Far Cry Primal: Review

Hello fellow gamers, today i will be reviewing Ubisoft's Far Cry Primal. One of the great things games can do is give us a glimpse of a different world. It might not be authentic, lifelike, realistic or remotely believable. It might be a fantasy, dream or nightmare. What matters is that it feels – if only for a few hours – convincing, and that it takes you out of your mundane life.

Very much a 'take the previous template and make it feel primal' approach, Ubisoft's latest imagining on the Far Cry franchise is a smart piece of work. The atmosphere and scope in particular are highlights, making you feel as if you have traveled back to the past where tribes, woolly mammoths and Sabre toothed tigers roamed the Earth. There are no guns. There's no radio conversations. There's no pretty much everything you might expect in today's world!

Such a decision has shunted Far Cry into somewhat new territory, too. With an emphasis on what tools were around at the time, crafting and building feels essential from start to finish. Whether that's sculpting a new arrow for your bow, or smashing together a new club to whack someone in the face with, collecting resources is as important as doing missions.

 The same can be said for Primal's settlement system. Serving as the game's point of progression, focusing on these RPG-like trees and increasing the population continually offers more rewards. These could be your standard level-up boosts – more health, better speed etc. – but it also ties into what animals you can tame, what extras are available to you and, quite nicely, how many resources you have flowing in your direction – every time night turns to day you'll be given a 'reward stash'. The bigger your miniature home, the more benefits you'll get.

Such evolution is nothing new to the Far Cry games, mind. It's certainly dressed up in different clothes this time – as well as having an addictive nature – but the familiar tentpoles are all there. Nowhere is this more apparent than Primal's mission structure. All set within a map so big it'll make you sick, the majority of the time you'll be hunting animals, recruiting important members of your tribe, or flat out killing your main rivals, the Udam. Certain missions play with the formula a tad (and as you'd expect it's littered with side quests), but a certain routine does set in relatively early.

There's nothing wrong with 'do mission, return home, level up, do another mission', but if you've sunk a lot of time into past Far Cry titles there's a slight chance it may all start to ring a few bells sooner than you'd like. There's only so long you can go looking for a deer to skin until before getting the itch to do something else. When it's good, however, it is entertaining and presented pretty damn well, the visual side of things being an absolute treat.

Whether or not it's better looking than Far Cry 4 is arguable, but from the off Primal is an example of why the current generation is impressive. Be it the sheer size of the thing or how pleasant it is to find a high spot and just stare off into the distance, Ubisoft's engine remains an absolute monster. It's a huge plus, mostly because it turns simply walking around the environment into a joyful experience. And then there's the bow and arrow.

 While sharing many traits with the one from 4, having to rely on it so much this time (mostly because there's not an MP5 in sight) forces you to get the hang of it. Once you do, it's a delight. Plunging an arrow into someone's skull is easily as satisfying as a sniped head-shot, and stacking these together sees it become better still. The same is true for the spear, making the slight dip when you engage in melee combat a little disappointing. It's certainly not bad, but up close attacks often spiral into button spamming with no real sense that you're trying to smash someone's face in. You're just swinging wildly.

Thankfully there are ways and means to avoid this, namely the ability to tame animals. Far Cry Primal holds nothing back in this regard either: if you want to have a bear as your partner in crime, you can go and get a bear to be your partner in crime. What's more, you can extended your finger, whistle, and the monster will go rip apart your prey. Acting as a party of sorts, it's a constant as you progress, coming into its own when larger beasts become accessible. Much like nearly everything in-game, this can also be ranked up. Before you see the end credits, you'll essentially be a walking disaster.

Far Cry Primal is a very fun video game (which sounds like a sentence a child would write), but it is a video game you've played before. Think how much a new setting means to you – and how much you enjoy Ubisoft's take on the open world genre – and the answer to whether you need this should be very clear. If you're still on the fence, you can ride around on the back of a woolly mammoth should you choose. That's alright...

Tom Clancy's The Division: Review

Hello fellow gamers, today i will be doing reviewing Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's The Division Beta and my experiences over the short time the beta was open.

