

Primal is a tighter affair, a more dangerous game than any of its modern-era peers with their super-powered sniper rifles and guerrilla mobility. Plus you can now tame animals (lions and saber-toothed tigers and bears, oh my) to fight alongside you.Ĭombat as a whole benefits from the change of pace afforded by stripping the series down to the strung-together technology of 10,000 B.C.E. It’s mindless blockbuster, on a level with Just Cause for sheer absurdity. Objectively, Far Cry (at least in its modern incarnation) is an open-world theme park, with barely-controlled chaos in service of wanton murder and arson. I joked in my Far Cry 4 review that it was “ Far Cry 3 plus snow.” Primal is pretty much “ Far Cry 4 minus guns. A surface-level change that (barely) masks the copy/paste feel underneath. Like Far Cry 4 and Blood Dragon before that, this is just a repurposed Far Cry 3, an incredible idea squandered on the same handful of enthralling, but threadbare mechanics.

Spears and bows instead of guns! Saber-tooth tigers! Mammoths! People speaking some sort of guttural language! And uh… Not only is the setting excellent, but it’s the biggest risk Primal takes. Predictably, it falls to you to single-handedly drive the others from the lush Oros Valley and save the Wenja.

You play as Takkar, a member of the Wenja tribe-a name which I’ve roughly translated to mean “We suck at fighting.” The Wenja are on the verge of extinction, mercilessly hunted down by two stronger tribes. Far Cry Primal takes us to the dawn of human civilization, to 10,000 B.C.E., when mammoths roamed the land and Egypt’s lofty pyramids were still seven thousand years in the future.
