Far Cry Primal (Xbox One)

The first-person shooter series Far Cry has often been just as much about contending with the more dangerous side of nature as it has been firefights with fellow humans. The gunplay takes center stage, but you can sometimes turn things in your favor by unleashing a tiger in an enemy camp or have to worry yourself about an animal ambush. Far Cry Primal looks to crank up that relationship with the wilderness even further, throwing the series back to the year 10,000 BCE for a story of survival in the Neolithic age.

As you might imagine, taking place so far in the past means there are no firearms available, but there are rival tribes you’ll need to contend with often and in violent fashion. You are Takkar, a member of the scattered Wenja people who resided in the bountiful land of Oros. The cannibalistic Udam and the fire worshippers the Izila dominate the valley, but while they have established small villages and forts, much of the terrain still belongs to nature and its beasts. Herds of mammoths, packs of wolves, cave bears and lions, and even animals you might not expect in a Neolithic stretch of Europe like jaguars, tapirs, and monkeys can be found, many serving as dangers or valuable sources of meat and skins to help you make tools, heal yourself, and even domesticate animals to fight on your side.

What makes Takkar the standout among his tribe is his incredible ability to tame animals with little effort. While in other Far Cry games you could throw bait to lure a predator into the ranks of the enemy, Far Cry Primal sees you able to approach wild creatures and turn them to your side with a very simple offering of meat. While at first you’ll only be able to convince creatures like dholes and wolves to aid you, the quests and battles across the land will let you level up and unlock new abilities, some of which will let you tame more fearsome beasts. Surprisingly early you can get a cave lion aiding you with little struggle, and later when options like the smilodon open up, you end up having an animal companion that can start to skew combat heavily in your favor. When you first begin and resources are lean, you will fear the night time when predators stalk you and your best weapons are basic clubs and a simple bow. Crafting will increase the strength of these weapons and you’ll even start to get special weapons like fire bombs. However, the beast taming that is granted through one of the earliest story quests gives you a powerful ally who fights for you automatically and it can severely reduce the level of challenge Far Cry Primal has to offer.

One reason is just how easy it is to maintain your tamed beasts. You are given a menu you can open most any time to summon a previously tamed animal to your side. If they are nearly killed in combat, you are given a good bit of time to run over and quickly feed them meat to get them back up and fighting, and if you don’t, you just need to revive them with some red plants that are easily found while in transit around the world. When enemies are in small groups, your tamed animal can far too easily keep them busy, and while it’s hard not to be proud when you see something like your smilodon take down a wild tall elk in a single pounce, the question arises why you shouldn’t always have a powerful beast fighting alongside you to simplify skirmishes. Your own weapons can be a bit lacking, the club swing requiring you to be in close of course and the spear not that much better because of the rate at which you attack, and a bow requires some aim and time to draw to really hurt. You won’t be a passive observer in battle and there is some of the visceral caveman thrill you’d expect from such a down to earth form of violent conflict, but it’s not too surprising most enemy types can’t contend against you and your animal companion when they’re using the same sticks and stones. At least there are usually chieftains and foes who wear headwear so you can’t smash heads with too much ease, and during story moments or boss fights the game will sometimes outright take away the ability to call an animal or give your foe some advantage like a perch the creature can’t reach or a toxic aura.

Battle doesn’t become a solved problem in Far Cry Primal, even when you’re fairly far in there might be times you sprint around the battlefield to heal up since foes start to deal greater damage down the line, but it can feel like it flip flops as it tries to find a happy medium between the simplicity of your own fighting tools and how strong using a tamed animal can be for turning the tide. The story of rebuilding the Wenja tribe and taking down the other two major tribes in Oros isn’t a particularly strong motivator, it can almost feel directionless at times since there are not too many big story events, and the characters being cavemen does mean they often aren’t too complicated. A shaman character does lead to a bit of mystical elements briefly entering the story, the player experiencing hallucinations with unique play styles that grant them knowledge they otherwise couldn’t have about the world, but these are brief and magic never truly creeps in elsewhere. An interesting effort to portray characters with mental illnesses in a time that wouldn’t understand them arises as well. Sayla, the first Wenja you meet in Oros, might have a form of PTSD, while Dah, a Neanderthal and a somewhat sympathetic member of the Udam, speaks of his people’s struggles with “skull fires” that are likely a disease caused by their consumption of human meat. Far Cry Primal doesn’t break from its brutal realities of the time to address these, but it makes for a more interesting picture of the past. Urki, on the other hand, reminds us that eccentric people likely existed in the far past too, a more comedic character who tries to come up with new survival tricks despite not being very intelligent.

