Far Cry Primal is out tomorrow, and although our review isn’t quite ready yet, we figured we’d share some notes from our time with the game so far. The premise seems straight-forward on paper—it’s a Far Cry game that eschews the typical third world setting and jumps back 12000 years to the days before history—but it’s understandable to wonder if a series built largely around guns and technology (and, um, uncomfortable race relations) would still feel like itself at the start of the Mesolithic. The short answer is that it does and it doesn’t: Primal feels like a Far Cry game but is just different enough to promise a new independent spin-off series. A longer answer is below.
1. It’s structured like a Far Cry game (ie, like an Ubisoft game)
Ubisoft’s big action games tend to follow a similar template. They’re usually first-person adventures set in large open worlds that gradually expand alongside your progress. They give you lots to do, with main storyline missions, various secondary adventures given to you by multiple non-playable characters, and random objectives that just pop up as you’re roaming the countryside. Between missions you can open up new territory on your map and possibly unlock a new fast travel spot by travelling to a camp or tower or some other kind of outpost and clearing out the bad guys. Primal ticks off most of these boxes. You’ll often find enemy camps of various sizes to seize, which are promptly taken over by your tribe, increasing your population. There are also bonfires throughout the map, which act like the radio towers and bell towers from the last two Far Cry games. If you take over a camp with a bonfire and light it, a swath of new land will be opened up on your map and every camp you’ve taken over in the area will be converted into a fast travel station. It’s about as faithful to the Ubisoft formula as you expect a Far Cry game to be, with an almost overwhelming amount of side business to pursue and a map littered with targets and icons.
2. Say goodbye to all the guns
The biggest difference between Primal and the earlier Far Cry games probably involves the way you kill things. The fairly substantial arsenals of the past are gone, replaced with a handful of simple tools fashioned from rock and wood. Your main weapons are a club, a spear and a bow and arrow. You have limited ammo for all three, and will have to either craft new ones on the fly or retrieve the ones you’ve already used from the bodies of your prey. You won’t be able to post up on a spot and spray a camp full of lead—you’ll have to pick your spots and hope your aim is tight, or else try to isolate the bad guys and bash them one by one with your club. The stealth kill is more important here than in any other Far Cry game. Without explosives or machine guns camps can get hard to raid in a hurry, especially if your rival tribesmen have horns to call in back-up. This is where Primal most feels like a new game: you’ll have to plan your exploits more carefully in the past because you won’t really be able to just shoot your way out of a problem anymore.
3. Get ready to hang out with some animals
