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Farlight 84 felt like I downloaded Apex Legends Mobile, but it was third person, very simplified, and honestly, not all that good. Here's our review of Farlight 84, a look at its gameplay and story.
This review will cover Farlight 84's gameplay and story. The game first came out back on April 23, 2023, on Android, iOS, and PC. Although it has been out for quite a while, its popularity has been slowly going up until its peak at the start of June. It has since then maintained this popularity to an extent. With the increase of players playing the game, it's only fitting to ask: Is it any good? Let's answer that question in this review of Farlight 84, its gameplay, and its story.
Farlight 84 Review
Farlight 84 Background
This game is a battle royale game, with ten squads of four competing to be the last team standing. It has all of the quintessential battle royale mechanics: Dropping into an area empty-handed, finding weapons, and taking down enemies. It also has the Apex Legends mechanic of the characters having special abilities to help them in fights. Additionally, players have a jetpack that they can use to propel themselves either vertically or horizontally. As always, there is a ring that closes in on a specific area, making the map smaller as time passes. If you've played battle royale games before, you already know how half of this works. There are, however, some key differences.
Farlight 84 Gameplay
One of the first things that caught my attention with Farlight 84 is its respawn mechanic. Normally, in battle royale games, death is very punishing. However, it is not the end. In Apex Legends, players can revive dead teammates granted they get their Respawn Beacon. In Warzone, players could win in the Gulag to fly in, or they can opt to use the Buy Back function. Farlight, however, does things a little differently. During the early parts of the match, players could just infinitely respawn. This made death less consequential in the early parts of the game, as players could just jump back in. Of course, eventually, respawns become unavailable. Reviving teammates was still possible, but it wasn't as fast as just pressing a button and flying back in.
Another gameplay feature that caught my attention was the driveable vehicles. There is a wide variety of vehicles players can ride, ranging from cars to robots. Players can use these vehicles to quickly go from one place to another. However, some vehicles have another function. Most, if not all of the vehicles, have weapons attached to them. These include rocket launchers, machine guns, and more. This is also an easy way to deal some damage to enemies, although not everyone really takes advantage of this.
The final interesting game feature that I found was how they implemented shield and weapon rarity. Scattered around the game are Shield EXP, or something like that. Instead of having to deal damage like in Apex Legends, players just have to pick up enough EXP to power up their Shields. As for weapons, the rarity, and in turn stats, of a weapon improves as the match progresses. That means by the end of the round, everyone will have weapons with roughly the same level of stats. This makes things easier, and more streamlined.
All of these make it easy to get into Farlight 84. Just play a few games, and you've basically learned everything there is to know about it. It's very simplified, and although that may be a good thing for some, it's one of this game's many weaknesses and problems. Let's go through them.
It's not a bad idea, per se, to simplify a game. The problem is when it offers nothing past that. None of my matches in the game stood out to me. All of them felt the same. Granted, some people might say that that's par for the course for Battle Royale games. After all, your gameplay loop has you starting from scratch every time, dropping into the map, winning or losing, and on and on. The problem is that the game's simplicity makes it so that the games quickly become, for lack of a better word, boring. There's nothing in this game that really draws me in. When I played PUBG, or Apex Legends, there were a lot of memorable moments, be it from the insane gunfights in PUBG, or the proper usage of Abilities and Ultimates in Apex Legends, there was always something that spiced up the games.
Since we're on that topic, let's talk about the game's abilities. Let me preface this by saying that with the sheer amount of games available in the market, it's not really feasible to have a totally original character, set of abilities, and more. However, this game somehow was able to, for lack of a better word, copy, a lot of Apex Legend's characters. Take Watchman, for instant. His ability allows him to place down a crouch-cover wall that has a full-cover shield which lets shots go out, but not in. That's Rampart's Tactical Ability from Apex. Momoi, on the other hand, has an Ultimate that lets her call in an Airdrop. Lifeline's Care Package does the exact same thing.
Speaking of Lifeline, Farlight 84 has Ceanna, who looks very much like Lifeline, from the hairstyle to her clothing, and even the small robot following her around. Heck, Ceanna even places down the small robot that can heal her teammates within range. She is basically Lifeline. There's Syfer, who looks quite a bit like Wattson, Yong, who has wings and is mobile like Valkyrie, and Sunil, who looks like Fuse, down to the robot arm. These are just some of the examples I can quote about the similar characters between the two.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't take inspiration from other games, or the works of other people. However, when around half or so of your roster looks like that of another game's, both in terms of abilities and appearances, that's when things get questionable. When I said that this game looked like a very simplified Apex Legends, this is what I meant. Playing this game just feels like I played a dumbed-down version of Apex that was third-person, had almost the same roster of characters, and was not all that fun to play.
Farlight 84 Story
As a battle royale game, it would have been expected if they didn't really add a story to this game. However, this game does have one. Or at least, each of the individual characters does. Playing a particular character a lot unlocks small bits of lore about them. These range from letters written about, to, or from them, short story snippets, and more. This encourages players to play specific characters for long periods of time to unlock pieces of lore about them. It's a nice feature, if only it wasn't so empty.
The extra bits of flavor text you get from playing a character a lot in these types of games don't really amount to much. It's not like people are wondering about the whole life story of Captain, and why he has a water gun as his ultimate. There's just no incentive to even try to learn about the characters. To be honest, the additional story tidbits felt like an afterthought. If the developers removed the story and lore part of the game, I doubt anyone would even notice that it was gone.
Farlight 84 Summary
I cannot fully recommend Farlight 84. Although it was fun the first few matches, it quickly lost my interest. From the very simplified gameplay to the blaring similarities to Apex Legends, it just felt like someone's attempt to cash in on those who can't play Apex Legends. If players could play Apex Legends, then it's better to just stick to that, instead of trying to look for something else that looks like a cheaper copy of it. If they can't, and they really want to play something on their phone, then just find some other game that isn't this. It's not really worth the space you install it in.
Score: 5/10
That's it for our review of Farlight 84, its gameplay, and its story. Check out our gaming news articles for the latest in gaming news.
