Far Cry 6 - actually the ninth game in the series because who's counting? - is perhaps the most quintessential game in the Far Cry franchise to date. Once again, an unjust-but-charismatic villain needs to be taken down and once again a rebel movement that can't find it's arse with both hands is totally hapless until a single figure shows up and does 95% of the gruntwork in the war for it, single-handedly. Along the way there are some fairly superficial musings on the futility of violence (just before you get to commit lots of it) and bloodshed, and the corrupting influence of power on the soul etc etc. If you've played any Far Cry game before - particularly the last three numbered games and their spinoffs - you'll not so much know what to expect, but be able to play this in your sleep before you even install it.
The appeal of the series has always been presenting an open world environment and presenting you with objectives that you can achieve through several means: front assault, stealth, using vehicles, employing allies or some mixture thereof. That element of the series is present and correct in Far Cry 6, with a nice back-to-basics feel to the action. The previous full game in the series - 2018's questionably-designed Far Cry 5 - interrupted its freeform action with an obnoxious narrative that constantly snatched control away from the player for ludicrous cutscenes featuring the most banal cast of villains ever to grace a video game. Far Cry 6 thankfully jettisons this approach. You have your charismatic villain, this time around played by Breaking Bad and The Mandalorian star Giancarlo Esposito, but he shows up relatively rarely, and the game thankfully gets out of its own way to let you undertake missions how you see fit.
The return to a tropical island map also adds to the game's retro feel, recalling the setting of both the original 2004 Far Cry and 2012's breakout game for the series, Far Cry 3. Whilst the first game had you fighting mercenaries and genetically-engineered monsters (don't ask) in an archipelago, the third had you fighting pirates and petty criminals. This one has you fighting a full-blown insurgency against a fascist, corrupt government, which definitely ups the ante.
The map is divided into three regions, each one inhabited by a different rebel faction. As Dani, you have to convince each faction to work with Libertad and, as usual for this sort of game, you have to win their loyalty by, er, fighting every battle of the war for them. Dani is a walking avatar of death at the start of the game and this only intensifies through the story, as they (you can choose their gender) are proficient with every weapon you can think of and also get a ludicrous backpack-mounted superweapon that can do everything from poisoning entire platoons of enemy soldiers to shooting down helicopters to disabling tanks with a massive EMP pulse. You can also take one of a series of slightly ridiculous animal companions into battle with you, who can cause havoc, spot resources for you and sniff out enemies from around corners.
The old levelling system has been jettisoned, with you now customising Dani through the use of cosmetic items, types of armour and weapon mods, which can impact everything from how much ammo you can carry to how you recharge your back-mounted personal WMD. This customisation system is both decent and a little unnecessary: you can play the whole game through with your starting weapons without too much difficulty. In this sense, Far Cry 6 represents a step back from the increasing RPG-like direction of the last few Far Cry games (and Ubisoft open-world games in general) and something of a return to the hardcore FPS focus of the earlier titles, which I found quite welcome. However, you are definitely a tougher character from the off then I think was the case in any of the previous games, meaning on standard difficulty the game can be a little too easy. I found switching up the difficulty or making self-imposed restrictions, like trying to stealth my way through every mission, a reasonable way of keeping things fresh.
As usual, you progress the game by taking over bases, eliminating checkpoints and performing a large battery of side-missions, many of them adding detail or colour to the large supporting cast of characters, or allowing you to recruit more crazy animal companions. It's all pretty traditional by now and those seeking fresh ideas may be disappointed by the lack of them here; then again, playing the ninth game in the series expecting it to maybe pull off some shocking kind of slide into originality may be a doomed endeavour from the start.
What Far Cry 6 does very well indeed is serving up chunky first-person, single-player (with some co-op modes) action, with a nice side-line in stealth. The graphics are solid if unspectacular, the Cuban-influenced soundtrack is excellent, and the action is frantic and mostly satisfying, even if enemy AI even on the hardest difficulty level is limited, at best. The map is large but not too large, and the game tries to play fair but also logically, with you able to use a variety of vehicles but having some reasonable limitations on doing so (i.e. you can't fly helicopters or airplanes around willy-nilly without degrading the enemy anti-aircraft network first, and driving a tank soon attracts tons of attention from enemy airpower, tanks and AT units). After Far Cry 5 falling flat on its face in a lot of what it was trying to do, Far Cry 6 refreshingly makes sense and doesn't cheap out on the player.
What the game does poorly is narrative. It's been the case that every game in the series since Far Cry 2 has to have lengthy moralising cutscenes on the self-destructive nature of violence, which I'd have more truck with if the games didn't then unleash absolute tons of violence in every single mission. It's a first-person shooter, so that's kind of its thing. It feels like the series wants to tell a more nuanced kind of story about revolutions, how hard it is to create and maintain a democracy and so on, but it can't overcome the limitations of the FPS genre, at least not within the very tight development timelines these games have. A Far Cry game that goes full RPG and offers non-violent solutions to situations might be interesting, but then I'm not sure if it would be a Far Cry game any more.
In that sense Far Cry 6's biggest problem is the competition: more than any other game in the series, it feels like a Wish version of the epic, massive Just Cause 3, which has a larger playing space, a less in-your-face narrative and much more fully embraces manic fun whilst also making you feel more like you're fighting in an actual war with shifting fronts. Just Cause 3 also wipes the floor with Far Cry 6's vehicles, mainly because of FC6's refusal to allow you to use a third-person camera mode when using helicopters or tanks, which makes them borderline unusable in a lot of situations. The influence is even more obvious in that Far Cry 6 borrows both the wingsuit and grapple from Just Cause 3 but fails to implement either in a way that's interesting or fun.
Still, the core gameplay loop of the Far Cry series is still enjoyable in Far Cry 6 (***½). Scouting out an enemy base, marking troop positions (with a smartphone this time, which at least makes more sense than the previous magic binoculars) and then devising an attack strategy is still as much fun now as it was way back in 2004. The on-foot FSP action is excellent and, at a reasonable 35 hours for the single-player story (a lot more if you want to explore every corner of the map, find every collectible and do every side-quest, obviously), it doesn't outstay its welcome as some recent open-world games have. Those looking for something new and fresh should look elsewhere, but Far Cry 6 is as solid an entry as the series has had for some time.
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