by While Far Cry 6’s previous DLCs may have spotlighted previous villains from the series, the latest expansion returns to familiar territory in a different way: by skipping the shark entirely. Lost Between Worlds puts you back in the role of Dani Rojas and is all about an alien entity named Fai who crash-lands in Yara and creates a multitude of time rifts and portals to other dimensions. What follows is a web of interconnected semi-roguelite levels that you can play through in any order. It’s a really fun way to end Dani’s story, which I happily plowed through all six hours in a single day, even though it essentially felt like a watered-down version of the main game.
Much like Far Cry 3 gave us the neon-soaked blood dragon, Far Cry 4 gave us an awesome valley of yetis, and Far Cry 5 dropped us on Mars, Lost Between Worlds isn’t afraid to top Far Cry 6 and get a little weird. Fai’s arrival has scattered five shards to other dimensions and it needs your help to find these shards and reassemble its ship to leave the planet. Luckily, just collecting shards should also keep the world from falling – handy, right? The best way to have fun with Lost Between Worlds, in my opinion, was to just go incredulous right away. There is no real Explained an alien ship crashing into Yara, and the sooner I realized that didn’t matter, the more I enjoyed shooting at the DLC’s colorful, crystalline enemies.
Collecting shards means venturing into destabilized real-world twists and turns called Rifts through portals. Looking like a cool, bizarre world version of Yara, each rift is essentially a self-contained level with a unique quality that offers a new challenge. For example, one rift suffers from periodic lightning strikes, another depicts a slowly descending spiral of doom from the clouds, and another is entirely pitch black save for the pink glow of the precious shard.
As you venture through rifts, you can also collect sparkling “Glint” fragments. If you die, you can spend Glint to revive at the beginning of this rift when you have enough – otherwise dying means you have to restart your entire rewind at the beginning of the rift web with Fai. That’s a welcome resiliency for anyone not into a more traditional roguelike formula, but I haven’t died very often in Lost Between Worlds and have saved up a whopping 1,000 Glint.
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Once you reach the end of a rift, you’ll have to choose between two portals (red or blue, of course) to continue advancing. The portals are simply gateways to two other random rifts of your choice and the ones they lead to stay the same for the entire run. That provides a fun sense of variety for mixing things up when you first go through a new portal, but also means you know where it connects if you need to go back through a rift later on. Your map will even show you which portal is connected to which rift once it’s unlocked, so there’s no guesswork if you’ve visited each rift at least once.
After each shard you collect, Fai grants you a new piece of gear to speed up your journey through the rift. For example, after you bring back the first shard, she will give you a C4-style bomb that you can use to open shortcuts on later Rift visits. Other gadgets include a grappling hook for scaling walls to skip sections and a key for opening previously locked doors that usually contain loot. This is a great progression structure as it drastically cuts down on replays if you don’t have to replay entire rifts every visit.
Aside from that handful of permanent gear upgrades, any weapons and gadgets you’ve collected along the way will be lost if you collect a shard or die trying. Since there’s only a handful of weapons to find, I like this feature because it forces you to adapt to whatever’s available, rather than picking a favorite weapon and never switching. That, in turn, helps keep each rift entertaining, even if it’s your second or third visit.
Since all the rifts criss-cross and connect in various 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 Rift, which requires you to swim around underwater, causing you to float from bubble to bubble while trying not to drown. It was just annoying and boring, like most bubble levels. So in all my other shard collecting trips I just avoided it. I much prefer this style to the intentional variety of procedural generation or random rift selection that Ubisoft could have opted for here, allowing me to play each scenario in the order I prefer.
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The other big twist that Lost Between Worlds introduces is “chromatic combat”. All enemies in this DLC are crystalized humanoid creatures that are either pure blue or pure red – in order to damage one, you must shoot them with the appropriate color by changing your own projectile color on the fly. (Although for some reason the standard PC keybinding for switching colors is “L”, which was uncomfortably inconvenient until I swapped it out for my mouse’s thumb button.)
Unfortunately, this color-changing idea doesn’t really do much good, as enemies always seem to spawn in the same places every time you visit a rift, and switching is as easy as pressing a button. Aside from reinforcing the otherworldly images shown, it’s mostly pointless. This is especially true since there are only a handful of actual enemy types between your standard assault rifle users, snipers, melee fighters, and shielded machine gunners. I would have preferred better encounter design or more creative enemy AI to adding a superfluous color change layer in combat.
