Far Cry 3 was one of my favorite video games ever when I was younger, and it still holds a special place in my heart. It’s the kind of distraction-filled open world game that feels impossible to translate to a tabletop game—not just because of its action gameplay, but also its jumble of interlocking systems, which are far more onerous to implement in a tabletop setting.
That said, popular IPs are a tempting rock for publishers to squeeze blood from, so I wasn’t particularly surprised when Funforge announced Far Cry: Escape from Rook Islands—a campaign game set on the same islands, and featuring some of the same characters. Let’s see how it fares!
Far Cry: Escape from Rook Islands is a cooperative campaign game for 1-4 players, and each session lasts about 90 minutes each. It plays best with a full 4 players.
Gameplay Overview:
Each scenario in Far Cry’s 7-mission campaign follows a familiar structure. Players start on a map surrounded by enemies and are tasked with completing a specific objective before time runs out. Scenarios also contain multiple optional objectives, which provide bonus XP and money (used to buy campaign upgrades).
Some scenario-specific events happen at the beginning of each round, then players get to take their turns for the round simultaneously, interrupting each others’ actions as desired. You get a fixed number of MP on your turn to spend on movement, and can attack with your equipped weapon(s) once per turn, or reload your weapons when they run out of ammo. Weapons each describe the type of die they use (which affects accuracy), as well as the damage dealt, and any additional effects triggered by the weapon.
After all players have acted, all the enemies on the map activate in priority order and play advances to the next round. Players win by completing the objective, and lose when all players are defeated or at the end of the final round.
In between scenarios, players may cash in resources to purchase or craft various upgrades and skills. Additionally, before each subsequent scenario, players partake in Exploration. During Exploration, players spend their MP to explore a grid of cards representing Rook Islands, uncovering various loot as well as hazards and challenges to overcome. When players run out of health or MP, the Exploration ends successfully (for some reason), and play continues to the next scenario.
Game Experience:
Board games based on video games have come a long way in the past few decades, with some truly amazing experiences coming out in recent years. Unfortunately, Far Cry: Escape from Rook Islands is exactly the kind of cheap, cynical cash-grab you might expect from a company ten years ago: a barely functional set of rules with no apparent playtesting or development, wrapped up in a bow composed of difficult-to-understand rules.
The core scenario gameplay here is theoretically functional, even if nothing about it is new or interesting. Players move, fire weapons, pick up loot, then rinse and repeat until the end of the scenario. Unfortunately, the actual implementation of these rules feels so imbalanced as to be almost broken. Enemies move so much faster than players, and take so many turns to take out, that every turn feels like an absolute slog. Even when scenarios don’t feel impossible, they feel uninteresting. There’s no room for creativity and freedom within the myriad weapons, mods, items, and skills, and every turn boils down to the exact same procedure.
The Exploration minigame somehow feels even worse. Despite adding an entire page of rules, and requiring an entire sweep of the game table to set up after every scenario, these segments are almost completely devoid of tension, cooperation, or interesting decisions—effectively stretching a dice roll for resources into an excruciatingly boring 30 minutes. It even manages to destroy what little theme exists in the game. The map doesn’t persist from game to game, you start exploring from the exact same location every time, and a player dying is explicitly considered a “successful” exploration. So what exactly is happening?
It feels like a transparently cynical move to ape the buzzwords of the video game, without making any attempt to replicate the fun or feel of playing it, which, now that I think about it, applies to every other system as well. There are Insanity cards, Takedowns, crafting, ziplines, skill trees, and even that one crazy guy everyone remembers, but none of it is fun or meaningful. Every part of the video game is replicated here, but no thought or care was taken to make those parts enjoyable.
Of course, the package wouldn’t be complete without a deeply underwhelming production, which Far Cry delivers with gusto. The rules are terrible, there are no player references, and I encountered numerous typos across all the components—some were baffling but unimportant to gameplay, but others caused substantial harm to the game experience, making it harder to set up, learn, and understand what was supposed to be happening.
Final Thoughts:
Far Cry: Escape from Rook Islands is a bad game, and I’m not sure it was ever meant to be a good one. Instead, its sole purpose is to separate Far Cry fans from their money. The parts are technically all there, but they don’t fit together in a pleasant or coherent way, and the finished output is soulless and devoid of creativity. I won’t say there’s nothing of value in the box (the cardboard dice tower is kinda rad!), but I will say I did not enjoy any part of it (except maybe putting together that dice tower).
Final Score: 1 Star – A cynical, lazy board game, and an even more cynical and lazy Far Cry adaptation.
Hits:
• Anecdote factory is a decent (if under-developed) concept
• Cool dice tower?
Misses:
• Scenarios are boring at best, unbalanced at worst
• Exploration is entirely uninteresting
• Terrible, typo-riddled rules and components
• So many extra systems that add nothing but bloat
