While previous Far Cry 6 DLCs may have spotlighted the series’ past villains, the latest expansion returns to familiar territory in a different way: by jumping the shark entirely. Putting you back in the shoes of Dani Rojas, Lost Between Worlds is about an alien entity called Fai crash-landing in Yara, creating a host of time rifts and portals to alternate dimensions. What ensues is a web of interconnected semi-roguelite levels that you are free to play in any order you choose. It’s a really fun way to end Dani’s story that I found myself happily going through for all six hours in a single day, even though it basically felt like a watered down version of the main game.
Similar to how Far Cry 3 brought us the neon Blood Dragon, Far Cry 4 gave us a fantasy valley of Yetis, and Far Cry 5 dropped us off on Mars, Lost Between Worlds isn’t afraid to cap Far Cry 6 by getting a little weird. Fai’s arrival has scattered five shards into alternate dimensions, and he needs your help to find these shards and reassemble his ship to leave the planet. Fortunately, the simple process of collecting shards should also prevent the end of the world – handy, right? The best way I found to have fun with Lost Between Worlds was to immediately give in to a suspension of disbelief. There’s no real explanation for an alien craft crashing into Yara and the sooner I realized it didn’t matter, the sooner I was having fun blasting the DLC’s colorful, crystalline enemies.
Collecting shards means venturing through portals into destabilized real-world twists and turns called rifts. Each rift feels like a cool, weird-world version of Yara and is essentially a standalone level with a unique quality that poses a new challenge. For example, one rift suffers from periodic lightning strikes, another features a spiral of doom slowly descending from the clouds, and another is totally black other than the pink glow of the precious shard.
As you venture into the Rifts, you can also collect Sparkling Fragments of “Glint”. When you die, you can spend Glint to revive at the start of that rift if you’ve had enough – otherwise death means you’ll have to start your entire run over at the start of the rift with Fai. It’s a welcome failsafe for anyone who doesn’t like a more traditional roguelike formula, but I didn’t die very often throughout Lost Between Worlds, and earned credits with a whopping 1,000 Glint saved.
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Once you reach the end of a rift, you must choose between two portals (red or blue, naturally) to advance further. Portals are simply gateways to your choice of two other random rifts, and the ones they lead to remain the same throughout the run. This provides a fun feeling 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 need to backtrack through a rift later. 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 each shard you collect, Fai grants you new gear to speed up your journey through the rift. For example, after bringing back the first shard, she will give you a C4-style bomb that can be used to open shortcuts on subsequent Rift visits. Other gadgets include a grappling hook to climb walls to skip sections and a key to open previously locked doors that usually contain loot. This is a great progression structure as it greatly reduces repetition so you don’t have to replay entire Rifts each time you visit.
Outside of that handful of permanent gear upgrades, any weapons and gadgets you’ve collected along the way will be lost every time 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 weapon and never switching. This, in turn, helps each rift remain entertaining even when you visit it for the second or third time.
Since all Rifts intersect and interconnect in different 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 flaw that forces you to swim underwater, floating you from bubble to bubble while trying not to drown. It was just boring and tedious, like most water levels. So I just avoided it on all my other shard collecting trips. I much prefer this style of premeditated variety over the procedural generation or random selection of flaws that Ubisoft might have opted for here, allowing me to play each scenario in whatever order I preferred.
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The other major twist introduced by Lost Between Worlds is “chromatic combat”. All enemies in this DLC are crystallized humanoid creatures that are either purely blue or purely red. To damage one, you must shoot them with their corresponding color changing your own bullet color on the fly. (Although, for some odd reason, the default keyboard shortcut on PC for changing color is ‘L’, which was unpleasantly annoying until I replaced it with my mouse’s thumb button.)
Unfortunately, this color-switching idea doesn’t add much since enemies always seem to spawn in the same places every time you visit a rift and swapping is as easy as a button press. Other than amplifying the otherworldly visuals on display, it’s mostly pointless. This is especially true given that there are only a handful of actual enemy types between your standard Assault Rifle users, snipers, melee rushers, and armored machine gunners. I would have preferred better encounter design or more creative enemy AI than adding an unnecessary layer of color change to combat.
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