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Far Cry Primal (XBO)

Far Cry: Primal is an adventure. It offers you a lot of freedom to traverse and explore the world, but the lack of linear structure is also its weakness.

Far Cry: Primal opens up with you, Takkar, joining your tribe in a mammoth hunt for meat. While you manage to fell the beast, a sabretooth tiger pops up to kill your comrades, steal your food and chase you off to parts unknown. You're left to quickly gather some materials to hunt for food, and trek through a cave, where you encounter the sabretooth again. You manage to scare it off and find Sayla, a woman who's also part of the Wenja tribe but whose tribespeople were killed by the Udam, a rival cannibalistic tribe. She asks you to take vengeance and to rebuild your people.

This is more or less all the story you're going to get in the game. FCP is not really a story-driven game; it's all about the adventure. You set out, gather materials, kill enemy tribes and wild animals and try to end up on top of the food chain. The gameplay loop is enjoyable, or it was at least for me; I had the advantage that this was my first Ubisoft open-world game, so I wasn't dragged down by Assassin's Creed or other Far Cry games. Still, the first story missions you receive are to recruit specific people to your tribe: a shaman, a warrior, a huntress, and an inventor. These are the people who will then later offer you quests, alongside the gatherer Sayla who welcomed you in the beginning. None of the people are particularly different; they don't receive a lot of character development in their missions and being cavepeople, they are all varying kinds of crazy.
Yes, cavepeople. Far Cry: Primal is a game that takes place in caveman times. There are strenghts and weakness to this setting: one positive is certainly the setting. The world is named Oros, and it is beautiful. There's plenty of beautifully lush forests to run through, lakes and rivers to traverse and wonderful vistas to admire from high rocky mountains. There's also a part of the map that's essentially all snow, which is a great sight but like most snow areas, loses its luster after prolonged exposure.

The early parts of Far Cry: Primal are tough. You have to gather materials to make all your weapons and to progress the missions. Combat is two-fold; either you'll be facing the enemy tribes of the cannibalistic Udam or the fire-worshipping Izila who have their own unique challenges and fighting styles but are generally manageable, or you'll have to deal with Oros' true hell: animals.
Animals will tear you to shreds and not think twice about it. This is the area where there is actual enemy variety; Udam are more physical and will charge at you with clubs while Izila will generally chuck spears, arrows, rocks, and fire bombs at you from a distance but each animal type really has their own fighting style. Dholes are like dogs and generally easy to take care of, but wolves will often fight in packs and overwhelm you early on. Big cats like leopards and jaguars will use a hit-and-run fighting style while bigger animals like bears and sabretooth tigers will physically overpower you. You'll be half dead before you notice a badger snuck up on you and is tearing you to shreds, and their hardiness means you won't kill them too quickly either. And woe upon you, poor cave(wo)man, should you anger a mammoth, as it will mostly likely result in a quick game over. Later on, you'll get missions to hunt the most ferocious animals, and the Blood Mammoth as it is called, could genuinely fit into a survival-horror game.

The animal menace can thankfully be dealt with as you are the Beast Master. Tensay, your shaman, will quickly instruct you in the way to tame wild animals and once you manage to recruit a sabretooth tiger (which scares most other animals when they approach you, leaving you to traverse the world in relative peace), the game really opens up. I found it to be very interesting game design, as there is a clear difference in difficulty before and after taming a sabretooth tiger because animals really will not hesitate to attack you, most are quite fast or hit incredibly hard, and are much more difficult to deal with as opposed to enemy tribes.

As the game opens up, the game becomes more comfortable to play. The more outposts and Wenja you add to your tribe (which can be done by clearing sidemissions and story missions), the more resources get added to a general resource stash that you have access to; this makes it so later on in the game you don't have to hoard as much wood and rocks and animal hide as your villagers will do it for you. Most of the missions are pretty simple 'kill these people' or 'gather these things'. There's some variety but not much. The game also gets easier as later on you'll recruit one Udam tribesman and one Izila tribesman, who will give you special skills. The Udam, Dah, teaches you how to make a berserk bomb, which turns enemies crazy and makes them attack one another. Once you have these, outposts and bonfires can be cleared in seconds; you let your owl fly over them and drop a few, and the enemies will take care of themselves. You could also drop sting bombs, which contain bees which will easily take out all but the strongest enemy types. It doesn't make the game completely easy though, as dropping bombs will generally alert enemies and later enemy camps will have horns that can be blown into to call for reinforcements, so a good combination of scouting and timing when to go for the Berserk Bomb is crucial.

After playing many hours of Far Cry: Primal, you'll reach the ending, and actually be surprised with some character and story moments. Both the Udam you recruit and the Udam leader, Ull, have some surprisingly nice scenes in the story finale. After defeating both Udam and Izila, the huntress you recruited also has a scene that made me somewhat surprisingly emotional as it played out. The strength of FCP without a doubt is how easy it is to just slide into it, to get into the gameplay and explore and do missions. Halfway through the game you will probably start missing a little depth; there's plenty of skills but many that aren't particularly useful, several weapons that don't feel like they fit a particular use, and a general lack of reason to do the missions you're doing. The characters will ask you to do something and you'll do it because it's a quest, not because there's a real reason in-game that makes a lot of sense.

However, Far Cry: Primal succeeds in what is, for me, the most important thing in a video game: it's fun. It's a good time. It's a pleasure to be in the world and marvel at the wonders, to lose yourself in the sounds of the animals, and to just pick up your spear, whistle for your sabretooth tiger, and trek out on another adventure.