Game Details Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Publisher: Ubisoft

Platform: PS4 (reviewed), Xbox One, PC

Release Date: February 23, 2016 (Windows: March 1)

ESRB Rating: M

Price: $60 / £40

Links: Steam | Official website Ubisoft Montreal: Ubisoft: PS4 (reviewed), Xbox One, PCFebruary 23, 2016 (Windows: March 1): M: $60 / £40

Let's get the bottom line out of the way up front: Far Cry Primal certainly isn't the best Ubisoft game—or even the best Far Cry game. It is, however, the most Ubisoft game I've played yet. That doesn’t say anything about the game’s breadth, depth, or quality of content. But in terms of how that content is presented, it’s pure, distilled Ubisoft all the way.

This is all despite the game's setting being about as far removed from previous Far Cry entries as historically possible. The game begins by quite literally turning back the clock more than 12,000 years. In 10,000 BCE, a prehistoric tribe is looking to eke out a living in the harsh, though still apparently desirable, Oros Valley.

The time period is just about the only thing that sets the plot apart from the previous pair of numbered Far Cry games. The apparently exceptional central character, Takkar, has the same habit of toppling warlords and leading tribal revolutions as the heroes of Far Cry 3 and 4 did. He simply does so with a club and spear rather than a bevy of automatic weapons.

Another turn of the Earth

If you're wondering where things go from there, don't bother. Even more than most Ubisoft games, Primal isn't so much a sequence of events as a flat, open-ended plate of tasks to complete and checkboxes to fill. The lack of a linear sequence plays into the gameplay design, as the "story" missions can be completed in any order (with a few exceptions).

Once again, Far Cry's colorful characters serve primarily as waypoints on a meandering journey. They are introduced without explanation, and their stories barely interweave, except in sharing the common goal of toppling the nondescript enemy warlords. For the first few hours of Far Cry Primal, I actually believed that there wasn't an overarching plot. I thought that after a brief introduction to Oros, I'd be left to hunt animals and interesting rocks, turn their carcasses into a better class of club, and simply subsist. At first, it seemed that Ubisoft had made a sort of populist survival game—Rust or Minecraft for the Assassin's Creed set.



























That would have been more appealing than what I actually got. What I got was what I've had before, only more so. Like most open-world Ubisoft games, Primal feels like a remix of all the other open-world Ubisoft games: complete objectives to acquire better gear, use that gear to kill people, plant a flag in the corpses. Repeat until you've captured every outpost or feel comfortable concluding the story.

At least I didn't experience any technical hiccups during my long, steady grind through collectibles and side missions. The game looks and runs great on both the Xbox One and PS4, with snappy load times that I thought developers had given up providing in this console generation. One of the most promising things about Primal, then, is what it says about the performance of Ubisoft games going forward.

All of what defines a Far Cry™ brand experience these days is here as well, only turned up a notch in accordance with the setting. The central bad guys are more shouty, the drug-fueled hallucinations are more colorful, the naked breasts are more numerous, and the pseudo-edginess is more pseudo.

Yet the game's attitude never dips or spikes—nothing draws attention to itself as particularly harder, easier, more intense, quieter, more beautiful, or uglier than anything else. As such, none of the traditional Far Cry elements stand out over the others. It's as if what makes a Far Cry game a Far Cry game was smoothed down and stripped apart to its endoskeleton and then packaged as a new product. It's an allure that remains exactly the same from minute one to minute 1,000 and beyond.

Which isn't to say the game is totally without appeal. There's a sort of low-yield enjoyment to the basic loop of hunting, gathering, crafting, killing, and capturing. The feeling is like the opposite of a low-grade headache—like a 1-volt current directed to the pleasure center of my brain. It's a numbing drug that Ubisoft has quite a lot of experience in peddling and has done so to great profit over the years.

A career in animal husbandry

In the tradition of another Ubisoft franchise, however, Primal does have one unique feature up its mammoth-hide sleeve. Rather than a nation of assassins or a pirate ship at your command, the beasts of Oros stand ready to serve you—when their guts aren't being stripped for a better class of bowstring, that is.

At nearly any time (depending on how you've specialized your upgrades) you can recruit a wolf, bear, saber-toothed cat, or lesser animal to a menu of available contacts. Each comes with distinct stats and abilities on paper, particularly the specially named animal variants earned through "Beast Master Hunts." In practice, they nearly all act as standard AI companions, which tackle and maul guards and kill animals for purse leather so you don’t have to.

The exception is your ever-present owl. Summoned by a press of the D-pad, your eye in the sky is a prehistoric UAV—marking targets, dive-bombing chosen enemies, and even carpet-bombing outposts with poison gas and beehives. This all happens via remote control, apparently, thanks to Primal's early discovery of man-to-bird telepathy.

The "Beast Master" system is a boon to variety. Without it, you're limited to three basic means of attack: clubs and spears (which are functionally nearly identical) and a bow-and-arrow set. When you're playing a game as rooted in recycled formulas as Primal, this gets very old very quickly.

What did we all learn?

When you've mastered beast mastery—as well as all of the game's barely related plot threads—Primal... just ends. In my case, at least, it ended in the most anticlimactic way possible. Having buttoned up the game's only major threats, I returned to my tribe's growing village to speak with one last side quest dispenser. There was a perfunctory 30-second cut scene, and then… the credits began to roll. It was the perfect abrupt close to a game without a lick of rising or falling action.

If ever there was a game that deserved a hackneyed science fiction twist, it’s Far Cry Primal. Sadly, the game keeps the face below its sloping brow entirely straight, owl-operated drone strikes notwithstanding.

If you’re still charmed by the blueprint that was originally laid out in Far Cry 3, then by all means give this club a swing. See how it feels in your hands. If not, then nothing Primal attempts is going to change your mind about the trajectory of the series. If you've never run this particular grind before, know that there are at least two other games out there with slightly more verve and variety.

The good:

Looks and runs great on both consoles

The craft, kill, capture loop still provides a low-grade catharsis

The Beast Master system adds a tiny hint of variety

The bad:

The weakest story of any Far Cry game—which is saying something

Very little weapon and combat variety

It feels mostly recycled from past games

The ugly:

Downing skulls full of human blood in order to see "visions"

Verdict: Far Cry Primal is video game aspirin—numbing and nondescript but basically pleasant. Try it.