Say goodbye to bombarding elephants with a grenade launcher a la Far Cry 4, because Ubisoft’s latest entry to the series sees you fighting tooth and claw for your survival with mammoths, dire-wolves, and sabre-tooth tigers in the Stone Age.
Their hunting ground is the fertile and deadly open-world valley of Oros, where our protagonist Takkar must unite with his tribe to compete for scarce food and resources. Armed with rough tools such as bows, spears, and axes built from stone and bone, the player engages in a new crafting system in a struggle for life the Narrative Director calls “going from being the hunted to the hunter”. A greater emphasis on melee combat should have interesting interaction with a first person perspective. The dynamic fire engine returns with next-gen graphics and particle effects a-plenty, useful for torching the rival tribes seeking blood and plunder, which may ignite hopes of base building and defence. At night, the dangers of Oros twist across the land’s deserts, grassland, and forests, perhaps reflecting a sweeping change of tone into something less explosive but more gritty, brutal, and primal.