I will  admit I got a bit caught up in the buzz for Tom Clancy's The Division since its astonishing premiere trailer at E3, so much so that I put the game on mine most anticipated games of 2016 list. After I played a few hours of the open beta for the game on Play station, my anticipation isn't gone, but it has been dulled quite a bit.

That's not to say there weren't things I loved . The beta shows off the same kind of detailed environmental design as those initial trailers, rendering a disease-ruined and fallen world where hauntingly beautiful signs of decaying civilization are everywhere you look. I also like the game's augmented-reality style interface, which overlays paths and information neatly over the "real world," including map projections that make it easy to figure out where you are and which way to go. The mix of high-end, near-future technology and crumbling urban infrastructure is certainly visually striking

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 The online party integration also seems pretty solid so far. While you can see a whole server full of players running around and buying items in central "safe zones," individual missions are split off into smaller team-based instances. It's relatively easy to join up with friends or strangers to take on those missions in small groups and coordinate your goals on a shared map. The only quibble is that voice communication seems to be the only reliable way to communicate; there are no in-game tools to quickly highlight nearby points of interest or send quick commands and information to your team (if there are, I didn't find them).

Past those surface niceties, though, the game-play on offer in The Division beta is uninspiring to say the least. The shooting action seems to draw direct inspiration from the Gears of War series, particularly in the way you can snap behind cover and move between safe points with the press of a button. That's a fine idea in theory. In execution, though, the controls are quite a bit clunkier than Epic's high-octane shooters.

Where the Gears of War games thrive on smooth animations and transitions that keep the action fluid and fast-moving, in The Division beta I found the protagonist moved much more clunkily. Stepping out of cover, climbing onto a high surface, and rolling out of the way of bullets all felt slow and awkward, with animations that focused too long on the hero just standing there without much purpose. Even something as simple as sprinting down an empty street felt awkward since even the slightest sidestep to the left or right seems to break the sprint.

The controls are only a minor quibble, though, compared to the enemy AI on display in the beta. In just a few hours of play, I ran out of fingers and toes to count the number of bat wielding enemies who simply ran straight at me at full speed, seemingly eager to be gunned down. Armed enemies were obviously more common, but they'd often pause while dodging between pieces of cover to stand in the open and shoot back at me, relatively defenseless.

One particularly stupid "boss" encounter, at the end of a side-mission line, saw the antagonist simply bouncing back and forth like a ping-pong ball across the edge of a nearby roof, putting herself in the open with predictable frequency you could set your watch to. Sure, these are supposed to be the earliest and easiest missions in the game, and encounters may get more difficult as you go. But it's not a strong start.

Even a couple of hours in, the shooting action is already starting to feel incredibly repetitive. Every single mission so far has boiled down to "go to this point, clear the area of waves of enemies, then move on to another point," with none of the twists or high-action set pieces that keep better shooters interesting. There has been precious little variety in the enemies, almost all of which seem to be thug-like, scowling black men in ratty hoodies who are given precious little motivation by some forgettable, overly expository story scenes and voice overs. A few "named" enemies are supposed to stand out for their intelligence and toughness, but in practice they just end up being sponges that absorb more bullets before going down.

The game's RPG-like leveling and abilities structure hasn't impressed me yet either. You can scrounge downed enemies for items, weaponry, accessories, and armor, and even use scrap materials to build up a central base. So far, though, all these features feel very transnational and perfunctory, with little of the personality that makes customization fun in shooters like Fallout or even Borderlands.

The special abilities on offer in the beta so far are kind of boring, too. There's a reusable sticky explosive that's pretty easy to shoot with pinpoint accuracy, but its detonation barely fazes even normal grunt enemies. A riot shield ability is nice for moving between cover, but it limits you to a pistol when hiding behind it and was awkward to put away in the middle of a firefight. The abilities that send out radar pings to highlight nearby enemies and heal nearby party members are at least useful, if not especially novel. The menu system hints at a bevy of additional abilities, talents, perks, and upgrades that are unlock-able as you play, but none of them are available in the beta.

Those locked bits of content and the hints of a much larger world outside the city's downtown hub give me hope that The Division can grow a bit more interesting outside of this short, limited beta test. After almost three years of anticipation, though, I'm quite a bit less excited about the game's upcoming March 8 release.