Satsuma wrote:
1) Iconoclasts (PS4)
2) Detroit: Become Human (PS4)
3) Far Cry 5 (Xbox)
4) Shadow Warrior (Xbox)
5) Guacamelee 2 (PS4)
6) Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (PS4)
7) Far Cry Primal (PS4)
This is a weird one. For starters the campaign is much smaller than the previous games and it’s melee and bows only set in 10,000 BC. And I loved it!
For about 5 hours.
Then it broke.
The combat starts off quite difficult as you swing bats and clubs and stealth kill guys and gals in prehistoric times because if you alert a crowd you’ll get smashed to bits, you won’t have enough resources to keep your arrows topped up and the spongy heavy enemies take a shit load to arrows or taps to the bonce to kill. So you stealth around sites, doing the usual stuff (seriously, it’s identical to the other entries with the same enemy types, and you even have to smash all the horns in a camp so they don’t call for reenforcements. Ah well) before you tick off another outpost to the collection as you cautiously progress around the initial areas of the map. You’ll meet giant woolly rhinos, mammoths, no dinosaurs, killer bears, wolves, rabid dog things and so on. And these animals will give you a real pounding. Please don’t fuck with the bears or mammoths cause they will trample you and The Revenant your ass.
So the world is nasty and hostile and that’s good because you play more cautiously.
Then you hit to 4-5 hour mark and you’ve progressed a load of the story, unlocked most of the weapons, upgraded said weapons and you’ve got a fucking Sabre Wolf as a companion (it’s awesome) and enough resources to survive any battle. So you pick a difficult camp say “fuck stealth” and literally smash right through the front door and then through skulls. Frankly, either the AI can’t cope or you become OP too quick. I had no difficulty after the 5 hour mark picking a single camp and just running in and clubbing heads with my giant sabre wolf tiger. I did all the outposts, all the bonfires and all the campaign missions by the 8 hour mark and by the 12 hour mark I’d completed all the side quests, a couple of puzzle caves, 3 of the 4 big hunts for beasts (is so the last one but it got too easy and I was a bit bored) and got the ending. My completion percentage? 40%. The rest of the game is just filled with crap loads of icons to do other stuff like more hunting and beating heads, but I’d had enough.
The weird thing is, I loved all of it except until it was a cake walk. The combat is meaty and satisfying. There’s nothing in the other Far Cry games that comes close to charging up to an enemy and doing a massive swing to the cranium and killing them in one hit from a massive death blow. It’s fucking ace. Even the bow and arrow stuff is great as head shots are one hit kills. Or charging a guy with a spear? What about throwing a 5 foot spear into someone’s face? Even better.
I think it’s probably a matter of perspective: if you don’t have much time (or patience perhaps) to play games you’ll probably have a good time playing through this to completion without much difficulty, but I need a game to feel like a challenge to overcome (especially given the setting, I mean come on, I smashed the giant Bloodtusk Mammoth to bits and that SHOULD have been the ultimate challenge in the game being by far the largest enemy) and that challenge fell off a cliff quite soon into the game. Oh and it doesn’t help that you have infinite health revives like every other Far Cry game I’ve played. So if you run out of healing items you just pop a finger back into place or something daft and get health that way. It takes longer than healing but it’s infinite. They should have taken that out.
Anyhoo, Far Cry Primal is pretty good. I know, I’m surprised as anyone.