After burning out hard on Assassin's Creed Valhalla to the point where I never finished it due to the overwhelming tedium, I was hesitant about Far Cry 6. I waited for sales to venture into this game and, honestly, the only reason I had any interest was due to Giancarlo Esposito. I should have stuck to my gut and avoided the game entirely.
My issues with the game can be broken down into four categories:
1) It's the same, tired, Ubisoft open world formula they haven't changed in over a decade that is easily 80-90% fluff content and only 10-20% main story. Collect-a-thons litter the map and an endless stream of pointless side quests flood your quest log. Strongholds to raid, chests to find, checkpoints to take over; Same crap, different day. The main story line is the same as every other modern triple-A Ubisoft open world as well: Go to location, find a reluctant group of possible allies, defeat area lieutenants until you unlock the final area captain, defeat the captain, go to a new area and repeat. Yawn. It's the same snoozefest that made me burn out on Valhalla and, surprise, I'm already bored to tears with FC6. The only thing Ubisoft has offered in their modern games are massive, expansive maps but bigger is not always better.
2) Braindead AI and an extremely aggressive respawning system. Enemy and ally AI in this game are so daft it hurts my brain. You might be trying to sneak into an area but some Libertad ally decides to run ahead like Leeroy Jenkins, blowing your cover. Enemies are so stupid you can snipe one from a safe distance and it will cause all the remaining enemies in the area to run to the general location of the guy you just sniped, and mill about in a predictable path, making it easy to just shoot them all without detection. But then the respawn issue rears its ugly head. Respawns in this game are almost as bad as the instantly-appearing police spawns in Cyberpunk 2077. While attempting to liberate prisoners from the Castillo National Zoo, I sniped guards and watched as newly spawned guards would appear 2-3 meters away from the one I just killed. Clear out a guardpost, walk about 20 meters away, turn around, and the guardpost is fully stocked with enemies again. The spawn system is ridiculous and destroys any fun of clearing out a spot and leisurely searching it for items or collectables. Making this issue worse is the fact that, to compensate for terrible AI, all enemies have god aim in close quarters. In an open fire fight, they NEVER miss even as they run around like beheaded chickens. It's not fun to have enemies randomly respawn in behind you and begin lighting you up before you can even react to figure out where the shots are coming from.
3) Changing the skill trees to gear perks and the constant need to change ammo types for enemy vulnerabilities. These two changes ruin the flow of the game as it forces you to continually go into the menus to change gear or find workbenches to change ammo types. You easily end up spending as much, if not more, time in the menus than you do exploring or playing. Need fire resistant gear for a certain area? Go into the menus to switch your clothes. Need armor piercing rounds for a guardhouse or checkpoint? Find a workbench and sit in the menus changing your ammo types. This also causes an issue of having a ridiculous amount of workbenches randomly dumped out in the world. I've found random workbenches out in the middle of the jungle and swamp, just sitting there, out of place, because players almost constantly need to have access to one. Why we can't just craft ammo and change on the fly is beyond me. These changes make the game feel even more tedious.
4) A complete lack of Giancarlo Esposito. Despite all the marketing material and his face plastered on the game's case, Esposito's "Anton Castillo" character appears extremely rarely and usually only in very limited cutscenes. Compare this to nearly every other mainline Far Cry game where the main villain often repeatedly shows up to antagonize the player. Castillo feels remarkably absent. In many ways, the game fails to build him as the overbearing fascist leader it portrays him to be and, at times, almost makes him a sympathetic character. There's more effort put into making his sub-bosses seem more villainous. The main star of the game is MIA for the vast majority of the game.
I can already tell this is going to end up just like Valhalla where I put it down and just never go back to it until I decide to get rid of it entirely. This formula is played out and the changes they made to try to refresh it (changing skill trees to gear perks) only made the game less enjoyable. Far Cry 3 still stands as the best Far Cry game to ever come from Ubisoft. Everything after has been a poor copy/paste. Albeit with fantastic graphics and eye catching set pieces. But staring out at the pretty vistas of Yara, or Hope County, or Kyrat can only carry a game so far.
I cannot recommend this game, not even as open world 'junk food'. Not when there are dozens of better options out there which can be had for less and provide better overall experiences. 1.5 stars out of 5 (or 3 out of 10).
