[typing] [tribal music]
The way I see it, Far Cry Primal is going to appeal to you if:
1) you enjoy the overall gameplay formula of Far Cry 3 and 4,
and 2) you don't think that guns and automobiles are what makes the series fun.
If the idea of a first-person world filled with emergent gameplay, role-playing elements
and all those trite industry buzz words lubes your gears,
but you're also open to trading rocket launchers and dune buggies for spears and saber-toothed tigers,
then Far Cry Primal is the game for you!
It is unmistakeably a Far Cry game, except that in this world
living in a cave is a necessity
instead of a thing to do when you're sick of government privacy violations.
However, if you're more like me and you think that the Far Cry formula was starting to show signs of staleness
with the fourth iteration, then stick around. Grab a cheese. Let's talk about it.
You got your gouda ready? Okay...
I like the overall *idea* of first-person open-ended mayhem like in Far Cry
and that feeling of stepping into a massive new world to screw with things is always exciting.
I enjoy blazing my own trail and knocking procedurally- generated skulls around as much as the next guy,
but a few hours later I look at the map and there comes that inevitable overwhelming sense of
"Holy crap! I've got so much stuff I gotta do!"
So I skip all that junk and blow through the main story
until I come to a point where I can't continue because pacing.
And what they call "pacing" I call "pointless limitations to pad out the length of the game."
It's the same basic problem I had with Avalanche's Mad Max
and countless other sandboxy action games in recent years.
I get simultaneously amazed and disappointed.
Intrigued by the vastness of the world
but turned off by the arbitrary barriers to progress unless I do a bunch of grinding.
Now I got nothing against grinding, necessarily, and I can get into it when I feel that it's my choice,
or that my character will be genuinely improved having done so,
but I hate grinding when I just want to see the next part of the story
but can't because I have to collect X amount of Y before I can unlock Skill Z
which the next mission requires for some reason.
Far Cry Primal falls somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.
I find that mediocrity is almost never a positive thing when it comes to games like this,
but in Primal's case, those extremes come together in an odd compromise.
Like a bar that sits right in a center of a county line,
where one side it's legal to fight and swear,
but on the other side it's not, and you have to stay civil and do crossword puzzles.
Far Cry Primal is like that.
A bit of boring with a bit of rambunctious behavior right in the same building.
As an example, the story in Far Cry Primal is practically non-existent.
You're a guy named Takkar who exists in 10,000 BC and no one cares!
He has zero discernable personality.
You'll run into plenty of other characters that are more interesting
but they also pretty much just exist to fill extreme archetypes.
The over-the-top flawed leader.
The over-the-top psycho villain.
The over-the-top redneck comic relief.
And the over-the-top weirdo that constantly makes you do drugs for some reason.
And this situation is kind of strange because they obviously went to a lot of trouble
by implementing an entire fictional language based on archeological stuff.
Yet the narrative it brings to the table is probably the flimsiest of the entire series.
The flip side to this is that since the story sucked, it freed up my attention for other things
like the fact that you can ride giant cave bears while slaughtering your enemies using bags of bees!
And how you can take control of a giant owl, spy on a nearby village,
then have it eat their leader's face before you run in there and torch the whole town.
The kind of mayhem on offer in Primal is such an absurd delight that I didn't care that the story was so pathetic.
And all the pointless grinding of previous games?
Well, it's still here but it seemed less frequent this time around.
For the most part, the grinding serves a legit purpose.
Upgrading your arsenal and your village,
which is no surprise if you've played the previous games,
but it's also there to make sure that you even have weapons in the first place.
The weapons in Primal are... primitive...
as they should be.
You've got rocks, bows, clubs, spears and a few oddities like the aforementioned bee bombs,
and sacks of grossness, that I guess are so gross
that your enemies freak out and kill each other when they smell it.
But unlike previous games where the ammo was all over the place,
here you're going to have to craft practically everything.
If you throw your spear and you can't get it back, you gotta craft another spear.
