Times change. Franchises change. That's cool. Far Cry games have always been more alike than they are different, trading large-scale paradigm shifts for minor systemic adjustments to the Far Cry© Formula ever since the series hit its mainstream stride with 2012's Far Cry 3. The problem with building successive sequels on the same mechanical root system is that inevitable, shit is going to get stale. The obvious solution to that is to think of new ingredients to pop into the recipe to keep the novelty at a nice high level, right? Well Far Cry 5 doesn't really do that. In fact, there is so little new content/things to experience in this game that I'm wondering if I'm missing something in a way I've never experienced with one of these games. From the narrative to the gameplay, everything about this game feels designed to be as bland and easily palatable as a McNugget.
...
...
...
...
Ok, got em? Here's what I have:
1. Large open world to explore freely, with as few loading screens as possible (preferably zero)
2. Largely focused on man-vs-man armed conflict that can be approached in various ways (shooting, fire, stealth, etc.)
3. A charismatic antagonist that drives the plot and gives the player some motivation to continue and/or big picture goal
Far Cry 5 certainly has # 1 in the bag. It's little slice of Montana is simultaneously aggressively full of content and sobering in its lack of visual variety (as someone who grew up in southern Michigan, it isn't exactly exotic but YMMV). Not only are there just... a lot of trees and farms to drive past, there aren't really any interesting things to find hidden in the world. The various collectibles from previous titles have been boiled down to a much leaner offering: you can find perk points and money in prepper stashes scattered around the game world (I've read these are ostensibly supposed to stand in for the radio towers of yesteryear), and there are bobbleheads and lighters to find, but they no longer serve any in-game purpose like, say, unlocking special weapons or revealing additional backstory on any of the characters. As far as I can tell, perk points and money are the only things you can get by exploring. No special guns, or outfits, or camo patterns, or lore, or anything. This is... alright for your first time through the game, I guess. This series has always rewarded/been about exploring so it's disappointing to see it augmented in some ways (having perk points out in the world in discoverable stashes like this is great) yet exsanguinated in others (no unlockable items, no additional backstory on anyone/the game world).
If you noticed me write "outfits" there and are wondering what I mean - yes, Far Cry 5 features several unlockable outfits for your character to purchase and wear. "Unlockable clothing options, in Far Cry? Wait, does that mean you can see your feet now??" Yes, Virginia. This is one of those features that just makes you wonder how much money and time was spent on it when those funds and hours could've spent on literally anything else in this game, especially considering how much of a token effort it seems to be. You can pick from a small grid of generic Pearl Jam fan attire as well as a couple of special outfits that are slowly being unlocked through live events. It's honestly so pointless that I'm surprised they bothered.
Look, I'm not against having more customizability. Even though it's totally trivial, I can admit that it's kind of fun to dress up my personal Far Cry Guy in certain threads, for a bit. My problem is that the fun does not last long as there are not many interesting decisions to be made when choosing between all of these clothes. Maybe if some of them had certain built-in perks, like a leather jacket that had a holster to allow you to draw your sidearm faster, or a fire-resistant jacket? Like most things in game development, they probably thought of that but couldn't make it work, or maybe they thought it would move the game closer to an RPG than they wanted, who knows. You know what? The clothes situation is fine, since it doesn't the gameplay at all. The problem is that this philosophy that prioritizes player customization over impact on gameplay is soaked into all of Far Cry 5, and the available arsenal of weapons the player gets to pick from is the clearest example of this. Far Cry has always been a series featuring a wide array of firearms, ranging from typical genre staples like assault rifles and shotguns all the way to bows and flare guns. Far Cry 3 and 4 shared quite a few weapons between them, which made sense considering the time frame the circumstances of their development, but Far Cry 5 is the first big, serious, next-gen numbered installment in the series since 2014, set in America as well - you might as well be walking in to a Cabela's right? Nah. There are five entirely new weapons, including models and animations. The rest are all either holdovers from previous games or strange reskins: 3 different pump action shotgun models with identical stats, animations and attachments. 4 clones of various rifles with different models, and 3 different MP5s that are each considered their own separate weapon in the store. What's really annoying and strange about this isn't all of these repeated assets, it's how they're presented to the player as discrete new guns for you to unlock. Yes, you will spend precious hours of your life unlocking 3 separate shotguns that all do the exact same thing, and you will have to pay for the privilege of using them and realizing that they are all the same, just like I did.
Maybe if all of these guns were unlocked from the start, then I can sort of see it. All of the clone weapons would still look bizarre, but I can understand the increased variety and customization angle that would've provided as it fits with the rest of the features. But... they aren't. You spend the whole game unlocking these boring cloned weapons to use on the same 5 enemy types from the last 3 Far Cry games. Even calling it "fighting" seems like a stretch, since you only ever lose a couple of seconds of progress if you kick the bucket and your inventory sticks with you anyway, so you never end up losing anything (Mark Brown talked about this in his video on the series). So the mechanic you end up interacting with the most ends up being the most restrictive to player freedom, which doesn't mesh well with the Resistance Meter mechanic that drives the whole game forward, as nearly everything you do in Far Cry 5 contributes to this meter, gradually filling it up towards the next story beat. Outposts, random roadside hostages, and story missions all give you "Resistance Points", and you unlock more weapons as you fill up the meter in each of the game's 3 regions. Bad guys stick around in a region even after you defeat the boss, so you aren't emptying the world of content too quickly (the world only really feels empty if you continue your save file after finishing the campaign as all of the random encounters no longer happen and enemies are only found in outposts), but there is something psychologically needling to me about the constant reminders. It's like a timer is constantly ticking down until the game is no longer fun.
