I have to say that I haven't really been all that impressed with Far Cry 6 and I wonder if that is kind of the consensus of the overall gaming community. I understand that I have plenty of game left to go and have only really done about 25% of the overall game but for me, a lot of what is going on here is kind of falling flat.
It could be that I was always going to be let down a bit by this game because I really enjoyed the hell outta Far Cry 5 or it also could be that perhaps I am just kind of tired of the whole way that this game functions. I am not sure about that so far but at the end of the day the fact remains that I am just a bit "meh" about the whole FC6 experience up to this point.
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I did a small search for reviews done by organizations and individuals and have already seen that there are a lot of 2 and 3 star reviews for the game, many people complaining that the game is "bland" or "simply not as good as the others." I suppose this could be a big problem for any game franchise that builds up such great stories in past entries, not all of the tales can top the one before. This is true with anything I suppose.
There is also a chance that they might have cut corners because they figured that the presence of Giancarlo Esposito as the main bad guy who is dictator Anton Castillo in the game. In all Far Cry games there needs to be a central figure that is the leader who you eventually take out and it is always some sort of dictator or zealot so it's not like it is criminal that they would use the same system. It's worked for them in the past.
Another thing about the game that I think a lot of people are going to find a bit boring is that they haven't really changed or improved a great deal about how the game operates. If anything they kind of took away one of best aspects of it in that they took away your ability to permanently have 2 companions that you direct traveling with you. Now you have just one "Amigo" and often another character that is running around with you, but you do not directly control. One of my favorite aspects of FC5 was the fact that you had a team that you controlled but now you just have an animal l- which is fun but takes away a great deal of the strategy that you once could have employed.
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It's very cute, but kind of ridiculous that a tiny dog in a wheelchair would be assisting you against people with rifles but that is the case.
I think one of my biggest issues with why I am not enjoying this game nearly as much as I would have liked to is because it looks and feels very dated. The game appears as though it could be 10 years old and while I am playing it on a system that is itself 10 years old the PS5 version doesn't differ graphically or game-play wise to the one I am playing.
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This isn't to suggest that the graphics, sound, or gameplay is necessarily bad, it is just tired. It's like having a food that you really enjoy but the chef continues to make it exactly the same with a minor different side dish for a decade. After a while you are going to get a bit tired of it. Honestly, the only thing I can really find that is done extremely differently are these various timed challenges where you have to arrive at some distant location in a certain amount of time using various vehicles like motorcycles or jetskis and since all of the ones like this that I have encountered have been option side quests with very little in the way of tangible rewards, I lost interest in them pretty early on. They are also very frustrating to fail because now you find yourself quite far away from where the trial began and there is no way to automatically restart it... you have to walk or ride or horse or traverse manually all the way back to the start point and that is just lame.
Another aspect of the game that is just tedious is that while it is open world, there are checkpoints all over the place that hinder your movement and all of them are basically exactly the same.
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I'm not saying each of these needed to be a unique work of art because yes, it is realistic that checkpoints in a military sense actually WOULD all be the same but they are also remarkably easy to overcome and by the time youve done your 12th one while taking very little damage it all starts to have a "what the hell is the point of all of this" feeling to it? The same could be said for the anti-aircraft stations that until you eliminate them, your movement is restricted. The objectives just lack in any sort of real variety compared to other Far Cry games and this is just kind of a let down to me.
Furthermore, Anton Castillo again, played by Giancarlo Esposito as a celebrity guest, doesn't really have that much involvement in anything that is going on in the game. You very rarely even see the guy. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that he is an actor and probably had to be paid a pretty penny to be part of this and they had to likely do all of his voice work in a couple of days. This might also be why it is quite frequent that the words he is speaking and the movement of the mouth of his on-screen character don't actually match up very well in many of the cutscenes.
The voice of Anton's son Diego is done very poorly by this guy
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It might not be entirely his fault but Anthony Gonzalez is just completely out of his depth in the scenes he is involved in and much of this could be because he is almost always sharing screentime with Giancarlo Esposito, who has one of the coolest voices in the industry. You can't really compete with that but it does make any of Diego's dialogue just seem sloppy and a bit stupid any time the boy talks.
I'm going to trod on and keep at it hoping that this game gets better with time but honestly, it is already kind of starting to feel like a chore rather than fun to play. Ubisoft better revamp this franchise pretty quickly because after just a few hours the gameplay just seems really repetitive to the point where I'm not really sure if I even want to play anymore.