Far Cry 6 Review: A Far from Revolutionary Sandbox to Roll Around In

At the core of Far Cry 6 is an urgent story about people rising up against a dictator, Antón Castillo (Giancarlo Esposito), on the fictional Caribbean island of Yara. But that tale of rebellion is too often suffocated beneath a surfeit of content that, more times than not, feels beside the point. Some of the game’s homebrewed Resolver weapons, from a CD launcher to a repurposed fumigator, are pretty nifty, but they only go so far in alleviating the frustration of a campaign that increasingly tethers itself to tedious first-person shooting.

Far Cry 6 is at its strongest when it isn’t shrugging off the motivations of its protagonist, an orphaned ex-military Yaran named Dani Rojas, by suggesting that their revolutionary spirit doesn’t entirely come down to just liking to shoot guns. The complications of your allies, split across four disagreeing factions, serve to make the revolution that shatters Yara more than a simple battle of good versus evil. As for Castillo, he makes for a memorable nemesis. As a child, his father was executed in front of him, and now he seeks to use his cancer-suppressing miracle drug Viviro to gain the power that his island nation has been denied due to international sanctions. Right down to the way in which he grooms his mild-mannered 13-year-old son to be his successor, he’s compelling precisely because his methods are so credible.

That makes it all the more frustrating that the developers are so content to let you off the hook for the violence you commit, namely by not so subtly reminding you that you need not be bothered by politics to go on a rampage. As the player is constantly being tasked by the plot and the characters to do a lot of shooting, Far Cry 6 is nothing short of an adrenaline-delivery system. But what holds up in the short run cannot sustain itself across 70 main Operations, plus dozens of paint-by-numbers military bases to liberate, checkpoints to dismantle, supplies to salvage, and anti-aircraft batteries to destroy. The narrative, already tonally inconsistent given Dani’s frequent disregard for politics and nonplussed reactions to the horrors done to her fellow citizens, gets increasingly diluted with each new side mission.

While some of the Yaran Stories give us a rich sense of how people resist their oppression, like the drag queen who runs a network of “chameleon” spies, many are just baffling, like the missions from the Mortal Kombat-esque cockfighting ringmaster that pit you against zombie roosters. Elsewhere, you may wonder why hunting and fishing, though increasingly optional, are components of the game given that both activities result only in temporary stat-boosting meals. It’s as if they exist only because they did in prior Far Cry games, and the developers simply didn’t want to boil this latest one down to its bare essentials.

Far Cry 6 is on firmer ground when it’s squarely focused on the revolution, even if that exposes how little the game seeks to shake up the series’s formula. The world-building here earnestly showcases how both Castillo’s dictatorship and the Viviro production have affected Yara’s people. In the farmlands of Madrugada, they serve as slaves; in the progressive-seeming Valle De Oro, orphans are indoctrinated into Castillo’s ideology and rebels are re-educated; and in El Este, the drugs are shipped out at the expense of the now-decimated fishing villages. A propaganda museum gives you a first-hand look at how Castillo is rewriting the history of the ‘67 revolution, while the war crimes glimpsed at the national zoo that’s been repurposed as a prison camp make plain what El Presidente really thinks of those who oppose him.

The Monteros, long-time farmers, are deeply connected to honor and family and are divided on whether to resist or collaborate with Castillo. By contrast, the social misfits and outcasts of Maximas Matanzas have had no choice but to resist, and the game does very well by Paolo, a trans man who, having transitioned at great cost in Yara, now seeks to claim both his voice and his power against his oppressors. And then there’s the generational divide between the so-called Legends of ‘67—those who led the last resistance and now live as recluses—and La Morale, a youth uprising led by those who have neither the patience nor privilege to wait this fight out. The stakes work at both the epic and intimate level, even accounting for the comic relief characters and the over-the-top villains that the franchise can’t escape.

Ultimately, Far Cry 6 could take a few cues from baseball, Yara’s national pastime. A nine-inning version of this game would be exhilarating, but as Dani and Castillo stretch into extra innings—30, 40 hours later, not counting the insultingly meaningless post-game insurgency missions—Far Cry 6 instead becomes exhausting. That’s because, more times than not, Yara’s landmarks aren’t so much organically advancing the story as they’re serving as pretty backdrops for violence, a place for you to airdrop into and thoughtlessly slaughter every soldier there. The game doesn’t fail—you’ll remember the hits far more than the swings and misses—but it’s easy to imagine the better one that isn’t too big for its britches.

The game was covered with a review code provided by Ubisoft.