Backlog: Far Cry 6

I have a question about Far Cry 6... why?

Just why?

I'm an Ubisoft apologist. They are check list games nowadays, but sometimes it's nice to just pop on a podcast and play in these sandboxes. 

But at what point does the check list start feeling more like a grocery list or a work to do list? I think it's the point we've been at with Ubisoft for a couple years now. 

I'm going to start with the good.

The gunplay is still a blast. There's something so satisfying about the Far Cry fire physics. You're having a fire fight in a tobacco field and you throw a molotov cocktail and the fire starts spreading, forcing enemies to move out of the way and into your gun sights. 

The shotguns feel real meaty when you pull the trigger. The sniper rifles have a snap to them. 

Caveat is that all the submachine guns feel exactly the same. 

I didn't really care for how they handled weapon strength in this one. Each weapon had a hard level attached to it and shared the same attachments under that gun group. This really made some of my favorite guns unusable at higher levels because they have a "2" stamped next to them and forces you to work with what they stamped with a "4." 

The story is incredibly interesting. I love the villain, I love the relationship with his child, I love the setting. I want more of that. 

Unfortunately, the side missions get in the way. (And there's a lot of them.) You may go hours between main story beats because you've been busy setting up propaganda banners for one character and getting another character on air on the radio. These are not fun missions, they are padding, distractions. 

These side characters aren't all that interesting either. There's several guerilla groups, two of which are headed by strong women, and I couldn't tell them apart. I was losing track of which faction I was currently working with and what their deal was. The only one that stood out was the faction of old revolutionaries and the only reason they stood out was because they were old. 

One of the worst side missions has you destroying jamming devices. There's like 8 of them and they don't show up on your map. You just know they are in a certain area. It's a fetch quest where essentially you are told, "I want you to get something for me, but I have no idea where it is or what it looks like." I used a guide just to get this out of my journal. 

And those distractions are on top of all of the other side missions peppered everywhere. 

There's the classic clearing the bases which I still enjoyed. 

There's destroying anti-aircraft guns which were an easier version of clearing bases. So it was fun, but once you realized a well tossed grenade is all you need, it's easy to clear these quickly. 

There's the standard open world races. Who likes these? Really? GTA, Far Cry, Red Dead... doesn't matter, racing in these open world games is not fun. And Far Cry 6 takes it to the extreme where most races are going to take you more than 5 minutes and the fail state is almost always at the very end. 

Then there's all of the collectables. USB devices, weapons, gear caches, destroyable billboards, etc etc. Each area has 50 or so of these minor things you can do. 

Then there's the collectable special weapons. Each one has a specific puzzle or challenge to complete. It might be one where you have to follow a bird with your wing suit. Or maybe there's a dance club that's partially submerged under water that you have to find your way through. Or even solve the mystery at the damn of where the worker with the key went. (Hint: There's one dead body at the damn and it's our guy)

It's basically the Tomb Raider tombs, but without the fun. A lot of these come down to just jumping against every wall and trying to swing just right. 

And the worst side mission they introduced is this mission type where you hear that there's an air drop somewhere and they make you race across the area in a certain amount of time to beat the army from getting there first. If you don't get within a certain distance in the time allotted, you fail. The thing is, it doesn't matter, the army is always there. You have to fight them. So even if you strategically placed a helicopter near the start point and got to the air drop with 2 minutes left, you still have to fight the army. Why have a timer at all?

Previous games, you had to hunt certain animals to upgrade stuff. It didn't make a lot of sense to get a bear skin to build better armor, but it was funny and less annoying. This game gives you endless amounts of various materials to collect. After a while, you find yourself wandering around a camp just clicking the X button to pick up anything that has an icon on it. It's a mindless activity. At that point, just make me magnetic and have me suck up the materials. 

There's the Far Cry 6 version of sending X amount of soldiers to complete Y mission. It's presented as a choose your own adventure with some random dice rolls. In theory, this could be fun. I loved this in Assassin's Creed 2. But you end up running through similar prompts and the entire thing takes way too much time for very little payoff. Most of the time, it's materials, but every now and then there's a weapon or piece of clothing. 

And finally, they have this huge icon with a notification over it for the multiplayer stuff. It's just always on the map and it bothers that deep part of my brain where I want to complete everything. I can't... I'm literally one of 10 people that bought Far Cry 6 and I don't want to play with randos. 

In summary, Ubisoft is getting in the way of their own games being fun. They think we want to continue have larger and larger checklists, more time in the game. 

More time in the game isn't bad if there are interesting things filling that time. But right now, it's a big open world that just has a bunch of map markers for cosmetics. 

The opening menu kept pushing DLC which looked like throwbacks to all the villains of the past, but my god, the last thing I wanted was more at the end of this game.