Far Cry Primal shows how the smallest loose ends can unravel the most expansive open worlds

Amnesty time: I’m a sucker for games that look really, really nice. Yes, I know, gameplay over graphics and all of that, but in this day and age there&ꩲrsquo;s no reason 🔯why we shouldn’t expect both. And in any case, a beautifully realised world can be the ingredient that tips a good game into the realm of greatness.
Such is the case with Far Cry Primal. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time losing myself in its world, despite it being quite a meat and potatoes adventure game at heart. It doesn’t even pass my ‘is it fun to move around the map?’ test which usually 𓂃dictates whether or not I persist with an open world game, it being little more than a prehistoric reskin of Far Cry 4’s awkward, mountainous landscape.
With the wheel yet to be invented, it is in fact a pain in the ancestral ass to get anywhere in Primal, even with the presence of fast travel and the ability to tam🌌e and ride beasts (which reportedly was a feature patched in late in the game’s development to make travelling less of a slog).
But it’s testament to how luscious and captivating Far Cry Primal’s stone age skin is that it took the entire world over a week to realise that Ubisoft ha♉d done little more than dump the Himalayas into northern Eur❀ope and add a few orange filters. But it doesn’t matter. At their best, games have an ability to transport you to a different time and place that’s unmatched by any other kind of media, and Far Cry Primal dumps you deep into prehistory just as painlessly as it dumps Everest onto Gothenberg.
Primal has you at ‘hello’ (or rather, ‘ugg’). Within seconds of pressing start, you’re in the zone: stranded in the middle of an ancient forest far, far away, rustling through the prehistoric foliage with your uninte🏅lligible caveman crew in the quest for something, anything, to kill and eat.
And then, with a screen-shuddering thud, your next meal stomps into view; a magnificent mammoth, its eye as close to our quivering avatar as this screen is to your n🍌os🦂e. We gingerly follow the beast into an opening and there, partially-obscured in the thick primordial mist, is one of the most breathtaking scenes you’ll see in video games all year: an entire herd of mastodons, frolicking, playing, bathing.
It is an incredible opener that sucks you into Primal’s universe instantly, and it’s one that, on the back of its imm🐲ersive audio and visuals, the rest of the experience manages to live up to. It’s such an easy world to lose yourself in that your mind starts filling in the gaps, and you begin explaining away the game’s flaws as part of the larger fantasy. So what if it’s a difficult world to get around in? This is the stone age – you’d expect the terrain to be a little rugged and bruising.
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The visuals are easily the game’s greatest asset and it’s no surprise that most of the changes Ubisoft have made to Primal post-release are geared towards heightening the immersion further. These i🍨nclude the ability to remove screen clutter, for crafting to take lཧonger, and an option to make animals spawn less often, requiring hunters to lie in wait for their prey rather than sprinting around aimlessly until they eventually bump into a herd of deer.
The latter modifi🦂cation would be a disaster in a less absorbing game, but in Primal, patiently stalking rare prey and earning every scalp through good hunting practice is all part of the fun. As I said, in a game this immersive, your imagination is kee🧔n to smooth over things that would be perceived as flaws in rougher offerings.
But it only takes one small bad piece of design to send even the most brilliantly conceived world crashing down to reveal the crude movie set underneath. Primal’s most disappointing element is one that had the potential to be brilliant – the Beast Master huntಌ quests, where you trail a mighty rare creature (such as the sabre-toothed tiger that wipes out your clan in the aforementioned opening) and hopefully weaken it enough to tame it to do your bidding.
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