Far Cry: Escape from Rook Islands Board Game Review

Overview

Far Cry: Escape from Rook Islands is based on Far Cry 3, a video game released back in 2012. Its cast of characters, many game mechanics, and even its thematic feel are pulled and remodeled for the board game adaption. You don’t need to be a fan of the Far Cry video game series to play Escape from Rook Islands, but there is a lot to appreciate if you love the series like I do.

You can find a video version of this review on YouTube.

Escape from Rook Islands is a 1 to 4 player co-op campaign game where you take on missions, battle pirates and wild animals, and explore the island in search of crafting materials, money, and experience.

The board game doesn’t simply use the Far Cry name as window dressing. It really does feel like the designers were actually fans of the video game and tried really hard to make Escape from Rook Islands capture all the great things about Far Cry 3. In many ways, they succeeded, what they didn’t succeed in, was making a good cohesive board game.

Escape from Rook Islands feels undercooked, unbalanced, loose, and even amateurish in ways you never want to see in a retail board game. There are moments where it shines, but those moments are always marred by a rough foundation that constantly reminds you that the ground upon which the game treads is barely holding together.

Gideon’s Bias	Far Cry: Escape from Rook Islands Information
Review Copy Used: Yes	Publisher: FunForge
Number of Plays: 20+	Designer: Unknown
Player Counts Played: 1 2 & 4	Player Count: 1-4
Fan of Genre: Yes	Genre: Co-op Dungeon Crawl/Hex Combat
Fan of Weight: No	Weight: Light to lower medium
Gaming Group’s Thoughts: Hated it	Price: $49.99

Additional Bias: I’m a big fan of the Far Cry Video Game series

Presentation

Visually speaking, Escape from Rook Islands looks incredible and captures the essence of the video game exceptionally well. If you know Far Cry, you would instantly know that this is a Far Cry board game the moment you gaze upon it.

The artwork is great and true to the video game. The standees are nice, the tokens look fantastic and the overall color palette is easy on the eyes while oozing with its tropical island theme. More than that, however, is just how cool some of the components are.

The player boards feature two spinners for tracking movement points and HP, as well as designating where certain items go. Holsters and Rucksacks are represented by these unique cardboard holders that you slot your weapons and items into.

Your sanity track is represented as a long blood-covered knife where you move a little piece along its divets. You even get a dice tower shaped like a Far Cry themed arcade machine. The components simply look really freaking cool. It’s a prime example of just how unique a game can look using just cardboard, and many of its design elements are incredibly clever.

You also get several decks of cards, a bunch of battle maps, and mission trackers. As well as a bunch of large enemy cards and HP trackers to go with them.

The rulebook is where things start to go wrong. Escape from Rook Islands is not a complicated game, but the rulebook makes for a maddening early experience. It’s riddled with spelling and grammar errors, it’s incredibly unclear about certain game elements, and worst of all, it calls its own components by the wrong name.

The rulebook had me searching for “Madness” cards when they are in fact called Insanity cards. It had me prepare an object deck when it meant the item deck, it had me prepare an accessory deck when it meant a weapon mod deck. The rule book is full of small, but confusing misrepresentations.

Finally, many of the weapons have miscolored dice symbols. The game uses a variety of dice, including yellow dice. However, on most weapon cards the yellow dice symbol is orange, and the actual orange dice symbol is a darker shade of orange. It leads to a great deal of confusion when playing the game.

I wish that was the end of it, but the more I played the game, the more issues I ran into. Mission 4, for example, wants you to set up more tiles than the game actually provides. The game is just riddled with quality control issues that make the entire experience feel unprofessional like you’re playing someone’s untested homebrew that you printed off. That is not the type of experience anyone should be having from professionally made retail board games.

What I Don’t Like About Escape from Rook Islands

The Early Missions

Escape from Rook Islands features 8 total missions if you include mission 0, the tutorial mission. I ended up playing most of the game solo, controlling all four characters. Why? Because the game chased off the other players after we failed the tutorial mission four times, decided to skip it, and then failed mission 1 four times.

To briefly describe the game, each mission takes place on a hexagonal map. Characters have a number of actions that are somewhat malleable. You can use your movement points to move, but jumping over an obstacle costs extra. You can attack with each weapon you have equipped, and weapons can take up one or both hands.

If you reload, you can’t attack that same turn. If you haven’t attacked yet, you can switch weapons. You can also use items, heal with bandages, or use your characters once per mission special power. If an enemy uses a ranged weapon on you, but the attack passes through cover adjacent to you, they have an extra chance to miss. Environmental elements, such as red barrels can be exploded, and then once the players are all done, all the enemies take a turn.

The tutorial missions equip you with some starter gear and talents, nothing carries over for the campaign, but it otherwise functions like a regular mission. Unfortunately, the mathematics don’t really add up. You start in the middle of the map surrounded by enemies, many of which can shoot you across the map.

