Welcome to my Far Cry 3 review! Wait, no, it's Far Cry 4. Hang on, no, it's Far Cry Primal! Sorry, it's hard to tell, they're all practically the same.
The Far Cry series has became very similar the past few releases, I could've also included Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon in the introduction, but I did want to get this review started one day. It's not necessarily a bad thing, FC3 is one of the best games I've played in recent years, however, doing the exact same thing over and over again, THAT is the definition of insanity. FC3 was so successful that FC4 did the exact same thing, but not nearly as good. Primal is set in the Stone Age, I thought this was a brilliant idea, I've never played a game set in that era and it was brilliantly done. Sabertooth tigers and mammoths walk the earth and fight with you if you keep them on your good side.
Being in a completely different era to the more modern-day setting, Primal had to do almost everything differently to fit the new, or older setting should I say? There's no camera to tag enemies, so how about an owl you can control that soares through the skies, tagging all the enemies in sight? There are no gun stores, so why not scavenge and make your on arrows for your bow by collecting wood from trees? I thought the owl tagging was a genius idea, it was one of my favourite new features. But, the biggest new feature of all, animal taming. You want a sabertooth tiger to do your bidding don't you? Of course you do! Crafting bait and hurling it towards a beast and slowly approaching it, to calm the animal down gets it to follow and fight for you. There's a number of different animals to tame, leopards, bears and badgers? Yes, badgers those ferocious, little Devils!
The game looks great, the people are always really close up in the scenes and you can see so much detail in their faces and their eyes look so real. However, it's a bit different for the close ups of the tamed beasts, they look pixely but it's only when you heal them you notice. The story isn't very memorable and nor is it that interesting, you are a Wenja, a tribe at war with the Udam tribe, while also fighting Izila tribe. One of the main characters was called Sayla, a Wenja who is haunted by the screams of the dead Wenja's and is emotionally hurt at the deaths of her fellow tribe. That makes sense, but what doesn't, when you first encounter her, she immediately tries to kill you. A Wenja. So much for caring about all us Wenja's! I found it hard to like any character in truth. They just weren't that memorable and they hardly even featured in the storyline. The game has no English whatsoever. It's the first game I've played in a completely different language, which made it unique.
Plenty of the good, older features were present. Animals you hunted showing as an x on the minimap, so you could find the carcass was always useful. Searching bodies for extra items and even the crafting with animal skins to create better gear. As there were no guns when this game is set, FC had to really focus on the melee. I really liked it, nothing like swinging your club or striking with your spear. I found melee fights to be way more fun than the gun fights ever were in the older games. Outposts were also back, which are by far the most fun thing to do in Primal, taking out a bunch of enemies using stealth to capture the outpost was always enjoyable. You could even use your owl to smash open cages animals were captured in, so they could take out enemies at the outpost for you. Owls could also drop any type of bomb weapon on the enemies below if you had any.
Crafting ammo was one of the best things in the game, you always need weapons so constantly scavenging for items was always a priority. You could also set most weapons on and even if you went up to fire with a weapon, it would automatically catch fire, which I thought was pretty cool. Not losing health every time you fell a metre was also an improvement the series really needed, that was how I would usually lose all my health... by jumping hardly a metre. Riding mammoths and some tamed beast was the fastest way to travel, but it can take a while to unlock the skill. Of course, there's fast travel, provided you've unlocked where you want to go. This game has the best fast travel, the loading screens in between are incredibly fast. There were actual boss fights. Yes, you weren't drugged up and hallucinating them this time, they actually were in real time!
However, there were still some hallucination missions. I've always disliked them, they really take me away from the game and I rush through them as fast as I can. Please no more in the next game, thanks. There were side missions too, they were boring and so pointless, they were only worth doing to get an extra skill point to upgrade yourself. Tamed beasts could be frustrating as when they're low health and you're calling them back to heal, if there's hostiles around they will try and kill them even if you're constantly calling them back to heal. This lead to many of my furry companions dying and me not bothering to revive them for disobeying me. One also got me caught and raised an alarm during a stealth operation at an outpost, I can't blame my sabertooth really though, he was trying to crawl alongside me and be stealthy too. One more thing I hated was, if you were controlling the owl and dropping bombs and such with it, the more you threw, the more alert the enemies became. All of a sudden you'll be kicked out of the owl screen to the first person view, because they've discovered you. I have no idea how an owl flying in the sky dropping stuff on you, gives away my exact location, hundreds of metres away on the ground. Be like seeing a plane in the sky and then running all the way to the air traffic controller and beating them up if you ask me. Makes no sense, does it?
All in all the game isn't bad, but that's because of how good FC3 was and it plays exactly the same. Uninteresting and forgettable story but a very memorable setting with some great new features (taming beasts). I certainly hope this isn't the last we see of Far Cry, but I hope it's the last we see of the game copying and pasting its predecessors.
7/10
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