Urki’s good for a laugh in a world without many of them, but generally your focus will be crossing the open world of the Oros valley looking for things to be done. There are a good deal of small quests to do to help the Wenja people, simple things like rescuing captured tribesmen or hunting troublesome animals leading to more people coming to your village and helping it grow, and passively collecting plants or animal hides will let you upgrade the huts of your major allies so they can provide more involved story tasks. Out in the world though there are also many helpful but less important things to do as you travel. If you want to unlock places on your map to instantly teleport to, you’ll need to clear out enemy bonfires and outposts. Little collectibles like rocks marked with handprints or cave prints can encourage you to explore caves, although cave interiors often aren’t too different from each other. One of the more involved tasks comprises of hunting down a few infamous beasts that have been troubling the valley, these feeling closer to what you might expect taming a creature should entail since they involve tracking, longer fights, and more complicated traversal than merely throwing bait to a wild animal. The shear number of tiny collectibles and minor tasks can discourage pursuing them too closely, which on one hand means you don’t feel you’re missing too much if you use fast travel often, but it does feel like an area where the game placed to-do work rather than meaningful tasks that would motivate you to seek them out more actively.

THE VERDICT: Far Cry Primal sometimes produces an entertaining facsimile of caveman life, feuding with other tribes and fighting back predators with your hand-crafted tools hosted well in the game’s beautifully rendered unspoiled wilderness. However, it sometimes feels like it might as well be called Beast Master with how effective having an animal companion can be. The accurately portrayed technology level struggles to combat a domesticated smilodon, and while some effort is made to shake up even this primitive battle system, the limitations in the setting lead to limited enjoyment.

And so, I give Far Cry Primal for Xbox One…

An OKAY rating. The beast taming in Far Cry Primal is perhaps its most interesting feature and most impactful in terms of holding it back, but it nearly had an idea for how to handle it. There eventually are points you can ride atop a mammoth, but this requires approaching a docile one in the wild and once you abandon it or it dies, you cannot call it back, you need to find a new mammoth. If more powerful animals like smilodons and bears had to be maintained in a similar way then perhaps the beast taming wouldn’t envelope so much of the experience and diminish its difficulty outside of the deliberately realistic and much harder Survival mode. The great beast hunts where you tame a particularly tough foe could even be more rewarding if it granted that permanent companion while animals like the wolf would perhaps see more play rather than being outdone rather quickly by the first cave lion you’ll find in fairly little time. The animal taming doesn’t completely  restrict the game’s ability to conjure some tough battles, mostly thanks to abundant enemies or the foes with a gimmick, but there’s still only so much you can do in a fight and even more advanced options like hurling bee hives are limited by small pouches and limited resources for crafting them on the fly. Unsurprisingly, the Neolithic period is inherently primitive in many regards, meaning personal stories don’t have as much depth as they could, people only understood battle tactics and weaponry so well, and you can’t whip out as many surprise weapons or situations as you could a modern adventure. The “caveman simulation” side does lead to some enjoyably primal moments like smashing your way through a crowd with a two-handed club, but it feels like it’s only enough to help motivate you to conquer the main quests, albeit some of the blame falls on even the side objectives usually being simplistic as well.

Beast taming was likely meant to be the solution to Far Cry Primal’s simplicity problem, and it is a system with some enjoyable highs, but it ends up contributing to the game’s issues with finding a comfortable difficulty because of how effective the animals are. On one hand, you learn early on the power of animals first hand as they hunt you, but letting you wield that power skews the balance of strength without the enemy compensating enough. The basics are still effective enough to deliver on the idea of a nearly realistic caveman adventure game, it’s not brutally realistic but it’s not too fantastical, but it feels like much more can be done with the setting than letting you run rampant with your easily tamed animal army.