Far Cry Primal

Far Cry Primal abandoned firearms and the modern era altogether, taking players to the Stone Age, into the fictional valley of Oros inhabited by three tribes, where the player, as the hunter Takkar, must make their way using only bows, spears, clubs, and stone weapons. The key new feature was a system for taming wild animals - the player could tame a bear, a wolf, or even a saber-toothed tiger as a combat companion who would accompany them on expeditions and defend them against enemies and predators alike. The open world retains the series' structure - camps to capture, tracks to follow, resources to gather - but without cars or firearms it puts greater emphasis on stealth, hunting, and close-quarters combat. Besides fighting, Takkar also has to build up and develop his own village, gradually bringing in more inhabitants with useful skills, so the game combines action with light base-building elements.

The atmosphere is enhanced by the fact that characters speak invented prehistoric languages accompanied by subtitles - an unusual choice that heightens the sense of a foreign, archaic era far removed from the modern world. Visually, the game benefits from the Dunia engine, still used in the series' main entries even years later, offering wild vistas of glaciers, forests, and savannas interwoven with the campfires of tribal villages and cave systems full of dangerous fauna.

Primal was received as an interesting, if not revolutionary, experiment - it earned praise mainly for its courage in abandoning the established shooter formula and for its atmosphere of raw wilderness, which sets it noticeably apart from the rest of the series and still draws in players looking for something other than another modern armed conflict. Some reviewers, on the other hand, pointed out that it's essentially Far Cry 4 in a different costume, since both the map and the mission structure derive from the same engine and design as the previous game, just with a prehistoric overlay. Even so, thanks to its bold theme, Primal carved out a distinctive and memorable place within the series.

Why play it: For the atmosphere of raw prehistoric wilderness that sets Primal noticeably apart from the rest of the series, even though at its core it's Far Cry 4 in a different costume.