Far Cry Primal review: Taming the wild

It was really tough to give up preconceived notions about what I imagined Far Cry Primal was going to be like. Even discounting the game's frighteningly mediocre announcement, I figured it was going to feel a lot like Far Cry 4, swapping all the bullets and vehicles for arrows and mammoths. And for the most part, that's what Primal is.

Far Cry Primal

$20 at Walmart

$18 at Amazon

$14 at eBay

The Good

Far Cry Primal takes place around 12,000 years ago during the Mesolithic Stone Age and creates an urgent sense of desperation and survival. Taming and riding the game's wild beasts never gets old.

The Bad

The game's characters and story aren't as heftily developed as in other Far Cry games. A lot of Primal's side quests are uninteresting.

The Bottom Line

Even though it is apparently cut from the same cloth, Far Cry Primal does enough to separate itself from previous iterations of the game thanks to its solid melee, hunting and taming mechanics.

In the spirit of avoiding what would have likely been a "Far Cry 4.5" follow-up, Ubisoft Montreal has instead delivered quite the capable spin-off, a game set in the Mesolithic Stone Age roughly 12,000 years ago.

Far Cry Primal's DNA is very much representative of what a core Far Cry game is: gathering resources, crafting, overrunning outposts, skinning animals, etc. And I guess we can add tripping balls to the list as well, because it seems every Far Cry protagonist has a run-in with a mind-altering toxin that results in some kind of supernatural gameplay.

But as much as the game looks like a lateral step from the third and fourth Far Cry games, remarkably, Primal is able to carve out its own identity even if its layers of predictability seem to endlessly unravel.

Primal sidesteps its predecessors in a number of ways, most immediately noticeably in its level of brutality. This game is rough. I'm talking bloodier and grosser than you're probably expecting a game set in the Stone Age to be.

But beyond the guts, Primal has built out a small set of new mechanics to freshen the overall package and occasionally made me forget I was inside a Far Cry game. One of the best examples of this is the owl -- the ability to call an owl to survey the land in your general area, tagging enemies and animals, even doing a death-from-above owl kill. The owl's skills can be upgraded too, as long as you flesh out the right items in your village. Which leads to my second point: village upgrading.

Your character, Takkar, can upgrade his cave and the surrounding area, opening up new objectives, skills and more. This will also lure members of his tribe to gather at the home base, strengthening the resistance to enemies. It's another way to incentivize the collecting of resources in the world because you'll want your limited amount of weapons to become more effective and powerful.

Takkar's allies make up the other few main characters in the game. Despite all being beautifully rendered, they lack a lot of depth. In fact, your character feels like a faceless vessel, unlike the more thoroughly developed protagonists of previous games that fly the Far Cry banner.

It's easy to get bored by the monotony of resource-chasing and some of the weak side quests that litter the game. For me, the most exciting element of Primal was learning to tame some of the world's most intimidating beasts.

By far, the most satisfying element in Far Cry Primal has to be beast taming, regardless of how absurd it appears in action. As you progress through the main story you'll unlock the ability to tame wilder and deadlier beasts. Once you've baited them with some meat, you can sneak up on them and then using some kind of Stone Age Jedi mind trick, that sabertooth tiger -- you know, the one that was not five seconds ago feasting on human flesh -- has a sudden change of heart and lets you command it. Awesome! But seriously, petting all these animals is kind of adorable. They gently approach you and look into your character's eyes saying "don't worry, buddy, I'm here for you." It's pretty cool.

It's probably not the first must-play triple-A title of 2016, but surprisingly enough, Far Cry Primal isn't the cut-and-paste job some, including myself, had been fearing. It successfully creates a sense of survival and desperation, all while introducing enough smartly designed amenities to spark an interest to, at the very least, see the main campaign all the way through.

I played Far Cry Primal on PlayStation 4 and was impressed with its quick loading times. It's also available on Xbox One now and will be out shortly (March 1, 2016) on PC. Graphically it's on par with what we saw in console versions of Far Cry 4, so I'm interested to see how it looks and performs on PC.