Far Cry 6 Review: Great Guns, Forgettable Revolution
I came to this Far Cry 6 review late, and that turned out to be the right way in. I picked the game up long after launch, once every patch had landed, and the island was sitting there finished. Ubisoft set it on Yara, a fictional Caribbean country run by a dictator called Anton Castillo, and handed me a revolution to fight with whatever I could weld together in a garage. Far Cry 6 gameplay still lives or dies on that one idea.
Far Cry 6 launched on 7 October 2021, and people are still running around Yara years later, which says something about a game plenty of players wrote off as more of the same. I have played all seven regions, poked at the villain episodes, and run Special Operations with a friend. Below, you'll find what I liked, what wore me down, and who I would point at this island.
Far Cry 6 Review Summary
Yara is the strongest open world Ubisoft has built for this series, with seven regions that look and sound genuinely different.
Resolver weapons and Supremo backpacks are where the fun lives. A CD launcher turns an ordinary checkpoint fight into something worth recording.
The ammo and armour system fights you more than the soldiers do, and swapping rounds mid-firefight is the biggest drag on Far Cry 6 gameplay.
Anton Castillo is excellent and barely in the game. The guerrilla plot around him never rises to meet Giancarlo Esposito.
The extras are generous: three villain episodes, the Lost Between Worlds expansion, weekly Insurgencies, Special Operations and full-campaign Far Cry 6 co-op.
Ubisoft stopped updating it in November 2023, so what you install is the finished article.
Yara Is The Best Far Cry Map
Yara is the reason I kept reinstalling this game. The tutorial island of Isla Santuario hands you a small, quiet version of the country, and then Madrugada opens up with tobacco fields and roads that curl around hills you want to climb. Valle de Oro is drier and richer, all ranches and farmland. El Este is mountains and jungle. Each region has its own colour palette, its own radio chatter and its own reason to stop the car.
The density separates it from the series' earlier maps. I would set off for a mission marker and pass a crashed truck, a fisherman with a story, a Yaran Contraband stash under a jetty and a checkpoint I could not resist flattening. The detours here are just short enough that I never felt punished for taking one.
Traversal helps more than I expected. Horses are everywhere, boats are fast, and the wingsuit turns the mountain regions into long glides down to whatever is on fire below. My favourite run in the whole game is a horse ride down a hillside in El Este at dawn with a checkpoint alarm going off behind me. The music shifts as you cross a region border and the propaganda broadcasts get nastier the deeper you go. I have played far bigger open worlds with far less personality.
Resolver Weapons Make The Combat Sing
Resolver weapons are the reason to play Far Cry 6 instead of any other shooter with an island in it. These are the homemade guns the guerrillas cobble together, and they are properly strange. Discos Locos fires CDs at people, El Susurro is a silenced nail gun for stealth runs, and El Muro is a shotgun with a riot shield welded to it. Each one changes how a fight opens rather than just adding damage.
The Supremo backpacks are the bigger swing. Exterminador locks a swarm of missiles onto everything nearby. Volta fires an EMP pulse that knocks enemies down and shuts off alarms and cameras, Medico revives and heals anyone next to you, and Furioso drops a ring of fire around your feet. I ran Volta for most of my playthrough since killing an alarm is worth more to me than raw firepower, and I still swapped to Exterminador the moment a tank rolled in.
Amigos are the other half of the personality. Chorizo the dachshund drags soldiers out of position so I can walk straight past them. Boom Boom marks every enemy in a camp, and Oluso the panther deletes people without being seen. I leaned on Chorizo, since the cleanest way through a Yaran base is usually to make two guards walk somewhere silly. All of it stacks into fights that go sideways in a good way. A dog spots me, an armoured truck arrives, I fire rockets into my own cover, and I leave on a horse.
