When I first booted up Far Cry Primal I was expecting a game that paid homage to When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth and One Million Years B.C. But What I got was more akin to Quest For Fire and the game is better off for it.
As gameplay intros go Far Cry Primals mammoth hunt was something I can honestly say I have never experienced before. As a brief introduction to your character and a basic tutorial it set the scene for what was to become one of the most enjoyable FPS games I have played for a long time.
You play as Takkar a Wenja warrior who must strike out alone after losing his tribe during an ambush on the journey to get to Oros, a land abundant with foliage and wildlife. So just imagine how pissed he is to find out that most of the Wenja tribes in Oros he was going to join have been slaughtered or splintered into smaller groups by warring tribes and the carnivorous wildlife. Takkar makes it his mission to find the few surviving members of the tribe and rebuild their decimated community and tame the harsh and unforgiving land and ultimately claim Oros as his own. Far 
Cry Primal doesn't stray too far from the mission structure of other open world games. Here you will fight the Izila and Udam laying waste to their campsites and taking out their leaders to claim their land for you and your tribe. At various points in the story you will need to find the game's mystics who will grant you special powers from hunting and gathering to mastering the skill of taming Oros wild animals. Side missions are also plentiful. You will be rescuing members of your tribe from hostile camps, killing predatory animals that are slaughtering your tribe and claiming bonfires to name a few.
You have to craft everything in Far Cry Primal. You won't even have a weapon to hand after the gameplay introduction and thankfully your eased into a fairly robust crafting system that isn't complicated at all. Everything you craft will eventually break. Clubs, spears and your bow and arrows, will need to be replenished frequently. Later on you can craft slings, traps and a prehistoric version of a grenade which is great fun to use. Thankfully it's as simple as highlighting your chosen item in the crafting menu and pressing A. As long as you have the materials needed to make it that is. Resource collecting is a HUGE part of the game. So much so that I found myself gathering everything and anything that I could scavenge around me. There resources are every bloody where and I never seemed to run out of anything. As your tribe starts to grow, resources will appear automatically at your campsites which you can plunder in case you grow tired of the never ending scavenging. Slaughtering the local wildlife will reap its own rewards in the form of animal skins and meat which you will need to replenish not only your health but also the health of any beasts you master.
You won't be on your own for long in your quest for dominance. The Beast taming skill is nothing short of awesome and truly makes you feel like you're a God in this small part of the world. Play the main storyline long enough and you will unlock the ability to tame the various animals in the game. You will unlock an owl which you can send out on reconnaissance missions to pinpoint enemy locations or even help you find the rarer animals for you to tame by spotting them for you. You can even use the owl to drop prehistoric grenades when you have leveled up enough. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Different animals have a different set of attributes which can greatly affect the way you approach different situations. The Taming Wildcats allows you to tame dholes, rare dholes wolves, white wolves, and rare stripe wolves. The next tier allows you to Tame Wildcats, leopards, jaguars, rare black jaguars, cave lions, and rare black lions. After you have tamed five beasts and if you have two spare skill points to use you can unlock Tame Apex Predators which let's you tame sabretooth tigers and brown bears. To unlock the final ties you need to have tamed eight beasts. Now you can unlock the Tame Cunning Beasts skill for an extra three skill points, which allows you to tame cave bears and badgers. The only downside to this ability is you can't tame Mammoths but you can ride them after you have unlocked that perk. And trust me when I say steamrolling through an enemy encampment atop a Mammoth is amazing. Crushing enemies underfoot or batting them aside with the animal's trunk is all kinds of awesome and who doesn't want to be a human wrecking ball.
The predatory animals you encounter early on will kill you time and time again. I wouldn't bother trying to kill anything larger than a Deer or a Dhole early on or even after you have unlocked your first Beast. This became a source of frustration to begin with and I had to level up pretty quickly. Some animals are more aggressive than others though and some of the predators will even turn their attention to you if they are already attacking an animal or another human. I soon learnt to avoid certain areas of the map and quick travelling to locations became a must. Do you remember how many games you have played that dump you in a hostile and freezing cold world that just let's you stroll around as if your are invulnerable to the cold? Far Cry Primal does the same thing here but you are vulnerable to the elements and you will freeze to death if you're not careful. To combat this you must craft winter clothes and warm yourself by the game's many fires. I can only think of Rise of the Tomb Raider that also has this feature in the DLC. It's a great little mechanic that adds another element of strategy.
I'm not the biggest fan of the Far Cry series but this latest entry has me hooked and thankfully there is no stupid season pass DLC either. Hopefully Far Cry Primal will be a success and the next title will include a whole host of dinosaurs because who doesn't want to ride a tame Tyrannosaurus Rex or send a Velociraptor into battle to do your dirty work for you? I know I do.
Formats Reviewed: Xbox One
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Far Cry Primal is available now for £54.99
Review code supplied by XCN.