If you’re looking for something to play this weekend but don’t want to spend any money on it, Far Cry 6 (opens in new tab)—the one with Giancarlo Esposito—is fully free to play until August 7.
“Far Cry 6 is a quintessential Far Cry game,” we said in our 75% review (opens in new tab): An evolution of the previous games (you can holster your weapons, for instance, so enemies don’t immediately go “Hey, that guy with the machine gun looks like trouble”) that maintains the same basic gameplay we know and love. You’ll drive all over the sunny island of Yara, shoot hundreds (maybe thousands) of people, blow lots of stuff up, make friends with people and dangerous animals, and eventually bring down the top banana, whose obvious wickedness is leavened by surface-level complexity and charisma.
That’s not meant to be dismissive. I haven’t played all the Far Cry games but I’ve very much enjoyed the ones I have. The mix of heavy weaponry and arcade-style driving in a reactive open world makes for a fantastic first-person sandbox, and I had a lot of fun just bombing around the backroads of Montana in Far Cry 5, assaulting gas stations and feed stores and causing as much random mayhem as possible. (The ending was great too.)
It is arguable that the people I killed were in fact victims long before I showed up—impressionable young minds caught up in the drug-fueled whirlwind of larger-than-life cult leaders—but hey, we don’t play Far Cry because we’re looking for nuance, am I right?
Anyway, Far Cry 6 is free to play until 12 pm PT/3 pm ET on August 7 on Uplay (opens in new tab) and the Epic Games Store (opens in new tab). If you dig it and want to keep playing, it’s also on sale for 60% off until August 8 on Epic and August 16 on Uplay, and of course any progress earned during the free weekend will carry over.
