Amigos have been one of the key marketing tools for Far Cry 6, and why wouldn’t they be? These are animals who can be summoned and obey your every command. Chorizo is an adorable dachshund, and you can even pet him just like in all of the memes. But it’s hard not to view this cutesy mechanic as cynical when it’s juxtaposed with the game’s otherwise serious narrative that delves into the heavy themes of fascism, slavery, revolution, and other aspects of the real world that it tries so desperately for us to take seriously.
This makes the presence of Chorizo, Guapo the crocodile, and the rest all the more jarring, especially when from a gameplay perspective they can feel almost superfluous to the overall experience. You can summon them in battle to distract enemies and tear them to pieces, but all of these actions take longer and feel more cumbersome than just pulling out a silenced rifle and blasting fascists in the head. Fancy skins and potential upgrades you need to grind for don’t help matters, they all just end up feeling pointless.
Once you’ve seen their chaotic animations a handful of times, it’s so much easier to put them aside and never think about them again. Knowing this, it begs the question why such allies are a part of things in the first place when they have such a negligible, if not downright negative, impact on proceedings. Far Cry - and Ubisoft games as a whole - have had this problem for years now. Its open world efforts are keen to introduce an endless number of systems so players will engage with these titles for endless hours, and as a result so many of them can feel endlessly underbaked and completely unnecessary.
Amigos fall into that camp, and their emphasis in marketing materials over the past few months only further cements how out of place they really are. We’re fighting against a very grounded example of tyranny, so a sausage dog on wheels rolling up to bite bigots in the face just feels woefully obtuse. This series has used the same formula for almost a decade now, with each new entry introducing welcome new additions but never pushing the boat far enough to make a substantial impact.
Far Cry 6 is the biggest culprit of this yet, with mechanics like the Amigos, fishing, collecting vehicles, and sending out allies on optional quests all adding nothing but empty hours to the runtime. It’s bloat for the sake of bloat, like the studio was eager to fill this gorgeous open world with things to do regardless of whether or not they have an actual reason to be there. In this case, I’m not sure they do, and that’s coming from someone who had a pretty good time on the island of Yara, as you can tell from my review.
While Amigos all feel mechanically irrelevant, their greatest sin is how they bastardise a narrative and characters who are otherwise depicted in a poignant way. Dani meets a number of eccentric and grounded characters throughout the campaign. Some you develop sympathy for as they talk about the things they’ve lost during the ongoing revolution and the motivations behind everything they’re fighting for, while others are lazy caricatures designed to accommodate the likes of Chorizo and Guapo.
Moments like this remove all dramatic agency from the game, and once it’s gone, it’s awfully hard to get it back. Sure, I’m on a mission to save my country, but doing it alongside evil chickens and crocodiles makes this feel like a silly action movie instead of the moving tale of perseverance it tries and fails to be. You can mix humour in with a serious dramatic story like this, but not when said humour is so inherently detached from the core ideas being expressed. It undermines everything Far Cry 6 is trying to achieve and just feels disrespectful.
Far Cry 6 might make positive political strides in contrast to Ubisoft’s earlier games, but it remains shackled to its own obsession to be wacky and chaotic, an identity I’m unsure it will be able to part from without alienating those who have stuck with it for so many years. On the flipside, without parting ways with goofy animals and tired cliches, the chance of a meaningful revolution remains achingly slim. Regardless of how fun it can be, this is a game that needs to evolve or risk being left behind to stagnate, and getting rid of Amigos could be the first step in this journey.