Ever since Peter Molyneux’s exciting looking B.C. for original Xbox was canceled back in 2004, I’ve been looking for a game to fill the prehistoric void. Michel Ancel’s Wild looks like it might do the trick, but so too does Far Cry Primal -- and it’s out in just a few short weeks. I played the first three hours of the game and had an excellent time.
To get the bad news out of the way first: yes, Far Cry Primal is set in the stone age, but no, it doesn’t feature dinosaurs. It does, however, feature plenty of other long-extinct animals. In fact, the game opens with you and your hungry tribemates hunting wooly mammoths – before being chased off of your kill by an even hungrier sabertooth tiger and brained by a tree trunk while falling down a hill.
The rest of the first hour is a slow burn. You’ll watch some cinematics, play others, and get introduced to familiar Far Cry mechanics. In fact, for better and for worse, Primal feels like an awfully Far Cry-ish Far Cry game in the earlygoing...until you become the Beast Master. Head into a cave, talk to a shaman, and guzzle some animal blood and by the time you walk out you’ll find that you can control animals. At first it’s an owl used to survey your next moves, tagging enemies from the sky. Pump some XP-earned skill points into the Beast Master portion of your skill tree, however, and you can teach your owl a few attacks, tame wolves, bears, and eventually sabertooth tigers (I only had time to unlock a wolf, however).
Once this side of Primal opens up, you can start to have a little extra fun with the rival tribes’ forts and villages you’re tasked with overthrowing. Want to stealth your way in and stab everyone? Go for it. Want to charge in and savagely crush some skulls head-on? That works too. Or, as I prefer: find a high vantage point and then, Pulp Fiction-style, send the wolf. (That’s all you had to say!) Even at “level 1” he can wreak plenty of havoc, mauling one target while sending all of the others into a frenzy and allowing you to enter the fray with the upper hand.
I also really like all of the nature and outdoorsiness of Primal – you won’t see a single pillar of concrete, which means its color palette is completely devoid of the generic and drab grays and silvers and dominate most major first-person shooter franchises these days. Everything is green and sunny, and the day-night cycle adds a nice wrinkle as well, with animals behaving differently during nocturnal hours.
My first three hours with the new Far Cry ended just as the full hub world opened up, including the ability to upgrade your village for added daily resource bonuses – not to mention a cooler looking abode. It’s fun to scavenge for resources, craft items, and occasionally get eaten by bear. And some of the side missions, such as the Beast Master activity that tasks you with hunting down large game across the wildlands – seem like they’ll be worth gunning for 100% completion on.
Far Cry Primal takes a bit of time to find its footing, but once it does, it shows a lot of potential for carving out a unique niche in the crowded first-person shooter genre.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews and Xbox Guru-in-Chief. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan, catch him on Podcast Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.
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