So, so much work went into something so bland and disappointing.

Far Cry 6 is the latest Far Cry game trying desperately to recapture the magic of Far Cry 3 and failing completely. It is a visually gorgeous bloated mess of meaningless content, boring gunplay, and terrible characterization. It's yet another example of a game made by many teams who seemingly never talked to each other, leaving FC6 feeling like a bunch of systems mashed together and called a game.

Story is the most obvious place that FC6 falls flat. The player character, Dani, has one motivation: leave the island of Yara and travel to America to be free. At the very start of the game there is a point where you can choose to do just that, to get on a boat and go, and that point is the last time Dani feels like they're following an understandable motivation. If you chose not to, Dani gets dragged into a revolution seeking to free Yara from a tyrannical dictator. This is admirable, but Dani never, ever seems to want to be there; because everything you do you are told to do by NPCs, Dani has basically zero agency, and that lack of agency hangs over the entire game.

At one point your "mentor" guerilla takes Dani aside and says that he sees something within, something similar to himself, a desire not to win a revolution but to fight eternally, a guerilla forever. Dani's reaction to this is basically, "No," and this desire to be a life-long mercenary never really comes up again until the literal last moment of the game when Dani says, "Yeah, screw leading this country to peace, guess I'm a guerilla for life." Cool. Amazing characterization. The truth is (as in most Far Cry games) Dani is a cypher; put whatever you want on them, it doesn't matter. But hey, at least the villain is good, right? A hero is defined by their villain.

Antón Castillo is the ruler of Yara, and he's intelligent and dangerous, a man who has hung onto power as a dictator with an unstable regime for years. He's kind to some, ruthless to others, and he should be a formidable foe. But that's the Castillo from cutscenes. The gameplay makes him look like an idiot because there is some major ludo-narrative dissonance going on.

The dissonance here is that Castillo never really defends any territory that's his or does anything intelligent. Ever. Even inches from his front door you can take a vehicle checkpoint and it's yours for the rest of time. And it's piss-easy to take as well, always around 5 guards who never pose a threat from the very beginning of the game all the way to the highest security levels at the very end. This is a game design failure stemming from a desire to have lots of content in the game: no content ever feels significant, even the most important parts. And there's so much content that, if you chose to have the enemy faction re-take their territory, it would be overwhelming to a player just trying to take their 20th or 30th checkpoint.

The story is predictable in every way. You beat back Castillo's forces, take control of regions, and meet the folks fighting with you. Because this is Far Cry, most of those characters are as annoying as they could possibly be, almost pastiches of real characters. Hey, it's easier that writing real people, right? So you make allies and tighten the noose around Castillo's neck, and then you come to the end game: actually attacking them. And then, ladies and gentlemen, characters start picking up the Idiot Ball.

The leader of the revolution decides to meet the ruthless dictator for a one-on-one chat. Wow, it was a trap. I'm so surprised. Dani goes to rescue her and ends up in a stand-off. The guerilla mentor character doesn't have a perfect shot of Castillo during this stand-off, despite being able to see where he's standing through the lens of a high-power sniper rifle, so decides to try to kill Castillo's son, getting the leader of the revolution killed. Castillo himself, at the very end of the game, murders his own child (in what I'm sure some writer thought of as a shocking moment) despite the fact that Dani has protected the kid through the whole game and would continue to do so.

It's just so dumb.

As for gameplay, it's just shooting guns. Aim at the head if you want, it does more damage. Enemy AI is stupid, even on the highest difficulty; they mostly just run into a room and stand there shooting, no tactics required. Castillo's most formidable soldiers can be easily one-shot, and his armored tanks and aircraft are at most two rockets away from destruction. There's really nothing to say about the gameplay. It's the exact same as every previous Far Cry game.

Design-wise, a lot of the UI is baffling.

• There is a loadout system where you can set up to 4 favorite sets of equipment for different tasks, but there are no hotkeys to swap to those loadouts, so you always have to open menu, select loadout, then select the specific one.
  
• The field of view is so awful it's unbelievable. Even with mods, the FOV in vehicles is pathetically narrow. Driving anything feels like you're starting into binoculars.
  
• You're always wearing an enormous, ugly backpack. Mods can visually remove it, but it's visible every time you see your customized character if you don't chose to do that.
  
• Hilariously, the highest difficulty removes the ability to see where another human player is in co-op. This doesn't make anything harder, because you're still two people who can talk to each other, but it does make it feel like you're playing the game alone. Not exactly how you want the co-op experience to feel.
  
• I hope you're ready to turn off the radio every time you get into any vehicle, because it defaults to on and blasts over all other game sound.

There are other design issues as well, like being able to airdrop literally anywhere, obviating the need to drive entirely. You can always efficively bypass any anti-aircraft defenses by flying into a region and jumping out of an aircraft before it's destroyed to land directly on AA guns and destroy them without effort. There are also pieces of gear you can unlock that refund any headshot bullet back into your gun, but not into the magazine, ready to reload: they refund directly into the chamber, turning the slowest, strongest sniper rifle in the game into a semi-automatic murder machine if you can shoot even half-way decently.

There are more quibbles, but this is enough of an overview. All told, Far Cry 6 is like its predecessors in all the wrong ways and is a posterchild for bland and bloated modern committee-made game design. It looks great, but it's stuffed to the gills with worthless, repetitive activities and collectables to make you think that you're doing something interesting while you're actually just wasting time. The story is bad, the villain is fine, the player character is unmotivated, the supporting cast in horrendous. And, cherry on top, Ubisoft is so angry that no one wants to use their launcher they withheld achievements from Steam. Hilarious. Skip this game.

Oh, and the DLC is three horrendously designed roguelikes built on systems that don't support that kind of play.

Ohh, Ubisoft, so good atmosphere so good look but inside ♥♥♥*ing ♥♥♥♥, I already said to myself don't buy Ubisoft stuff but I already bought this, so be clever don't buy this ♥♥♥♥ if u don't like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ looting all time

The setting of fighting a Latin american dictatorship was perfect. They just had to screw it up with the awful changes in mechanics.
-You have to keep changing ammo types for different enemies. Enemies are bullet sponges if you use the wrong ammo. Example: 5 body shots with .50 sniper rounds is required to take down enemies wearing dress uniform if you use the wrong ammo type ie. armour piercing, explosive or standard rounds. It has to be soft target round for enemies not wearing any armour at all.
-Clothing set up (for different perks) also has to be constantly changed, and tediously via the menu.
-There are no human companions
-They also removed manual saves so I often lose couple minutes of progress each time I resume the game, and not knowing what happened the last time I played
-The capital city is a ghost town without any civilians. Can't even fly there.
I'm sure I'd have more gripes against the game design elements I have yet to pick up on but I'm struggling to continue have fun playing after 12ish hours.
Big step back for the series.