For those not familiar with the basic Farcry recipe I'll give a summary: Farcry games are open world first-person shooters where you conquer enemy outposts to grow your territory, and by doing so get access to more advanced weapons. It is known for a few things:

1) environmental interaction: events change from day to night, things can be 'sploded, and plants can be set on fire to your advantage (you can for example sneak near an enemy outpost, light the grass on fire and watch it spread into the camp causing disarray and big ol' booms).

2) Vehicles and friends: cars, boats, airplanes, helicopter, many with bombs and machine guns attached, many pilotable by friends (calling in a bombing run or helicopter gunship that actually helps is just plain old fun).

3) Hunting and Gathering resources.

4) Best for last: villains. Farcry has some of the best villains you'll ever see in videogames, not necessarily because it's super well written but because Farcry does not fuck around when it comes to motion capture, voice-acting, and actor quality.

So Primal.

Primal is, at it's heart, a really cool idea done passably well and as a result sucks in a lot of ways. Like McDonalds trying to make a burrito, you appreciate that they are trying something new, they have the talent to pull it off, but ultimately they didn't quite get there and you're left wishing theyd stuck with the same old.

The good

The idea behind primal is wonderful. It is set in pre-history. You are (probably) human, running around just after the Ice-Age in a valley full of Wooly Mammoths, Neanderthals, and saber-toooth tigers. Hunting, or just surviving, at night is hard. You light your club on fire just to see what is happening. You hear wolves in the distance and can see only their glowing eyes as they hunt you, getting a fire started keeps you safe, waving your torch around scares animals off for now.

The graphics are gorgeous. It came out in 2016 and they really hold up.

Likewise the sound design is wonderful. The music really fits the tone and the entire game is subtitled because every single character speaks one of three languages all developed just for the game based off of proto-Indo European linguistics.

The bad

Remember how I said it was set in pre-history? You essentially have three weapons, a club, a spear, and a bow. You get upgrades and, in an attempt to spice things up, you get a few throwables that make zero sense in the setting.

Remember how I said Farcry had vehicles? None of those in pre-history, but you do get to ride a saber-tooth tiger (or wooly mammoth, or bear) later in the game? It's fun, but really fucks with the open-world idea.

You spend a lot of time running around on foot, and the combat gets boring fast.

The Ugly

Farcry generally made its name on villains. Story to a degree, but that kind of Bond-movie-esque 'not great story, but well delivered by top notch actors' kind of story. Primal completely flubs that. Just totally forgettable. It's a really bad look for a franchise that made its name on some of the most extreme villains delivered carefully with awesome acting and graphics.

Conclusion

So why do I say it doesn't have to be good to be good? It's fun for a while, and while it's fun it really impressed upon you what a cool idea a first person shooter set with some degree of realism in human pre-history could be. It's fun petting your saber-tooth tiger and then riding it through untouched forests while setting mammoths on fire with burning spears. It's fun being a mammoth and grabbing hunters with a tusk and tossing them over a cliff. It's cool that you never get to fully see at night, but that sometimes the moons out and you can see a little better (and sometimes it's not and the only reason your ass ain't eated is that you're sitting on top of a bear). It's fun when you just start out and paying attention to where the sun is in the sky can mean life or death.

It's a gorgeous world that feels ancient and scary. When the basic idea shines through it really shines through, there's just some stupid shit like having "a game" that needs to go with it.