Far Cry Primal

While its unique time frame prompts this first-person action series to try new things, it spends so much time on how you do them and not enough on what you’re doing that it feels a bit redundant. Because the game is set in 10,000 B.C., much of your time is dedicated to gathering resources and hunting animals, with the rest spent attacking enemy villages and defending yourself from random attacks from predators on both four legs and two. You even get help in the form of an owl that can do aerial recon, as well as wolves, bears, and other animals that can attack on command. All of this works together to make you feel like you're wandering a strange and dangerous land. But it also helps that, when you take up your bow and arrow, the game's spot-on controls make you feel like you studied archery under Hawkeye from The Avengers and then interned with Katniss from The Hunger Games.

Still, while having spears, a bow and arrow, and a club makes the fighting feel different than in previous Far Cry games (which armed you with guns), all the hunting and gathering gets a bit repetitive after a while. This is especially true because you're constantly looking for raw materials, but you don't really have an easy way to cart all of them back as much as you'd like (of course, there's nothing like cars or anything to help you haul items off to your village). It even takes a while for you to learn how to train a bear to let you ride it, meaning that until that moment occurs, you're going to be walking across this massive prehistoric land, which can take lots of time. This isn't to say that all this repetition is bad; it just could've been so much better if your missions were more varied or the game were a lot shorter. Overall, though, Far Cry Primal puts a radical, unexpected historical twist on the first-person shooter genre that will intrigue mature gamers.