 utterly fails to stamp out an identity for itself to justify it's existence as a sovereign entity from any other open world adventure title like the one's Ubisoft spits out bi-annually. They try, but at this point it mostly just comes across as an old man, far past his prime, trying to piece together memories of his glory days to breathe some form of life back into them- whatever that's worth. "Lets do the flamethrower mission, reviewers loved that ten years ago!", "Oh, the bad guy needs to make a speech here- make it rambling and circular- it'll be just like the Vaas scene!" There's no soul to the game. And you want to know the worse part? I'm still going to play it. Not today. Not tomorrow. But some day. Why? Because I hate myself. And I want to suffer. And whilst no one exists to tell me stop, who cares enough to try and keep this thin scattering of dying neurons I call a mind healthy- I'm going to keep drowning them with pathetic trash just like this until my eyes pop. So thanks Ubisoft- your mediocrity will literally be the death of me.
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