Far Cry 6 hands-on preview: Enough issues to make us say, “Ay, Dios mío”
Far Cry 6 hands-on preview: Enough issues to make us say, “Ay, Dios mío”

            
  
  
  
    
      

      

      
        The bugs aren't great. Even if those get fixed by October, we have other concerns.
      

      
    

    
    
    Far Cry 6 stars Giancarlo Esposito as a ruthless dictator in a facsimile of Cuba.

          
  
  



  

  
      
    
    
                      
                      
          

    
    
      The trailer for Far Cry 6 featuring a very familiar voice for modern TV fans.

          
  

Roughly six weeks before Far Cry 6's upcoming launch on PC and consoles, Ubisoft elected to unlock the entirety of this first-person shooter's opening beats for a press-only, hands-on demo. This kind of access differs from the carefully selected "slices" we sometimes play in preview events, as those are meant to show an unfinished game in its best light.
But after going hands-on with Far Cry 6 for nearly four hours, I was reminded why game studios are sometimes cagey about prerelease reveals.
The demo I played was equal parts massive and unwieldy. I couldn't help but feel like hundreds of Ubisoft staffers' efforts to create a beautiful and convincing pseudo-Cuban adventure wound up squeezed into a single, tiny clown car of a package. The issues didn't end with game-breaking bugs and wonky AI, which may very well be resolved on, erm, October 7. At this point, I'm more concerned about uninspiring new loadout systems, a narrative tone that can't make up its mind, and an absolute yawn of a return to the Ubisoft open-world bloat of old.
Yara mean one, Mr. Esposito
For the uninitiated: every new Far Cry game, much like games in the Final Fantasy series, changes the location and characters while otherwise sticking to a familiar gameplay core. In FC6's case, that's open-world, first-person gunplay. Players must typically move by foot, four-wheeler, boat, or other modes of transport between massive forests, expansive shorelines, and run-down cities, all while battling whatever megalomaniacal leader is dominating said remote locale.

    

    Far Cry 6 stars Giancarlo Esposito as a ruthless dictator in a facsimile of Cuba.
                
  

This time, the setting is Yara, which is a thinly veiled fictional Cuba, and its megalomaniac is Antón Castillo, portrayed by beloved actor Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad). Over the years of his reign, Castillo has converted his island nation into a massive research and pharmaceutical laboratory, and he is so set on selling a cancer-beating cure to the rest of the world that his regime forces locals to work his farms and labs as unpaid slaves—or be killed for resisting. You start the game as Dani, a born-and-raised "Yaran" who questions this leadership approach and joins a rebellion.

          
                      
                  
                    
        
          
    
    
          
          
The game immediately lands on the wrong foot in terms of tone. While Far Cry games' villains haven't necessarily been the epitome of nuance, Castillo is easily the series' corniest one yet, saved (almost) by Esposito's adept performance. To the plot's credit, we've been fast-forwarded to the part of the story where Castillo has tricked enough of the party faithful into aligning with his murderous regime—you don't have to look far in history books to see how accurately that checks—but FC6's plot-filled opening has no interest in establishing how Castillo ever became beloved. His valuation of all other civilians' lives is comically nil.
Meanwhile, everything posed from Dani's perspective can't make up its mind: should Far Cry 6 be bludgeoningly serious or distractingly cheeky? Harrowing murders and ripped-apart families suggest one extreme, while giddy nihilism and comically large flamethrowers point firmly in the opposite direction. I'm working from a deficit in guessing how the full package plays out, but I already suspect that Esposito's solid acting and legitimacy will continue to get in the way of FC6's hankering to descend into dumb, dumb, dumb.
Yes, you can pet the dogs... with bullets

    

    After watching loved ones die, you wake up on the shore of a Yara-adjacent island. Every image in this article is captured from real-time gameplay on a PC with an RTX 3090 and most settings cranked to max. (No ray tracing yet, sadly.)
                
