Far Cry 6 review-in-progress: A silly game trying to be smart
>After playing several hours of Far Cry 6 on Xbox Series X, I think the word “guerrilla” has lost all meaning to me. This action title, which officially launched on October 7, has a lot of what makes this series great, but it also has a lot of what drags it down. It’s a fun game wrapped around a core of flavorless pseudo-political stuff, a game that’s a regular barrel of monkeys when it’s indulging in dumb fun but also really, really wants you to think it’s smart.
>I suspect this game has a few final twists waiting for me, so I will update this review when I have finished it, though I do think I’ve seen enough of the gameplay, side missions, and critical story to give a good summary of what’s what so far.
>The game takes place in Yara, an island nation ruled by El Presidente Anton Castillo. Yara’s main claim to worldwide fame is a drug called Viviro, a cancer treatment cultivated from Yaran tobacco. However, under the auspices of Castillo and his platform of “True Yaran” patriotism, the country has devolved into a dictatorship where anyone the regime deems unworthy is forced to be a slave to the state. Now a number of dissident groups within the country are poised to strike back.
>The player character, Dani Rojas, is a sharp swing from Far Cry 5’s Rook, being fully voiced and having an actual name and personality — and not a bad one, either. They’re initially dragged into the revolution against their will, only to later become attached to their friends and wanting to personally put an end to Castillo’s rule.
>They play a fairly straitlaced foil to some of the crazier NPCs, but they are not without their moments of levity, my favorite being their interactions with their menagerie of animal companions.
>My biggest problem with Far Cry 6 is that it clearly wants to be about something, and even after hours and hours of playing it, I don’t know what that is. I think years of taking inspiration from politically fraught real world scenarios has bewitched Ubisoft into thinking Far Cry is some kind of smart political thriller. That would be fine, except Ubisoft will not do any of the work it would take to actually make Far Cry 6 that kind of game.
>Far Cry has a list of things it must have, including wacky characters, over-the-top missions with explosions, and animal companions. These quintessential Far Cry elements take up so much of the air that they leave no room for anything more than a clumsy attempt at socio-political commentary.
>Occasionally someone will make a speech in the presence of Dani that sounds like it means something but really doesn’t leave much of an impact. This is why I say the voice actors are sometimes let down by the script, as they deliver each speech with such conviction that you can almost forget they’re not saying anything.
https://archive.ph/4U6Mv
Far Cry 6 review: Less predictable and more political
>Far Cry 6 is set in Yara, a fictional country made up of several islands in the middle of the Caribbean. This nation is ruled by a president/dictator named Anton Castillo (Giancarlo Esposito), elected by a questionable popular vote, who has been in power for several decades.
>Yara is a world power in medicine, and it seeks to develop a cure for cancer from its tobacco plants. However, the cost of these advances has been an impoverished population divided between the false and true Yarans, according to Castillo’s classification.
>False Yaranos are considered outcasts and forced to work as slaves on Viviro plantations, the resultant element of modified tobacco plantations.
>Anton Castillo’s goal is to return Yara to its former glory, while the nation has to cope as best it can with the blockade imposed by the international community and particularly by a superpower like the United States.
Ubisoft has insisted that its games are not political (a point that its narrative director later pushed back on).
>However, in Far Cry 6, it recognizes that these types of stories cannot be isolated from the political discussion, even less so when this title is not at all subtle with its mise-en-scene.
>Yara is a fictionalized version of Cuba in which there are too many elements that refer to the history of this Caribbean island, such as revolutions that last for decades or cities that seem to have been stuck in time as a result of the blockades.
>Still, there are elements of Far Cry 6‘s narrative that are more complex. In the big picture, Yara is Cuba, but when zooming in on more specific situations, sociopolitical elements appear that are problematic not only in dictatorships but globally.
>For instance, military control in cities with curfews, extreme nationalism, or discrimination against minorities; themes that become visible in the game and that do not remain only in stilted references.
>In that sense, Far Cry 6 is more honest than Far Cry 5, as it is less subtle in saying what it has to say. In the previous title, the insinuations about what was happening in the rural and protestant U.S remained just that.
>Far Cry 6, on the other hand, is not the most explicit game of all, but it has no problem showing the consequences of fascism and nationalism.
https://archive.ph/wtvWw
Is far cry series secretly red pill? I can’t recall any triple AAA games that pissed off game journalists like far cry 4, 5 and 6.