73 hours, 3561 total kills, 1399 stealth kills, 2912 headshot kills, 158 machete kills, 472 kills by amigos… those are my stats after finally finishing the story (including all side missions but one) of
Far Cry 6.
I ended up liking this "Far Cry goes Cuba" game quite a lot after getting used to the changes from Far Cry5 and New Dawn. It is actually not all that different and many things have only changed superficially. A good example to illustrate the level of change is the name of one companion, or "amigo" rather, as they are called in FC6. The doggie companion that was named "Boomer" in FC5 is now called "Boom Boom" in FC6.
Far Cry 6 is a typical UbiSoft open world game. It reminded me a lot of Ghost Recon Wildlands which also features a Hispanic setting and a very diverse world (Bolivia) with different climate zones.
There are main missions, side missions with and without a story, activity missions like races, enemy checkpoints (very small "bases") and large enemy bases that can be taken over, there are treasure hunts and many, many collectibles including special treasure hunts (criptograma chests) that require finding two keys by exploring the surroundings. Finally, there are also some (lame) mini-games like dominoes and cockfighting.
I originally started the game with a male Dani, only played half an hour or so, waited for patches and then I restarted with a female Dani because playing a female guerrilla seemed like a nice diversion from 95% of other games with male protagonists. It ended up being a good choice as I liked the acting and the voice actress with the cute accent ("fockin' Castillo").
The missions were mostly fun with the typical quirky Far Cry humor. Some missions were a little (very) over the top, but if you have 56 operations total, then not every single one can be great obviously.
The story had a great ending and in between I was surprised how much freedom FC6 offered for a game of this type.
I don't want to spoil anything but there is a real asshole character in the game, and when you finally get to him, you are discouraged from killing him. The mission objective states to leave him alive, but I was so pissed off at the guy that after the cutscene ended, I shot him in the face anyway, he went down, cried in agony and I put a second bullet in his head after watching him suffer for a while.
The mission did NOT fail or abort! Wow. And the companions even commented on me killing him later in camp. It makes me wonder if leaving him alive actually makes a difference. Will have to Google that some time…
The game also has a secret premature ending that is quite funny when it happens.
I thought that the equipment/loot system was a little weird but you can mix and match pieces to fit your play style quite well so it was OK.
The game was pretty easy on the normal difficulty. There no longer is a hard difficulty. Just easy and normal. There was one mission/operation I had to return to later after leveling up some more but everything else was mostly a cakewalk.
Things I liked a lot: The world, the exploration, clearing the map by conquering the world for Libertad bit by bit, the flying, the wingsuit & parachute (airdropping onto a mission never got old), the story and most characters, my trusty black ghost panther amigo Oluso, the hunting and fishing, the great graphics and the Rambo themed mission they added as a free DLC
.
Things I did not like: The bugs and crashes. I haven't had a game crash as frequently as FC6 in a long time. It got better after title update 4 (which had many crash fixes according to its patch notes) but it still happened sometimes. It was totally random but a common pattern was: If the game did not crash within the first hour then I could play for five/six hours straight without a single crash but once it started crashing then it would crash repeatedly about every hour or so and only a reboot got rid of the crashing. Regarding the cause, my guess is bad memory allocation or caching (the game does its little shader caching routine every startup and a longer one every time you update drivers).
There was also a good number of annoying glitches like when you got stuck on terrain or when the AI went bonkers… the game could use another polishing pass to make it more enjoyable.
Another real annoyance is how the amigos sometimes stick to your feet and block doors or even prevent you from quickly dodging an incoming attack etc. … sheesh.
I finished most of the map but there are a few loose ends I want to tie up, especially the remaining two or three Ubi core challenges to grab the XP for UbiSoft points (you can buy 20% discounts with 100 Ubi points in their store).
On a whole FC6 was a lot of fun and I would put it on the same level as FC5 and New Dawn, both of which I liked a lot. At first I was sure FC6 would rank below those games but now I'd call it a tie, give or take.