  

This is the kind of game, after all, where you'll get seriously hurt in the middle of frenetic machine-gun combat, then tap the "heal" button and watch yourself... light and puff a cigar? Because Cuba, I guess? It's also the kind of game where you'll head to an out-of-the-way farm because a "battle chicken" you'd just befriended instantly warps about half a mile from your current location. Hop in a car, track the farm down, and help this bird kill a bunch of trained guard dogs over some sort of thinly explained animal spat. To repeat that: you must murder barking dog after barking dog, with very little explanation as to what evils these dogs had ever committed or what nasty names they may have called the chicken's mother.

          
                  
                    
        
          
    
    
          
          

    

    Content warning: This gallery begins with a punk-rock rooster (see the collar?) and ends with dead virtual dogs. It's honestly a bit disturbing.
                
  

In my head, I've already started cataloguing every emotionally numb, head-scratching narrative turn I faced in this four-hour demo, and I'm not convinced that explaining each of those beats at length is worth your reading time. It certainly wasn't worth my attention inside the game.
But if you've played previous Far Cry games, you may already assume the narrative-worst with this series and instead hope that this sequel cranks up the massive-island battling opportunities to the point you can mash the "skip cut scene" button and have fun anyway. The nicest thing I can say on that front is how pretty, lush, and varied FC6's Cuba-like cities and islands looked in my preview session. Ubisoft's global network of studios has clearly put a ton of work into building Yara's landscapes, and the environs alternate between full forest zones, roadside encampments, boozy shoreline towns, castle-like fortresses, and more.
These are even more fun to explore when you commandeer a car, horse, biplane, or helicopter to tread ground more quickly, though FC6 has many unsurprising "finish a quest before exploring freely" road bumps in place. Some road checkpoints will slash your car's or bike's tires if you try to drive through, and anti-air turrets will blow unexpected aircraft out of the sky mighty quickly. Kill all of the guards at any of these pesky anti-rebel encampments to drive or fly through freely.

Peak Ubisoft
Before long in my session, this massive scope and these tastefully designed landscapes turned into so much regressive, open-world fluff. Peak Ubisoft. Say what you will about the Assassin's Creed games, but last year's Valhalla at least had some inventive ideas to break up its take on open-world adventure. Its landscape was dotted with logical side missions, and its RPG upgrade system let you dial in some really interesting customization paths for how you might engage in the series' increasingly compelling hand-to-hand combat.

          
                  
                    
        
          
    
    
          
          
If similarly promising stuff is hiding in FC6, my recent demo didn't hint at it. In one new series wrinkle, enemies have specific vulnerabilities, usually to types of ammunition ("armor-piercing," "ballistic," etc.). I'm not sure who thought this was a good idea in a first-person shooter, where only three weapons can be assigned to your quick-access belt. FC6 isn't built for the divide-and-conquer battle approach that might make sense in an Assassin's Creed game, where foes might wait for you to tangle up with one enemy type before you bounce off and face the next one. If you want to emphasize FC6's weapon-vulnerability system, you only get a few pot shots while sniping the battlefield from a distance, and your sniper rifle probably only has one type of ammo equipped. From there, it becomes a matter of everyone wising up to your hiding spot—and, as of this preview build, magically running toward your exact position even while your body is fully obscured by hills. Once combat gets frantic, discerning which foe is vulnerable to which bullet type goes out the window.

    

    If you like min-maxing stats all of the time during open-world adventures, Far Cry 6's menus will keep you busy. Personally, I'm not a fan.
                
  

The new "Supremo" backpack feature lets you equip one special ability at a time. But if you're imagining something like Crysis' supersuit, full of abilities that can be swapped and activated on a regular basis, or even some bonkers, Just Cause-caliber explosions and chaos, Ubisoft has bad news for you. FC6's Supremo kits mete out their superpowers via a painfully slow recharge, which starts over if you switch between kits via the pause menu. The kits' bonuses mostly resemble average characters in a class-based team shooter. Some are cool in action, even if all too brief, like shooting through walls or tricking enemies into fighting each other. Most are a bit ho-hum: disable enemy alarms; enter a temporary "rage" with better melee attacks; heal yourself faster.

