Sometimes the question is not where to take a franchise but rather when. Developer Ubisoft Montreal takes a far leap into the past to 10,000 BCE in the upcoming open-world, action-adventure game Far Cry Primal. Last week, I played a beta build of the game and experienced the first few hours, along with a mission and area later on in the story. The Stone Age setting is a brutal, harrowing era for mankind, long before we became the dominant beings on the planet. More than any Far Cry before it, Primal is a visceral experience focused on survival.
Primal established its wild and cruel world right from the get-go. After a brief narration by the shaman Tensay (whom you meet later), the opening scene placed me in the shoes of the protagonist Takkar hunting a mammoth in Central Europe with his friend Dalso and their Wenja tribe brethren. The tribesman use spears, so taking down a mammoth requires a lot of hits while being cautious of its running charges. The successful hunt of the wooly beast attracted the attention of a saber-toothed tiger, catching us hunters off-guard. Takkar and Dalso leap off a ledge, rolling down a large hill and hitting trees and debris. Takkar awakens to find his friend dying and covered in blood. Dalso’s last words urge you to find the land of Oros, where other Wenja live.
You are now all alone and must start from scratch. Takkar needs a weapon and so Primal teaches you how to gather resources to make a bow and arrow. Resources are a crucial necessity in building and upgrading different things in the game such as weapons, equipment, and later your village huts (more on that later). You can activate Hunting Vision by pressing R3, changing to a grayscale-filtered view with only resources highlighted in yellow or animal and human foot prints in red. You are able to craft multiples of a weapon and upgrade it as you progress through the game. Once I had all the proper resources and produced a bow, I was ready to hunt for meat to heal Takkar’s health.
With firearms nonexistent, the weapons in Primal are of the primitive sort and include bow and arrows, clubs, and spears. It’s an arsenal that requires more accuracy than the lineup of weapons players were given in past Far Cry titles. Gone are rapid-firing guns with spread and area damage-dealing grenades. Your primary tools of destruction in Primal are most effective by hitting your target in the head, usually resulting in a one-hit kill. Arrows and clubs can be lit on fire to provide extra damage, set enemies and brush ablaze, and provide light to see in the darkness – an important function given Primal’s day and night cycle. When the sun goes down, the world becomes even more dangerous as your visibility lowers and predators like wolves are out hunting. Swinging a flaming club or setting dry brush on fire helps keep predatory animal at bay.
I soon encounter a Wenja woman named Sayla being attacked by a saber-toothed tiger and help save her from the fate suffered by Dalso. We quickly reach the land of Oros I was searching for, but it is no longer the home of the Wenja. Saylo explains that the leader of the Udam, one of the two rival tribes, named Ull destroyed the home of our people and killed many of us. It’s up to the player as Takkar to fight off enemy tribes and build a new home for the Wenja.
To gain a competitive advantage over adversaries, Takkar must learn to tame the beasts of the land so they can fight alongside the Wenja. He sets off to find a shaman named Tensay to teach him how to become the "Beast Master." The owl is the first animal you tame and, while not able to deal damage, it serves as a valuable scout. When you call upon the owl, the game shifts to an aerial third-person perspective of your flying friend, thus providing a bird’s eye view of the area to tag navigation points or spot enemies. The other beasts you tame can join you in combat and include the wolf, bear, badger, saber-toothed tiger, and other wild cats. Once you have tamed one of these animals, you can call upon them from an in-game menu and command them to run to a specific spot or assign an enemy for them to attack. However, your predator allies are mortal and can die in combat unless you give them meat to recover health. Again, everyone strives to survive in Primal.
Equipment and skills also assist Takkar in his quest to give his Wenja people a home. One piece of equipment I had the opportunity to try was a grappling hook, allowing me to quickly climb up to higher ground or repel downward. The ease of vertical traversal with the grappling hook came in handy when escaping from pursuing enemy tribes people. Meanwhile the experience you gain unlocks skills for Takkar and key ally characters. Upgrades include increased health, speed, and new abilities or improvements on existing ones.
Which skills or weapon and equipment improvements you can unlock are limited by how developed your home village is. Reminiscent of Metal Gear Solid V’s Mother Base, each major hut in Takkar’s village is tied to a unique set of upgrades. You use collected resources to fulfill specified requirements to boost up each hut. With each new level up of a hut, new weapons, equipments, skills, and upgrades open up for you.
Last but not least, the large amount of time you can spend in Far Cry Primal is made all the better thanks to its handsome visuals. The characters and animals all look fine, but it’s the environments that are the stand-out stars, graphically-speaking. The land or Oros is filled with an immense amount of vegetation, from the grass, flowers, and brush littered all over the ground to towering trees. The untamed flora is present everywhere, swaying dynamically in the wind, helping to bring the prehistoric wildlands to life. The environments I saw in Primal are possibly some of the best-looking in the series and are an example of what the latest-generation gaming hardware can do better than before. A large hope of mine is that there’s enough variety in landscapes, otherwise I could see players growing tired of the sights.
I found Far Cry Primal’s story and gameplay to be a bit of a slow burn and may not be exciting enough for everyone. The plot and characters are not particularly memorable and seem to unfold how one expects it to. The world and the gameplay progression are what will likely hook players into spending dozens of hours here. Come February, we will see if the risks and change of time and pace pay off for Far Cry Primal.