Far Cry 6’s Sliding Epitomises What Far Cry Should Be
Sliding is stupid fun in Far Cry – the rest of the game should be too
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A few hours in, Far Cry 6 sure feels like Far Cry. It has violent melee attacks, huge set pieces, and a plantation-load of quests across the map, all while expecting you to be far more invested in the story than you are. I’m sure many people have and will continue to discuss the various merits and limitations of sticking with the same formula for a decade, getting bigger and prettier but no more inventive, so I’m not here to talk about that. Instead, I want to point out how bloody fun it is to slide about the place.
Far Cry’s traversal is pretty simple. You run around the map, and fairly early on unlock the ability to call for a car or summon horses. A grapple hook lets you ascend and descend cliffs, while a parachute lets you drop from a height safely and a boat allows for travel between the islands. As the game is so fond of reminding you, it’s all about the right tool for the right job.
Perhaps it gets more interesting in the late game, but that is how all the traversal feels right now – a tool to be properly utilised at the right time. There’s not much fun in any of it, it’s all just travel from A to B. Go from this objective to that one and probably hit some minor quest on the oversaturated map. When you’re running though, all of these problems cease to exist. Just push the slide button and you’ll have the time of your life.
At its core, the slide button is also perfunctory. Tap it while standing or walking, and you’ll crouch down, allowing you to hide behind barriers or in the long grass. Tap it while running, and you’ll slide, theoretically skidding to safety. In reality, that isn’t how it works. Considering Far Cry 6 lets you hurl baseballs at your enemies, sicc crocs on them, or fire an avalanche of rockets from your backpack, it’s fair to say it embraces the carnage of the shootout more than the tactics. You can take a stealthy approach and slowly pick guards off one by one, but Far Cry’s combat shares little with its Ubisoft cousin Rainbow Six. I’d say it’s more like Hyper Scape, but then no one knows what that is.
Because combat is more about blowing things up than acting with precision, the slide is comedically overpowered. You can’t take people out at the knees or slide between their legs like in Severed Steel – side note; go play Severed Steel – but if you’re running at pace and feel like a break from the grim spectre of fascism, just push crouch and pretend you’re on a 20 metre Slip n Slide.
There’s more to it than just ‘this button is fun’. I’ve already explained why I think Far Cry should embrace its silliness instead of its storytelling, and I know how ironic that is after lambasting it for not committing to politics. But the six seconds every slide takes is more enjoyable, more engrossing, more important to the Far Cry 6 experience than any moment Castillo is on the screen. Giancarlo Esposito is brilliant, as we all expected, but the narrative is flat and lacks heart – again, as we all expected. Far Cry has all the tools to just be a wacky game of explosions that means nothing, and the sliding is a huge part of that.
I’m not using it tactically. I’m using it when I’m running through the jungle, seeing if I can make it to that tree or that rock or that dead fascist. Far Cry is simultaneously embracing what makes it silly and fun while also begging to be taken seriously. The sliding is the best thing about the game, and that’s not a backhanded compliment. More of Far Cry should be like this. I don’t want to liberate Yara, I just want to slide around it until my legs bleed.
Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/far-cry-6-sliding-story-themes-gameplay/