Your starter weapons tend to do around 2 damage, most of them max out on an orange die which has a 50/50 chance of landing a hit. Some use a yellow die which has a 4/6 odds of landing a hit. Each player has 9 HP and three movement. You’re outnumbered, most of the enemies on the map have equal to or higher HP, equal to or higher movement, and better chances to hit. You can’t outrun them or outgun them, plus the guard dogs can even impair you so you can’t move.

I couldn’t beat it, even playing solo with four characters. I came close a couple of times, but the entire mission felt like you were either lucky or you weren’t. There is simply not enough tactical depth or options available to you to make up for the sheer mathematical disadvantage you have in that mission.

Since that mission was disconnected from the campaign, I moved on to the first mission, and it was somehow worse. Each character starts with a machete and a fist with no access to any other weapons, items, or talents. Its only saving grace is the fact that it’s not a slugfest, your objective is to escape. That, however, did not make the experience feel any better.

After several failures that felt neither fun nor fair, I did win. However, I got very lucky on a few dice rolls, and the enemies got very unlucky on a few dice rolls. The entire mission didn’t feel like a tactical game at all. It felt like a puzzle game where there was one correct way to win and every character had to make a specific set of moves to do it. I felt like the loot tokens and side objectives were just red herrings to distract from that fact.

The thing is, even if you found that preprogrammed set of moves, luck could still take you out anyway because of how much of the combat is dice-based.

Once mission 1 was behind me, and I moved onto the exploration phase. After that, things felt smoother and more enjoyable, as I was able to actually equip my characters properly. Yet, the stain of those two missions remained, as that’s two out of 8 missions that felt unbalanced, poorly tested, and completely awful to play.

The Lack of Variety

After clearing the initial hurdles in Escape from Rook Islands. I was met with the ability to use XP and money for weapons and talents, as well as the ability to craft holsters, potions, and rucksacks. While the customization is enjoyable, it’s here you’re introduced to another blemish that somewhat permeates the entire game. The lack of variety.

There aren’t a lot of weapons or items in the game, many of the more expensive weapons are statistically the same as cheaper weapons, with the exception that you can purchase a mod for them. While I made incremental improvements after each mission, my load-outs were largely set in stone after the first one.

The same is true of the enemies, there really aren’t all that many, and you end up fighting some of them them all campaign. A few only appear in a single mission, and it can make things feel repetitive, despite the relatively short campaign.

This makes the entire game feel somewhat incomplete, the good portions simply don’t have enough meat inside them. This is best demonstrated with the anecdote factory. Some missions have you set up a neat little Ancedote deck. At the start of each round, you draw a when card. Most of them say “All is quiet,” but when you finally pull the “It happens now” card, you pull a where card to see where on the map it happens, and then a what card, to see what actually happens.

That is a very cool concept, that can actually change up a mission. If a Leopard spawns for example, that could be a good thing. Wild animals and other enemies fight each other. The problem is, there are only 5 whole what cards. That’s it. Five different possible events. It feels like such an underutilized concept, and that tends to be true for every part of Escape from Rook Islands that actually works.

The Lack of Replay Value

There are only 8 missions in the game, and the campaign lacks any real replay value. Each mission will be staged the same exact way and while the anecdote factory can in theory change things up, it’s only used in a couple of missions. Besides, even if it was used in all of them, there are only 5 possible events that can be spawned from them. Combine that with the fact that the first two missions feel completely awful, and well, you don’t have a lot to work with.

It seems wasteful to develop an entire game and manufacture all those components for just 8 missions with no way to change things up. It makes all of the game’s previously mentioned blemishes stand out even more because you’re wading through a whole lot of jank to get a rather small return on that investment.

What I Like About Escape from Rook Islands

The Exploration Phase

Between missions, you play an exploration phase, and aside from mission objectives, it’s the main way you earn XP, money, and crafting materials. It definitely helps break up the pace between combat and is a nifty little mini-game that is easy to set up and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

You essentially move around by spending movement points, uncovering cards, and choosing whether or not to take on the tasks there. Some locations just give you stuff for finding them, but others require some dice rolls. Failing most tasks sends you back to basecamp, which makes you waste extra movement points to move to other locations.

The tasks themselves are just a simplified push-your-luck dice roll, but I did enjoy the fact that you could move more than one character to the same location to double your chances of beating the task. As simple as it was, it was enjoyable and I was always excited to uncover each card, and even more excited to see all the additional XP and money I earned along the way.

It also eased the pain of missing out on extra XP and Money from any side objectives I failed to do during each mission. The exploration phase always meant I had a second chance to get what I needed to unlock new weapons or talents.

