FAR CRY 6

Taking a stealthy look inside Ubisoft’s revolutionary guerrilla thriller

- Navid Khavari

Developer/publisher Format: Ubisoft (Toronto) Luna, PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, Xbox Series

Origin: Canada

Release: October 7

Number six, then. Of the hundreds of games shown during E3 week, it was notable that Far Cry 6 was the highest-numbered new entry in any series. And coming after the repetitious Far Cry 5, and the somewhat ironically named New Dawn, Ubisoft’s shooter mainstay seems in need of fresh ideas, above and beyond the publisher’s usual tactic of relocating its open-world to a new corner of the globe.

Far Cry 6 does do that, of course, whisking us away to Yara, a fictional Caribbean island. It’s an excuse for some gorgeous scenery, bathed in golden-hour sunshine or pelted with tropical rainstorms. Think fluttering palm trees, winding dirt tracks, stretches of off-blue water dotted with the occasional spit of land – a classic Far Cry setting, in other words, one of the few things that ties the shooter’s modern incarnations to the Crytek original. Naturally, it’s bigger than ever before: Yara is a whole country, with multiple towns, “each with their own distinct personality, people and culture,” as the game’s narrative director and lead writer, Navid Khavari, explains.

“We studied everything from revolutions throughout history to protests in Venezuela”