Plot-wise, the cult and its leaders have shockingly few interesting things to say or do during their long, long monologues. Jacob Seed's brainwashing storyline was the only one I felt was interesting and that fit in with the whole cult scenario, but what really let me down was the big cult leader, Joseph Seed. Typically people complain that the interesting villains in Far Cry games don't get enough screen time, and while that tradition continues with Joseph Seed here, the bigger problem is that while Greg Bryk does everything he can to bring this guy to life, the writing just doesn't seem to have his back as there is barely any actual religious demagoguery going on, just vague references to how great things used to be and how the world is going to shit. John Seed is much less interesting than the characters you interact with in Fall's End like Pastor Jerome (how is he not a companion??) while Faith's scenes feel like they stretched out a minor character into a major one at the last minute.
Outside of the main storyline, the bare minimum setup of this situation doesn't really seem to make much sense either. You spend the whole game flying around in planes and helicopters and can buy them from shops all over the place, so what's stopping you from just flying away? No reason given. Why do I care? Because they took the time to explicitly acknowledge this kind of thing in the opening of the game when Joseph Seed orders a police dispatcher to not call in the National Guard and its revealed that she is actually a member of the cult... or he convinces her not too with his cult leader charisma powers, I honestly can't tell what I was supposed to think happened there. You also get vague hints on the car radios of Moscow getting nuked, US diplomats being recalled, and other happenings that ostensibly explain why no one cares what this cult is doing in rural Montana - the world really is collapsing out there. I'm fine with that, but why is that kind of worldbuilding only given via a car radio that many players (including myself) can and will miss entirely? I'm not trying to nit-pick this story to death because I hate it, I'm just surprised at how bland it is. Just off the top of my head, here are some interesting ideas to base story missions off:
- Helping defectors escape the cult (there's already a mission in the game that deals with this, but's its just a one-off. Maybe it could be set up like the Underground missions in Far Cry 2 where there are several missions you perform to help these defectors with getting out of the county or you run guns for them or something)
- Going undercover into the cult to sabotage something/get information/rescue someone
- Excavating one of the tunnels out of the county and leading a convoy of civilians out (would be a cool reversal of the usual convoy missions)
- Maybe the reason you can't fly out of the county is because the cult has some sort of anti-air weapons. Maybe a mission where you try to disable one so some civilians can get away?
- Helping some civilians with building a makeshift radio system to contact the outside world
- There don't seem to be any hospitals in the county, so maybe a mission to steal medical supplies from the cult? Or maybe there is some sort of black market trading going on between disgruntled members of both the cult and the resistance and you have to do something involving that.
Just spitballing here, but the story missions truly are so lame and forgettable that I'm wondering what happened with those. I'm assuming they had to design them all to be roughly the same in terms of difficulty because of the free-form nature of the player's progression, but I'm really not sure. It really is unfortunate that a game with a premise as potentially insane as this ended up with the narrative equivalent of a chicken McNugget, but I don't think it would be unfair to say that a lot more of the team's efforts are being directed at the gameplay side of things, and those efforts at least have borne some fruit.
It's smooth. Like, really really smooth. The way your character's movement is handled is just a bit faster than the previous games but it makes a world of difference, especially combined with the improved animations for basically of your actions. Honestly the movement is much more fluid that it makes me realize how much of the difficulty of previous games was due to just how clunky movement was handled, so that is definitely Far Cry 5 deserves props for. I also generally enjoy the environment of Hope County and the various little prepper dens and cool locations to discover, and think that the way missions are learned about by talking to people instead of just going to an icon on a map is a mostly good change. Like I said before, I just wish there was a bit more of a reward for exploring outside of the handful of unique vehicles.
The game also runs and looks pretty damn fantastic. I'm running it on a 970 with only 8GB of RAM and I'm getting a consistent 60 frames with only a few areas of chugging, so thanks to Ubi for correcting the record with their previous PC launches with a pretty well optimized game. I haven't gone back and played any of the older Far Cry games recently besides 2, so the level of fidelity with those isn't quite fresh in mind anymore, but the lighting and water effects are obviously a step up from those older titles. Character models for anyone who isn't one of the 6 main characters still look like they were ripped from an Xbox 360 and the draw distance and environment detail hasn't advanced as far as I would've thought, but it doesn't detract from the experience much aside from the bizarrely awful looking death clones for the vehicles and the way the game still evaporates any dead bodies you haven't looted at an outpost once you clear or if a certain threshold of enemies in a small area is reached (seriously... what year is it?).
When it comes to the multiplayer/community aspect, Ubisoft really seems to be giving a shit in that area with the greatly expanded Arcade mode that pulls in assets from several other Ubi games this time around as well as these "Live Event" group challenge things that happen every week. I appreciate the support but also have to wonder about how someone who misses out on these events is supposed to obtain the rewards? Because the rewards have tended to be actual unique weapons and items that seem to have been held back for these events, e.g. a new car or a returning weapon from the previous games. So this is basically on-disc content is being slowly unlocked one week at a time. I can't say I'm a huge fan, but I'm ok with it as long as it stays free, and maybe stringing things along will help to maintain a longer tail with the game's community, as Far Cry games have never been known to have strong, long-lasting multiplayer populations from 3 onward.
So Far Cry 5. If you like open world games or FPS games, you will probably like this game. If you've never played a Far Cry game before you will probably love this game, but if you've experienced these games in the past you know pretty much exactly what you are in for, so just be aware that very little has changed. The core gameplay is great, but the systems and narrative that surround it are so tame and inoffensive that the premise feels a bit wasted. I compared it to a chicken McNugget earlier and I keep coming back to that because this game really feels like McDonald's: everything in it was approved by a corporate committee, it's never very good, and it definitely isn't nutritious. But it is really consistent and its on the way home from work, so what the fuck.