          
                  
                    
        
          
    
    
          
          
Thanks to the fictional world's Cuba-like pastiche of "we hack together our crazy weapons with discarded parts," I was hopeful FC6 would use the gimmick to crank its combat into an overcharged gear and truly separate itself from Far Crys (Fars Cry?) of the past. Instead, it feels rote. Improvised nail guns and compact disc launchers look interesting in your virtual hands, but they play like a cosmetic skin over traditional semi-automatic guns. Menus full of weapon and armor attachments, which are more involved than any prior game in the series, turn into a numbers soup—something that drags players out of the fun of an open-world adventure in favor of squeezing percentages out of ammo types or armor.
Admittedly, there's still some fun to be had

    

    Riding shotgun in a chopper in co-op.
                
  

Despite all those flaws, here's the thing: I still managed to eke out some fun in my session. This came primarily in my final hour, when I fast-forwarded to a more powerful, better-equipped point of the game and joined another tester for a co-op romp. At this point, we were clones of the protagonist Dani, and in cut scenes, only one of us existed. That set the tone: it's time to get stupid.
While hopping on all of FC6's modes of transportation and then zipping across the massive network of islands to take out apparent tasks sometimes visible from 1,000 feet in the air, the game managed to feel like a fine, organic string of chaos. And by having a second player, my frustrations with the preview build's robot-perfect AI evaporated. Apparently, I needed a second real-life player to confuse Yara's anti-revolutionaries (or, you know, Ubisoft's enemy pathing systems). This shouldn't shock anyone who has tapped into the weirdly bolted-on co-op options in prior Far Cry entries, though once again, the series doesn't do much to mechanically support co-op once you're with a friend. One Supremo power helps heal teammates faster, and most modes of transportation have at least two seats, but that's about it.

          
                  
                    
        
          
    
    

        
        
          
          
When I wasn't sharing my session with someone else, I was more often annoyed by the things that FC6 gets quite wrong. The worst is a series of jumping challenges that alternate between aiming a grappling hook to climb up the sides of cliffs and then jumping between those ledges. Anyone who played Turok 1 on N64 knows what a bad idea this is for an FPS outside the Mirror's Edge series. I got so stuck on one of these puzzles, unable to stick the landing, that I begged the Ubisoft demo handler to skip me ahead. (I've since reviewed the footage, and I'm convinced that no, I am not the worst FC6 player of all time.) Also, multiple missions succumbed to bugs, with one mission getting stuck thanks to a helicopter glitching into the ground and staying there. After I shot the wedged chopper enough times with a pistol, another helicopter spawned in the sky, letting me advance.
Those issues could be cleaned up by launch via bug fixes and control touch-ups—although, yikes, look at that calendar, and October is close—but I simply don't feel the same about the humdrum missions I played. Stealth sections suffered from uneven AI, which made it hard to savor the usual "approach a fortified zone from various creative angles" flavor that Ubisoft games often inject into their open-world missions. And while FC6 is determined to give players a massive toolkit, ranging from weapon attachments to muscle cars to helper animals, I kept returning to the sense that every mission was meant to be beaten uncreatively, without excitement. The whole thing kind of lacked a clear tonal perspective on whether I should be cheering, laughing, or taking the threat of Castillo very seriously. (Or, you know, digging up a ditch to bury all those dead dogs in.)
We continue to have an open mind about how the final tweaked version will play on PCs and consoles in a little over five weeks, so expect another trip to Yara soon in order to evaluate what shape FC6 eventually lands in.
This article has been updated since publication to clarify phrasing about the new Supremo system.


          
                  

                  
          






  


  
    
    
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