The Way It Adapts The Video Game

Escape from Rook Islands didn’t just lift the characters and visuals from Far Cry, it makes a strong attempt at adapting the video games’ mechanics into board game mechanisms.

For example, you can attempt a takedown on enemies that are low on HP. Takedowns don’t use up your attack, and they instantly defeat any enemy if successful, but gives you two insanity tokens. The sanity system in general feels very Far Cry. The more you kill human enemies, the more sanity your characters lose, making them stronger in some ways, but has some downsides too.

I really enjoy that each character carries a limited number of weapons and can switch between them. I like the importance of taking cover, and how you use plants to brew potions and hides from animals to craft bags. In some missions, you can blow up red barrels, or use ziplines to kick enemies into acid. The boss fights, feel like video game-style boss fights, and I mean that as a compliment.

The talent system is also a clever adaption. In the video game, the main character would get tattoos that imbued him (or so he believed) with stronger abilities. These tattoos represented three skill trees, the spider, the shark, and the heron.

The board game follows the same style of skill tree with spider, shark, and heron talents. You can spend experience on these talents and lower-tier talents unlock higher-tier talents of the same tree.

The talents themselves are pretty interesting too, and alongside weapons, can help define a character role. I made Daisy into a medic, Jason into a shotgun-toting tank, and Liza into a long-range sniper. There is only one copy of each talent, so one character taking any given talent means no other character can have it. That makes the decision space more interesting and can help each character feel more unique.

It all feels very Far Cry, and feeling like Far Cry is the game’s greatest accomplishment.

Smooth Campaign Elements

Setting up each mission is fast and straightforward. You just push together two maps and populate them with a handful of tiles and enemies. Furthermore, actually running the enemies is super straightforward. You line up each enemy card and HP tracker and use colored cubes matching their color standees to track their hit points. On the enemy’s turn, they act in order of rank and follow a very easy-to-understand logic.

They usually just move toward and attack the closest target, although a few attack, and then try to find cover from their target. Either way, it’s very elegant, fast, and easy to understand.

Saving your campaign is as easy as putting your character and all their belongings in a baggy, and putting the team’s stash in a separate baggy. It’s nice, simple, clean, and most importantly, easy to set up again later.

What I’m Mixed On

The Core Battle System

Putting aside the jank, and poor mission balance. The core system is a relatively solid, but simple battle crawler. It’s a bit too simple, and that’s where the game tends to trip itself up.

You rarely have many tactical options at your disposal. Oftentimes your turns are just moving a space or two, taking a shot, and hoping your dice don’t hate you. The solo experience actually feels a bit better in that sense, because I was controlling four characters with unity. It meant I could set up combos, or takedowns, and use tactics that would feel clunky in a multiplayer game. When I say clunky, I mean it.

You see, Escape from Rook Islands wants players to play at the exact same time, not take turns. If you interrupt another player’s action or get interrupted, you’re supposed to just take those lumps and continue on. I think it’s an attempt to mitigate alpha gaming, which is a good idea in theory. But it’s implemented poorly.

It’s a mess at the table as people attempt to move around while yelling out who they are attacking with what weapon (because that’s what the rulebook says to do). It becomes a very jumbled mess, where people end up organically taking turns anyway. As each person wants to see what another person is going to do before committing. Since there is no structure to the simultaneous play system, and players have a fluid number of actions that differ from each other player, that seems to be the inevitable outcome.

At the same time, controlling a single character in a turn-based fashion feels limiting, and a little boring. Individual characters don’t have much to do by themselves.

The simplicity feels the worst in the early missions, where you don’t have the options, mathematical or tactical to deal with overwhelming enemy numbers that are all statistically stronger than you.

When it works, it feels good. Blowing up a barrel to take out two enemies is satisfying, as does taking cover causing an enemy to whiff a shot with the cover die that would have otherwise landed. But I’ll be honest, I think I only enjoyed the system because I played most of it solo, playing four characters. I’m not sure there would have been enough meat on its bones otherwise.

Verdict

Far Cry: Escape from Rook Islands is a game with some very cool ideas that does a great job of adapting elements from its source material. However, a good portion of its mechanisms missed the mark on both quality control and balance play testing. Additionally, other parts feel rushed and poorly implemented.

It’s a shame because under better circumstances it would be a great poster child to use against over-produced deluxefied games. It manages to do some cool things with cardboard and is reasonably priced. However, it’s a bad game. Furthermore, even if it wasn’t, even if it didn’t have all the errors, unclear text, misleading iconography, and awful balance. I still wouldn’t be able to recommend a shallow experience with just 8 missions.

I did enjoy parts of Escape from Rook Islands, but I did not enjoy it enough to make up for the jank, the type of jank that shouldn’t exist in the first place. Some of the issues the game shipped with are inexcusable.