They’ll happily join your village and mooch living quarters built from your hard-earned booty, but don’t expect to see them out in the wild helping you when things get dire. Even the clearly traumatised woman with the ear fetish grew on me. It’s a shame we don’t see much of them over the game’s duration because I quite like the secondary cast from the one-eyed guy who expresses his brotherly respect via swift headbutts, to the one-armed bloke who I suspect peed on me just so he could choose my nickname. Supporting characters feel largely absent beyond their handful of associated missions and have very little to do with Takkar outside of cutscenes. Primal simply hums along sedately until culminating in a pair of standard-issue boss fights. “It took me around 20 hours to get through Primal’s main campaign and just some of the available side quests, and the story does retain Far Cry’s now-signature supernatural flourishes, but it lacks any real twists, intrigue, rollicking set-pieces, drama, or depth. Ubisoft has made a move away from Far Cry’s traditionally more linear storytelling but at a hefty cost. Unfortunately this elevator pitch is also the entire plot synopsis, because that’s pretty much all there is to Primal. To achieve victory over two separate enemy tribes (the Udam and the Izila) Takkar must work alongside several allies to gain the abilities he needs to defeat the leader of each tribe. When Three Tribes Go to WarTakkar's goal is to help establish the Wenja as the dominant tribe in the game’s large world, Oros, which is a mixture of rolling plains, lush forests, and inhospitable ice. A considerable letdown for a series that’s carved out a reputation for fascinating and nuanced bad guys. Regrettably Primal falls flat here too neither of Primal’s main villains are a patch on a character like Vaas.

Of course, one of Far Cry’s real fortes is its ability (particularly in more recent instalments) to make up for its ho-hum leads with some truly scene-stealing antagonists, like Far Cry 4’s sadistic Pagan Min or, better still, Far Cry 3’s frighteningly unpredictable Vaas. Unfortunately, that’s more or less all we ever learn about Takkar and, as such, he isn’t an especially engaging or interesting protagonist. We also know he has a beard because, well, you can see it in his little icon on the in-game map screen.

Play Far Cry Primal’s 10,000 BCE Stone Age setting takes us back into human prehistory, casting us as a hunter called Takkar, who's part of a fractured tribe known as the Wenja.

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