Far Cry 6 begins with a fairly out of place prologue, having you creep through the streets of Yara’s capital city before reaching a boat headed for America. Unfortunately, it turns out Diego Castillo, son of dictator Anton Castillo, is a stowaway, bringing Anton to your door (or deck) to ‘rescue’ his son by force before blowing your boat to smithereens. You wash up on the other side of Yara. Your friend is dead but her phone is alive - this distinction matters, since you mourn her for all of five seconds before grabbing her phone and acting as if nothing ever happened.

The first few hours of Far Cry 6 are a tight and contained affair. The game still offers an expansive open world, but it feels manageable. You start to get a feel for where things are; although with a million quest markers, getting lost is hard. As part of the game’s pseudo-tutorial phase, it leads you around the island to various checkpoints, teaching you how to clear camps and complete other open-world objectives scattered across the map. It does this while giving you a handful of main missions and introducing characters who seem interesting at first but get progressively less interesting the more you talk to them. So far, so Far Cry.

Related: Far Cry 6's Cockfighting Is Gross, And We Should Care More About ItExcept not really. The game plays like Far Cry but the island feels much tighter and more controlled. There’s less bloat and more saturation, more use of space while still giving you license to explore, sliding away to your heart's content. As any of you who have played Far Cry 6 are probably already aware of, I was a fool.

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Turns out this is just the starter island. It should have been the finisher island - I am untethered and my rage knows no bounds. After a few hours, you pony up with all the friends you’ve met along the way and launch into one big mission. It’s kind of like those occasional missions in Red Dead Redemption 2 when the whole gang rode off together, except here the stakes are meaningless and you don’t care about anyone. Having barely mourned your friend on the beach during the chapter’s opening, the game prepares you to never care about its characters, and boy, does it deliver.

In this island’s last stand, one of your companions goes missing and is presumed dead. It later turns out he’s been captured and is being tortured by Castillo, who uses him to train Diego in the art of being an absolute bastard. I think we’re supposed to care, but I don’t. I’ve met this guy twice, and both times he was brusque, unfriendly, and told me nothing about himself. He’s the brother of my dead friend, and blames me for her death, except right before this mission he decides he doesn’t. Okay cool.

Far Cry moving off the first island introduces two issues. It means the storytelling needs to accelerate needlessly, and it brings in a huge amount of bloat. As far as the narrative goes, because Far Cry 6 never stops to let you sleep or uses any other narrative devices to show the passage of time, I have no idea how long I’ve been part of the revolution. To me, it’s been a few hours, but to Dani, it appears to have been a few weeks. If the game tried to convey that in some meaningful way, maybe I’d have a stronger connection to the characters.

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This continues on the main island. The first mission sees you meet a new character, then immediately launch into a second mission. Of course, you can ignore this and clear camps or hunt for treasure, but I didn’t. A key contact was apparently in mortal danger, so doing jobs for Chorizo the dog wasn’t high on my priority list. After rescuing her, you talk to her as if you’ve been on this island for weeks and have become close with that other character you just met. As far as players are concerned, you’ve had one perfunctory conversation with him and barely avoided him blowing you to bits. Far Cry 6 is too eager to accelerate the human connection, but it’s also desperate to slow down the gameplay.

It’s a Ubisoft game, so there will be a lot of map stuff to clear up. That’s not my favourite style of game design, but it’s popular and we’ve seen other publishers embrace it, so I know to expect it. The problem is it felt like this issue had been fixed in Far Cry 6 - the first island still had a lot of things to do, they were just more concentrated. Thinking about it rationally, the first island may have been a bit too small to sustain an entire game. But Yara itself is so huge comparatively. You could fit that first island into the main map 20 times - that’s way too much bloat, especially when each new area comes with more characters to connect to and only eight seconds to do it.

Far Cry 6

Far Cry isn’t really sure if it wants to give you a blank canvas of a map to work your way across, or a thriving, lived-in world full of meaningful characters. In any case, it’s too big and endlessly overwhelming to achieve the first goal, and never stops to smell the modified tobacco long enough to achieve the second. I know critics tend to get games for free, or can write them off against tax, while other players shell out and want enough content to make it worthwhile, but adding too many pointless tasks and open spaces with nothing to do doesn’t add value, it just wastes time. Even before I started writing about games, I thought unnecessarily massive worlds were boring.

When I say Far Cry 6 should have stayed on the first island, I don’t necessarily mean that literally. I know it’s probably a bit too small to contain the game Ubisoft wanted to make. But the ideal size for Yara is much closer to the first island than the bloated map of the second, and every element of the game suffers from not recognising that.

Next: Far Cry Never Should Have Been Political In The First Place