Far Cry Primal (2016) (PC) (Ubisoft Montreal)
0Werner Herzog's enthralling 3D documentary "The Cave of Forgotten Dreams" (2010) fills the viewer's head with unanswerable but endlessly fascinating questions about the long-lost community of inquisitive naturalists, fervent spiritualists and natural born artists which populated Europe some 30,000 years ago. By contrast, Ubisoft Montreal effortlessly rewinds time from the present day to the Mesolithic era, hands the player a giant spear and without further ado ushers him or her out the door to get on with the collecting, crafting and enemy-bashing which the Far Cry series has become known for.
This is perhaps not an entirely fair characterization of the developer's predictable gamification of pre-history. If nothing else, it could be argued that the unrelentingly harsh hunter-gatherer lifestyle makes the kind of violent busywork that typically take place in a Ubisoft open world adventure thematically justified. Nonetheless, it's hard not to get the sense that an opportunity was missed to tell a slightly bigger story than "Me Tarzan, you Jane, Let's collect five deer skins and upgrade our village!"...