Ubisoft’s caveman adventure Far Cry Primal has been one of the stranger, more beguiling games of 2016. Last week, they added a free survivor mode for console and PC players. If you’re willing to start a new game to try it, it makes things much more interesting.
If you come across a group of three bad guys in Far Cry Primal, two of them will attack. The third guy usually won’t. He’ll run away.
Far Cry Primal is something of an spinoff for the series—a stopgap release meant to fill the hole between Far Cry 4 and Far Cry 5. So it’s no surprise to see it recycling things from its predecessor.
Far Cry Primal is a game about a caveman who explores a new land. If you play on the game’s default settings, it’s also about a caveman who methodically conquers that new land thanks to his helpful smartphone GPS.
It’s not an open world game without hidden references and easter eggs. And Far Cry Primal has some pretty cool ones: some related to other Ubisoft games, while others to our own prehistory.
Far Cry Primal is frequently violent and occasionally, unexpectedly sweet. The caveman action game is an excellent concept best experienced by people who haven’t been playing every entry in Far Cry, another of gaming’s perpetual franchises.
Today on Highlight Reel we have savage prehistoric cats, close street fighter calls, quiet meetings between muscular men, killer streaks, and much more!
Who needs guns in a video game when you can tame and command bears and saber-toothed tigers to kill for you? That’s what I’ve been doing in Far Cry Primal, though there’s something to be said for just stopping and petting these furry four-legged instruments of death.
There were no easy opportunities for any of the characters in today’s new Stone Age Far Cry Primal game to overlap with those of 2014's modern-day Far Cry 4, but publisher Ubisoft has found a way to confirm they’re in the same universe.
Pop quiz: What makes Far Cry Primal different than all the other games Ubisoft has released over the past year? No, it’s not the mammoths. Not the fake language they made just for this game, either. Give up? The answer: There’s no season pass.
We’ve already seen that the main guy in Far Cry Primal will be pretty chill with animals, taming and commanding them after suppressing their whole eat-the-human instinct. But lead character Takkar will have some gnarlier interactions with his fellow humans. As in “ears cut off and kept as trophies.”
At face value, Far Cry Primal looks like an easy diversion for Ubisoft to take from its main line of militaristic shooters—a side project full of vicious animals instead of rifles and rocket launchers. I’d argue it’s something more than that. Primal is the apotheosis of the series’ post-Far Cry 2 design trends.
Prehistoric Far Cry is looking pretty damn good, I gotta say.
Far Cry Primal is now official—it’s set in the prehistoric era and will feature woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers, as we reported yesterday. It’ll be out on February 23, 2016 for Xbox One and PS4, with a PC version to follow.
UPDATE (10/6/15, 12:12pm): It’s official: the next Far Cry is Far Cry Primal, and it’ll be set in prehistoric times—although it’s actually in the Stone Age, directly after the Ice Age. (Sorry for the mix-up.) It’ll be out February 23, 2016.
