While Far Cry 6’s previous DLCs may have put past villains from the series into the spotlight, the latest expansion returns to familiar territory in a different way: by totally jumping the shark. Dropping you back in the shoes of Dani Rojas, Lost Between Worlds is all about an alien entity called Fai that crash-lands in Yara, creating a multitude of time rifts and portals to alternate dimensions. What ensues is a web of interconnected semi-roguelite levels that you’re free to playthrough in any order you want. It’s a genuinely fun way to bring an end to Dani’s story that I found myself happily plowing through all six hours of in a single day, even if it did essentially feel like a watered down version of the main game.
Similar to how Far Cry 3 brought us the neon-dripped Blood Dragon, Far Cry 4 gave us a fantastical valley of Yetis, and Far Cry 5 dropped us off on Mars, Lost Between Worlds isn’t afraid to cap off Far Cry 6 by getting a bit weird. Fai’s arrival scattered five shards into alternate dimensions, and it needs your help to find those shards and reassemble its ship to get off the planet. Thankfully, the mere process of shard collecting should save the world from ending as well – convenient, right? The best way I found to have fun with Lost Between Worlds was to just immediately give into a suspension of disbelief. There is no real explanation for an alien craft crashing onto Yara and the sooner I realized that didn’t matter, the sooner I was having fun blasting away at the DLC’s colorful, crystalline enemies.
What We Said About Far Cry 6
Far Cry 6 is some of the most fun I’ve had with this series in nearly a decade. Its cast delivers strong performances across an enjoyable story, even if it’s also a fairly predictable one that doesn’t always land the bigger swings it tries to take. And despite some faltering new inventory mechanics and a handful of bizarre design choices, its creative weaponry means taking down an outpost, ransacking a convoy, or even just taking a ride with a buddy has never felt better. – Jon Ryan, October 6, 2021
Score: 8
Read the full Far Cry 6 review
Collecting shards means venturing through portals into destabilized twists on the real world called rifts. Each rift looks like a cool, bizarro-world version of Yara and is essentially a self-contained level with a unique quality that poses a new challenge. For example, one rift suffers from periodic lightning strikes, another features a slowly descending spiral of doom from the clouds, and another is totally pitch black other than the pink glow of the precious shard.
While venturing through rifts you can also collect sparkling “Glint” fragments. When you die, you can spend Glint to revive at the start of that rift if you have enough – otherwise death means you’ll have to restart your entire run back at the beginning of the rift web with Fai. That’s a welcome failsafe for anybody not as into a more traditional roguelike formula, but I didn’t actually die very often throughout Lost Between Worlds, and rolled credits with a whopping 1,000 Glint saved up.
The smart progression structure dramatically reduces repetition.
Once you reach the end of a rift, you must pick between two portals (red or blue, naturally) to advance further. The portals are simply gateways to your choice of two other random rifts, and which ones they lead to stay the same for the whole run. That provides a fun sense of variety to mix things up the first time you go through a new portal, but also means you’ll know where it connects if you have to backtrack through a rift later on. Your map even shows you which portal connects to which rift once it’s unlocked, so you don’t have to guess once you’ve visited each rift at least once.
After every shard you collect, Fai grants you a new piece of gear to speed your rift travel along. For example, after you bring back the first shard, she will give you a C4-style bomb that can be used to open up shortcuts on subsequent rift visits. Other gadgets include a grappling hook for scaling walls to skip sections and a key for opening previously locked doors that usually contain loot. This is a great progression structure because it dramatically reduces repetition if you’re not required to play through entire rifts all over again every time you visit.
Outside of that handful of permanent gear upgrades, any weapons and gadgets you’ve collected along the way will be lost whenever you collect a shard or die trying. Since there are only a handful of weapons to find, I like this feature because it forces you to adapt to whatever is available rather than picking a favorite gun and never switching. In turn, that helps each rift remain entertaining even when you visit it for a second or third time.
Since all of the rifts criss-cross and interconnect in various ways, you don’t even have to visit the same rift more than once or twice if you don’t want to. For example, I absolutely hated the rift that requires you to swim around underwater, making you float from bubble to bubble while trying not to drown. It was plain annoying and tedious, like most water levels. So, I just avoided it on all of my other shard collection journeys. I vastly prefer this style of pre-meditated variety over the procedural generation or random rift selection that Ubisoft could have opted for here, letting me play each scenario in the order I preferred.
The new color-coded enemies don’t really add much to combat.
The other major twist Lost Between Worlds introduces is “chromatic combat.” All of the enemies in this DLC are crystallized humanoid creatures that are either purely blue or purely red – in order to damage one, you must shoot them with their matching color by changing your own bullet color on the fly. (Although, for some odd reason, the default keybinding on PC for switching colors is ‘L’, which was obnoxiously inconvenient until I swapped it to my mouse’s thumb button.)
Unfortunately, this color-changing idea doesn’t really add much since enemies seem to always spawn in the same places each time you visit a rift and swapping is as simple as a button press. Other than amplifying the other-worldly visuals on display, it’s mostly pointless. That’s especially true since there are only a handful of actual enemy types between your standard assault rifle users, snipers, melee rushers, and shielded machine gunners. I’d have preferred better encounter design or more creative enemy AI over adding a superfluous color-changing layer to combat.
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