A tall stone tower. A bale of hay below. The screech of an eagle. If you’ve been conditioned by years of playing Ubisoft games, seeing all of these at once means one thing: jump.
Yeah, not in Far Cry 6.
Far Cry 6, released last week for PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, is Ubisoft’s latest big-budget three-dimensional Excel sheet. Fundamentally, it plays the same as previous Far Cry games: From a first-person perspective, you explore a staggeringly large open world, often shooting people in your path, occasionally climbing structures to get a vantage point. At the top of one of those structures in the starting area, you’ll come across an unmistakable Assassin’s Creed reference.
Assassin’s Creed, of course, is Ubisoft’s other popular series of big-budget three-dimensional Excel sheets. Though the formula shifts between entries, overall, Assassin’s Creed games play the same: From a third-person perspective, you explore a staggeringly large open world, often stabbing people in your path, and more often climbing structures to get a vantage point. At the top of some of those, you can perform what’s called a “leap of faith”—actual name of the move—and do, like, two-thirds of a front flip into a bale of hay, that in some cases is hundreds of feet below. Hooray for physics. You’ll also hear an eagle, the official mascot of the assassins, do a little screech.
That’s been a common gameplay element for—oh no, my wrinkles and grays—a decade-and-a-half. So can you really blame me for trying to do a leap of faith? Unfortunately, it didn’t work out so well:
I’m by no means alone in this. Last week, one Reddit user shared a PSA, urging players to steer clear of their Assassin’s Creed instincts. (“It’s a trap,” they wrote.) Another posted a clip that is nearly identical to the one above, save for the fact that it goes down during the day, rather than at night. Both posts are flush with people saying they fell for the same trap, or riffing on names for what an achievement could be called. “Splat” is a good one. As are “Old Habits,” “Requiescat in Pace” (a refrain of Assassin’s Creed protagonist Ezio Auditore), and “Die Hard.” (“Fell For It” - Ed)
“It still is a leap of faith,” one Reddit user wrote. “But the faith was misplaced.”