First kicking off 20 years ago, the Far Cry games rank among Ubisoft’s most popular series and for good reason. The first-person shooter series is largely viewed as the tentpole franchise in which the developer and megapublisher consolidated the open-world model of games that became so ubiquitous in recent years, not just from Ubisoft itself but from other developers as well. The “Ubisoft” model really clicked into place with Far Cry 3 in 2012 before becoming the house style for many of the studio’s franchises, such as Assassin’s Creed and Watch Dogs, and now you have the chance to pick up the entire series for the price of a single game.
This weekend, you can cop every full game in the series—Far Cry, 2, 3, Blood Dragon, 4, Primal, 5, New Dawn, and 6—on a deep-ass discount on Steam and Humble Bundle. If you want a bundle compiling all of them, it’ll run you $US51.45. That’s a metric ton of camps to blow up, fields of drugs to torch, and hallucinogenic trips to go on, all while problematically stumbling through a lot of conflicts you should probably just butt out of!
If you want them all piecemeal instead, that’s also an option and it’s really just a matter of picking your poison. The Far Cry games are a lot of things, and not all of them are great, but if there’s one thing those games will do, it’s transport you to alternate realities, different eras of human history, and vast new environments spanning the globe.
Let’s start with the most recent entry. You can pick up Far Cry 6 at both Steam and Humble Bundlefor just $US15, as well as its villain-themed expansion pass and a sci-fi DLC for another $US24. Far Cry 6 takes place in a fictional amalgamation of real-world island nations (but mostly Cuba) under the thumb of a cruel dictator played by Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad, Do the Right Thing) and drops you into the shoes of a guerilla fighter trying to topple a fascist regime. Each of the game’s three villain expansions then pull a weird trick and let you play as the bad guys of the previous three numbered entries.
A final DLC called Lost Between Worlds continues the series’ tradition of jumping the shark (more on that in a bit) and drops you into a sci-fi expansion that makes absolutely no sense. Still, if you want the most polished and newest incarnation of the formula, you can’t really go wrong here.
Far Cry 5, meanwhile, is available for $US9, and you can nab its expansions, which include a zombie-themed DLC and another that takes you to Mars, for the same price. Though the game courted controversy with its handling of its Montana setting and the ideologies of Hope County’s residents, it was also probably the last title to be released before Far Cry fatigue fully set in. It also spawned a spinoff title called New Dawn which took place in a post-nuke apocalypse born from one of 5’s optional endings. Yes, these games are insane and you can pick up New Dawn for the insanely low price of just $US8.
Far Cry 4 and its prehistoric follow-up (no, you didn’t read that wrong) Far Cry Primal are also on deep sales for $US6 and $US7.49, respectively. Far Cry 4 is the last one of these games I was excited for and bothered playing, and for what it’s worth, I thought it was pretty great at the time, offering a successful evolution of the tried-and-true formula in a setting and story I felt was better delivered than the series had managed previously. Alternatively, if you want to ride a wooly mammoth, I believe you can do that in Primal. Different strokes, I guess.
The first three games are all even cheaper. Far Cry 3 is just $US5 bucks and its neon-soaked 80s fever dream of a side game, Blood Dragon,
is $US3.74. Far Cry 2, which these days is heralded as a classic that really pushed the series into becoming deeply immersive open-world games with conflicting systems and factions, is only $US3. The original and oft-forgotten Far Cry can be grabbed for the same low cost.
Taken altogether, the Far Cry series is probably a great way to explore the evolution of shooters and open-world games from the mid-to-late aughts through to the present moment. And even if you don’t care for much of the stories they tell, they’re endlessly interesting considering how much Ubisoft has engineered the games around emergent moments. And if you need any more convincing, it’s very nearly time for Ubisoft to announce a new one, so you may as well start catching up now!
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