Anton Castillo Deserved A Better Story
Anton Castillo is the best thing in the script and he is in maybe a tenth of it. Giancarlo Esposito plays him as a man who believes the cruelty is arithmetic, and every scene with his son Diego reaches for something serious about how a dictatorship reproduces itself. Those scenes are excellent. There are nowhere near enough of them.
The campaign is built wrong for him. Dani Rojas spends most of the run doing errands for three regional guerrilla factions, and those factions get far more screen time than the man on the posters. A lot of that writing is fine, some of it is very funny, and almost none of it builds toward Anton. I finished whole regions without a reminder that he existed.
Tone is the other casualty. A mission about a family being executed sits next to a mission about a rooster fighting ring, and the game plays both at full volume. I laughed at plenty of it and I never believed the revolution it was selling me. Dani is a likeable lead in both versions, which softens the whole thing. A cast this strong should have left me something that lasted past the credits.
This Far Cry 6 Review Docks Points
The ammo system is the first mark against it. Every enemy wears one of a handful of armour types and every weapon takes a specific round. The correct play is to scan a camp, then fit soft target rounds for unarmoured troops, armour-piercing for the helmets and blast for vehicles. Done properly it works, and done properly it also means pausing three times inside one firefight. By my second region I had settled on one suppressed rifle and stopped thinking about it.
Gear levels make that worse. Weapons, clothing and enemies all carry a rank, so a fight you could win through clever positioning still turns into a bullet sponge if your rifle sits a few levels behind the region. That pushes you toward the numbers instead of the toys, in a game whose toys are its whole personality.
Repetition is the other cost. After about fifteen checkpoints I could predict the layout from the road: one alarm box by the gate, one sniper on the roof, one heavy who arrives late. Soldiers rarely flanked me, almost never used the terrain well, and lost track of me the moment I climbed anything. Bases are better built and the Yaran Stories are frequently great, and even so the middle of my playthrough turned into a checklist rather than a rebellion.
Is Far Cry 6 Worth Buying?
Yes, with one condition: buy it for the island and the guns. Anyone who wants a large, beautiful, endlessly interruptible playground will get dozens of hours out of Yara without much effort. Anyone hoping this is the entry where the series finally grows up should sit it out, since that game is not in here.
Nothing about this game is going to change now. Ubisoft confirmed in November 2023 through the official Far Cry account that the development team had stopped making updates and that online services would keep running. Everything shipped: the villain episodes Vaas Insanity, Pagan Control and Joseph Collapse, the Lost Between Worlds expansion from December 2022, and the weekly Insurgencies and six Special Operations. New Game Plus arrived with Title Update 6 in November 2022. Far Cry 6 co-op covers the whole campaign for two players, and it is a livelier game with someone else causing chaos across the camp.
Wait for a sale before buying the Season Pass separately, since the episodes are short and the base game already holds more content than one playthrough can exhaust. Ubisoft made the whole Isla Santuario opening playable as a free trial with your progress saved, and trying it settles the question faster than any review can. The Far Cry 6 store page lists what each edition holds. Far Cry 6 game keys are the quicker route to a loaded save or the version with everything attached.
FAQs About Far Cry 6
Final Words
Most of my affection for this game points at the place instead of the plot. A hillside in El Este and a burning checkpoint stayed with me. Why I was fighting did not. For an open-world shooter that might be enough, and for a story that spent this much on Giancarlo Esposito it is a waste.
Two systems argue with the design around them, and they hold the score down. A game built on homemade rocket launchers and a dachshund should not ask me to check an armour icon before every fight, and gear levels quietly push everyone toward the same rifle. Strip those two out and I think this is the best Far Cry since 3.
No patch is coming to fix any of it, so the version you play is the version I played. I find that oddly freeing: no roadmap to wait on, no reason to rush. Yara will be there when you feel like an evening of blowing things up.
GameBoost Products
View all GameBoost Accounts
View all GameBoost Boosting Services
View all GameBoost Currencies
View all GameBoost Game Keys
View all GameBoost Gift Cards
View all GameBoost Top Ups
View all GameBoost Items