In Primal crafting isn’t an optional side activity, it’s a thing you need to do to survive. The land is full of resources like wood and stone that are of much greater importance than in other games in the series. There are dewy valleys and sharp cliffsides. You might even catch a glimpse of an alligator snapping at a poor mammoth that just wants a drink of water.

If you crouch in the grass you can watch wolves chase deer, and huge ancient elk graze calmly through the woods. Oros is a place that seems vibrant and alive. Like all Far Cry games, though, the story, for all its bombast, plays second fiddle to the exploration. You also have to eliminate the threat, which you do by clubbing a lot of cavemen and burning a lot of villages. Your job is to reunite your tribe, who are now scattered around, running scared. They live in an idyllic land called Oros, filled with mountains and rivers and wildlife, but one that’s also home to a much more violent (and cannibalistic) group intent on killing every last Wenja, for some reason. Primal puts you in the role of a hunter named Takkar, a member of a displaced tribe of prehistoric people called the Wenja. But Primal also feels like a wasted opportunity that probably would’ve been better off without the Far Cry name and all of the baggage that comes with it.

That can still be a lot of fun, and the new time period keeps the familiar formula at least a bit fresh. The really cool parts - the focus on surviving the elements, and a new feature that lets you tame beasts like mammoths and bears - is largely hidden behind a structure that has you fighting other humans and overtaking new territory. Ultimately though, Primal ends up feeling too much like, well, a Far Cry game. There’s a lot of potential there, especially around the idea of survival in Primal you won’t just stumble across a machine gun or a cache of grenades, instead you have to build weapons yourself, using the wood, stone, leaves, and animals around you.

Your sniper rifle is replaced with a bow-and-arrow. Those gun-toting soldiers become club-swinging rival tribes. You take the basic structure of a Far Cry game - with its huge, unpredictable open world filled with dangerous animals, weapon-wielding enemies, and plentiful natural resources - and then you set it in prehistoric times.

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