If you bash a dude's face in with your club and it breaks,
you gotta craft another club.
Furthermore, most of your weapons can be set on fire at will to inflict further damage and set the world on fire.
And I should not have to tell you why this is far too much fun in the right situations.
Of course, this is all the peak of technology in the Stone Age, or however old this is,
and it can all be tossed right back at you since your enemies use largely the same stuff,
which means the outcomes of each battle can swing either way really quickly.
You do have a convenient power on your side, though,
which is never really explained and that's fine.
Your guy is known as the Beastmaster,
and with that title comes the mystical ability to tame and control... beasts.
All you have to do is plop down some bait and – shhh!
[growling]
And that's it! Lions, tigers and bears, oh, my! – they're yours forever.
You can feed them. You can pet them. You can ride them!
Agghh! I was not aware how much I needed this!
Ripping off the necks of a bunch of nameless jerks
while you're on the back of a sabertooth tiger is downright cathartic.
It's also beautiful!
Well, not the gory violence – that would put you on a watchlist somewhere
but the world of Oros that you can explore.
According to the intro, it's based in prehistoric Central Europe
although the map seems to be lifted straight from Far Cry 4's Kyrat,
which is based in the Himalayas.
So whether or not someone done goofed, I don't know.
But the world of Primal is fantastic,
and it feels completely unique from Far Cry 4, no matter what's shared.
It's lush with vegetation, wildlife, biomes,
cliffs to scale and hidden weirdness to deal with,
making each area stand on its own.
If it's too cold, you'll need to stay warm.
If it's a swampy area, you may not find all the resources you need.
If it's the mountains, you'll have to worry about toothier carnivores.
And if it's anywhere, people will pee on you.
Seriously, there's a lot of peeing in this game.
I think we found Ubisoft's fetish.
And each area can be scouted out using something called Witcher vision– er, hunter vision,
making threats and useful items glow,
meaning that you're never too overwhelmed with all the detail in your face.
It's a shame that YouTube's video compression sucks so much because the PC version looks far richer
than the muddy visuals you're seeing here, I promise.
And yet, as rich as the visuals are and as fresh as the animal buddy and combat system can be,
the remainder of Primal is pretty ho-hum.
Most of the time you'll be wandering from point A to point B,
dealing with any random encounters as you see fit.
They're all pretty boring.
And then performing some task to earn skill points
that can be spent on making this whole process nominally easier.
And once you get past the awesomeness of mastering beasts,
the bulk of the experience is just what you expect from a Far Cry game.
You know, instead of having towers to climb, you have bonfires to light.
Instead of throwing knives, you have sharpened rocks.
And instead of unlocking new modes of transportation, you unlock new animals.
It feels like a Flintstones world
in the way that there's a primitive analog for everything in the modern games,
and honestly, it's a bit silly.
But really, this is a game where you're a primitive dude
with glowing night vision and magical owl drones.
The whole game is ridiculous, so it kind of fits in.
For better – and worse – Far Cry Primal is purely middle of the road for me.
Its moments of sheer awesomeness are promptly deflated by the moments of sheer blandness.
It's like a roller coaster with two HUGE loop-de-loops on either end that make you scream every time,
but the rest of the track you're crawling along at two miles an hour.
Yeah, it's exhilarating in spots.
I just can't say for sure that I would go back to experience it again.
Maybe when I feel like role-playing as Dr. Bees
and then stomping on a bunch of crunchy cavemen with an angry mammoth.
It's a $60 game. And even though I was able to get it on sale for $40,
I still kind of wished I'd waited a little bit longer even for a lower price than that.
So take from that what you will.
And if you enjoyed this video, well then thank you. I enjoyed you watching.
I was watching you watching, and...
man, that was a weird thing you were doing with your left hand.
If you would like to see some more videos like this,
then check out my channel or just subscribe
and be notified whenever there's more in the future, which is every Monday and Friday.
And as always, I thank you very much for watching LGR.