Sometimes, reviewing a game can be difficult. It’s an incredibly subjective experience, playing a game, nowadays. You’ll get more or less involved in the storyline, or a particular relationship. You’ll love this particular game mechanic, and hate that one.
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Such is the case with Far Cry Primal, which feels remarkable mostly for its lack of remarkability. The game is really fun. When you just look at playing the game, it’s one you can easily lose a couple of hours in, with countless side missions and small tasks fleshing out the main quests, and all of them a blast. Being a native fighting first and foremost for your own survival, then second playing Rambo to a group of less capable protohumans is a blast. You’re the alpha, the primary, the leader of the pack and the one meant to lead everyone you meet one way or another: into the light of civilization or the darkness of death. And that’s fun. Going for headshots with a bow and arrow or a spear, or charging into battle with your club swinging in front of you and your sabretooth tiger attacking the enemy next to you is just plain exciting.
So, in the most visceral of experiences, Far Cry Primal succeeds in spades. The problem in evaluating the game comes after, when you’re trying to figure out just what about it is new and remarkable. This is a game I had an utter blast with for a solid ten hours (with many more sure to come – I can’t wait to jump back in and finish side stories and delve deeper into Takkar’s story), but I can’t completely formulate why.
Looking at the basics, the presentation of the game is definitely remarkable. It takes you back, way back, to prehistoric days, the dawn of civilization. You’re Takkar, one of the last remaining Wenja, or so you think. You’re thrown, then, into the role of chieftain, made to gather these Wenja together from across an ever-increasing map, and battle back the other growing clans, both of whom are ever so slightly more savage than yours. The blandness of the story keys in here, where your group is instantly tempered – you’re not commanding the “crazy cannibals” or the sun-worshipping fanatics who don’t feel pain. You’re the leader of the boring, regular folk, who are trying to figure out how to survive and live their boring, regular lives. It’s the safe choice, when taking the Far Cry franchise to the prehistoric past was supposed to be the bold move. In that, the story fails you – you feel exactly the same as you would in the 18th, 19th, 20th, or 21st century. You’re just another leader of men, the same boring men of any time period.
Sure, your weaponry is different, but is it really? Your spear is more powerful, an oddly short-range version of a sniper rifle. Your bow-and-arrow has a great feel to it, where if you hit your foe dead in the chest or face, they actually fall (until they stop doing that when you meet later enemies, an impetus that just doesn’t make sense in the fiction), and your club is blunt and strung. The weapons work – again, until they don’t – the way that they should, and feel right. It’s a remark even an observer would make, that it feels more real, more savage. Then, you get a little farther along and that’s all thrown aside for the prototypical video game or shonen development of enemies. Well, now this guy is supposed to be stronger, so he magically can take five arrows to the chest where those other 90 died instantly. It breaks the fiction they set up from the beginning, and pulls you out of the story when you’re looking at it critically.
As far as that story goes, it’s nothing that will shock you like The Last of Us or make you think like your favorite RPG. And that, on its own, isn’t a negative – sometimes you just need a base story to let someone go have fun, and that’s fine. But when you have a fiction that’s inherently destroyed early and often, it then makes you look more critically at the story, and thus realize how generic it is. It’s amazing how much better this would all hold up if you just met a varied force from the beginning. If your first encounter was with a group of strengths from the single arrow to the crudely helmeted, and if that was a more realistically graduated group, everything else about the game would work better. This game would feel more like the amount of fun you have playing it, and that should be the case.
This is a game that it’s very difficult to be critical of, because at its heart I had so much fun. I genuinely feel I’ll go back, long after work hours, and play this game some more, trying to get every nook and cranny explored. But I won’t care about it in any higher level, and with games like The Witcher and Mass Effect and The Last of Us out there, I really think I should care more about the experience. The game seems to present itself as one you should be thinking and caring about, and that becomes its largest failure.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that if you’re looking for just a good eight-ten hours of fun where you’re doing fairly similar tasks but having to do some strategy and problem-solving, you’ll have an absolute blast with Far Cry Primal. The game is really fun, and the weapons feel strong (for most of the game). The beastmaster portion of the mode, taming beasts (through an extremely simple mechanic that only depends on you spending points to unlock higher levels) is awesome. When you have a rare black lion or sabretooth at your side, it’s just fun, sicking them on enemies and watching the carnage. But if you’re looking for a game with characters to care about, that’s just not here.
In an age where story and relationships count as much in games as they do in films or TV shows, that’s always going to come up in reviewing a game. There, Far Cry Primal fails to find its footing. In pure, arcade fun, the game delivers in spades, however. It’s a blast hunting, taking down outposts, and learning new abilities. The game is fun, it’s just fairly empty fun. For someone looking for a great arcade experience, or something to fill the late winter/early spring dearth of games, you’ll be thrilled to see a game with this much to do, and this much fun doing it. If you’re looking for a deep storyline that takes you into the experience, though, or even a story that makes sense in the confines of itself, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
Grade: 7.5/10
