With Far Cry Primal ($59.99), developer Ubisoft abandons all political pretenses and focuses on what made Far Cry stand out from its peers when the series debuted: the open-world sandbox. You play as a stone age hunter named Takkar, and your goal is to secure a safe haven for your people, the wandering Wenja tribe. The prehistoric realm of Oros is chock full of lush foliage, massive game animals, and an absurd amount of predatory beasts. Melee combat and beast companions set Primal apart from past Far Cry games and make exploration feel much more personal and engaging. It's one of the best PC games you can buy. However, your mileage may vary: If you love the open-world exploration and freedom, Primal has that in spades. But its story is simpler and more straightforward, so if you were hoping for eccentric villains and outlandish melodrama, Primal may leave you a tad disappointed. I played Far Cry Primal on PC, but the game is also available for PlayStation 4 ($799.95 at Amazon) and Xbox One ($200.00 at eBay) .
Conquering the Stone Age
The biggest change Primal makes to the Far Cry formula is the focus on melee weaponry. The left mouse button performs a quick attack, and holding the button unleashes a stronger blow. The right mouse button puts Takkar in throwing stance, which lets you toss a weapon at a target. This is ideal for hurling spears, but not so much for tossing clunky clubs. That said, throwing a club at an enemy can prove valuable in a pinch.
Arrows are your go-to projectiles for most encounters, but even they have their limits. Arrows have a clear trajectory and a very noticeable travel time, unlike the sniper-like arrows found in Rise of the Tomb Raider . Unless you are engaged in an ambush, you will need to lead your shots if you want to hit moving targets. Primal's requires a good amount of familiarity with the weapon, which I found very involving. Of course, as it is a console port, Primal also has an aim assist if you can't hit your mark, so you can always turn on that option if you are having trouble.
As a struggling caveman, you have very restricted inventory space. With only two clubs, two spears, and eight arrows at the start, there is a hard limit on what you can hunt or defend yourself against. The game lets you collect used arrows and weapons from people you kill, which slightly alleviates the inventory issue. However, if you cannot kill your target with what you have equipped, it might just run off with all your arrows and spears embedded in its hide, never to be seen again.
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Far Cry Primal (for PC)
At the start, you have enough ammo to kill a bear, but that's about it. There are much larger and stronger animals in Oros, but you don't have the capacity to kill such beasts until you unlock more inventory space and improve the quality of your weapons. If you can barely kill a bear with two spears and a quiver of arrows, you won't kill a mammoth that's five times larger.
Why You Should Game on a PC
Primal's second major gameplay change to the Far Cry formula, beast taming, goes hand-in-hand with the inventory woes. You learn beast taming very early in Primal, so you will rarely hunt or explore Oros on your own. With so few ranged options at your disposal, tamed beasts are your go-to distance attack. You can command them to fight whatever you are aiming your cursor at, giving you a chance to melee the target while it's distracted or shoot at other enemies.
Once you complete your first beast quest, you can tame small hunting animals, such as wild dogs and wolves. As you unlock new skills, you can tame hunting cats, lions, and bears. Aside from attacking any nearby threat and warding off other animals, your tamed beasts make fine companions. You will need to feed your pet when they are wounded or incapacitated, and you can pet them if you're bored. Petting doesn't do anything, but you don't often get to the opportunity to pet a lion or saber-tooth tiger nowadays, so it's a comforting little detail. The combat and beast taming blends together to make the world of Primal feel more personal.
Far Cry Primal (for PC)
Primeval Sandbox
Oros is a massive, open world sandbox, filled with ancient behemoths to hunt and primeval predators to elude. Primal uses a light RPG system that lets you unlock new techniques, weapons, and items as you earn experience through combat or exploration. You can also salvage materials to expand the Wenja village, which in turn earns you new abilities and experience.
The story of Primal evolves as you explore the region and recruit lost members of your tribe. The plot highlights the conflict between your nomadic Wenja people, the cannibalistic Udam of the north, and the fire-worshiping Izila tribe of the marsh. Depiction and drama of the Oros tribes is interesting, but I find the cast of characters bland this time around. Past Far Cry games have had highly eccentric villains to keep you invested in the plot. In Primal, I found myself more curious about the world, rather than the antagonists or the tribal drama.
That said, Primal's environment serves as the most memorable character, much like Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon . Part of Primal's appeal, at least for me, is that you're running around a prehistoric Europe amidst extinct behemoths you can only see in museums. But Ubisoft did an amazing job with both sound design and visual fidelity to bring the realm of Oros to life. Oros is never quiet: be it the crashing of brush, the crying of a wounded animal, or the guttural growling of a predator, you are constantly bombarded by noise. The creatures are just as detailed as the game world. Beasts have facial expressions that change when they are angry, calm, or pleased. You know a wolf is happy when it pants and wags its tail like a dog. You know a lion smells something by its flaring nostrils and sharp breaths.
One of the most memorable things to happen during my time with Primal occurred only one hour in. An early tutorial informed me that fire was effective against animals, so I decided to experiment with it and shot a wolf with a flaming arrow in the dead of night. Because of the low visibility, I botched the shot and struck it in the flank, which sent the beast into a frenzied run. In doing so, the wolf set the forest around it on fire. I was stunned not only by how fast the fire spread, but by how other animals reacted to the blaze. Animals in hiding fled the fire in a panic, silhouetted by the red light of the flames. As I stood there in wonderment, the rest of the wolf's pack had looped around the cliff side to ambush me and kill me.
Events like these happen all the time as you traverse Oros, which makes exploration a very satisfying experience. The flipside to this is that the exploration wears thin after a while. Sure, you have plenty of skills to unlock and stronger weapons to earn, but these feel more like enhancements rather than an expansion of your abilities. The fundamentals you learn from the beginning are the ones you will be using in most situations throughout the game, which can be repetitive in the long run.
Prime PC Port
Far Cry Primal performs solidly on PC. Not only does it have a variety of sliders that let you adjust the visuals to your liking, but also a handy benchmark option lets you run a demo to see how well the game performs with those settings. You can opt to use the preset graphical setting and not fuss over the individual values, or you can go into minute detail to get the game to run however you'd like. Texture quality, shadow quality, post-processing FX, geometry, terrain, water, and volumetric fog can be adjusted from Low to Ultra depending on the setting.
With all settings maxed, with a 144 refresh rate, at 1080p, my Nvidia GTX 970-powered PC averaged 53 frames per second, with a maximum 63 and a minimum of 41. After I dropped the setting to High, the rig averaged 73 FPS, with a maximum of 85 FPS and a minimum of 59 FPS.
Far Cry Primal supports both gamepad and keyboard and mouse controls. I found the keyboard and mouse controls to be very comfortable and favored them over the gamepad controls. Movement uses the WASD keys, while camera control and basic attacks use the mouse. You can adjust the sensitivity in the options menu, though I found the default setting to be quite good. The only adjustments I'd urge a keyboard and mouse player to make are to turn the aiming assist off, and to turn owl flight inversion off. It makes for the superior gameplay experience.
Going Wild
It's surprising how a simple tweak to the visuals and setting can alter a game so radically. Much like Far Cry Blood Dragon, Far Cry Primal stands apart from other games in the franchise purely on the novelty of its setting. Sure, taming wild beasts with fantasy shaman magic is silly. Yes, the core gameplay is still very much standard Far Cry fare. But running through the primal European wilderness with a bear at your side looks and feels amazing. Primal has a ton of personality, and that goes a long way towards keeping the game fresh and fun.
A change of scenery does the Far Cry shooter series good. Primal's caveman drama, beast-taming, and prehistoric hunting are highly satisfying, even though we've tread this ground before. Can we get dinosaurs next, please?
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