Sometimes it's best to leave well enough alone, advice that's inherently contradictory to the nature of curiosity, but nevertheless advice Far Cry 5 paddles into our subconscious time and again, as you consciously rove about attempting to tear, shred, rip up and burn down a cult whose soul purpose is to free its followers from the corruption and malice of modern human society-by way of capturing and enslaving those who refuse to abide. No doubt, Far Cry 5 prods at your sense of moral codification; the powerful Joseph Seed and his flock put forward very convincing reasons for the mute player character to drop armaments and walk away. But alas you decide to follow instructions and start a brainless war because impinging on the beliefs of others is a wholesome alternative to pretentious ideals of hippie flowers, peace and love-and so killing is always the right answer in the end.
Far Cry 5 is ambitious in the way it constructs and layers the influential Seed family, collectively making them a formidable pact. Together, the family occupies and controls Hope County, Montana and its three main regions-The Herbane Valley, Holland Mountains and Whitetail Mountains- as part of the resistance, you need to liberate these regions to ultimately gain access to Joseph Seed.
Each region is controlled by one member of the family, John- who looks like Joseph, with a smart appearance, even if he's a tad overzealous, Jacob- who looks like a hardened and gnarled Conor McGregor, and Faith- a seductive spiritualist playing innocent with her gentle, inviting and kind exterior-making you feel guilty for bludgeoning everything she and the entire Seed family are looking to accomplish, but is nevertheless literally and figuratively intoxicated in a world called The Bliss-a heavenly haven for all the Seeds' victims-and thus she can make your sense of justice addled.
Far Cry 5 is ambitious in the way it constructs and layers the influential Seed family, collectively making them a formidable pact. Together, the family occupies and controls Hope County, Montana and its three main regions-The Herbane Valley, Holland Mountains and Whitetail Mountains- as part of the resistance, you need to liberate these regions to ultimately gain access to Joseph Seed.
Each region is controlled by one member of the family, John- who looks like Joseph, with a smart appearance, even if he's a tad overzealous, Jacob- who looks like a hardened and gnarled Conor McGregor, and Faith- a seductive spiritualist playing innocent with her gentle, inviting and kind exterior-making you feel guilty for bludgeoning everything she and the entire Seed family are looking to accomplish, but is nevertheless literally and figuratively intoxicated in a world called The Bliss-a heavenly haven for all the Seeds' victims-and thus she can make your sense of justice addled.
Of the four Seed family members, Faith is the most enigmatic and inscrutable, she's endearingly pleasant and as hopeful as a sun-kissed flowerbed, but it's hard not to question how she became so fixated on saving every trapped soul she can-but her ethereal personality coupled with the palatial lavishness of The Bliss juxtaposed with the resistance and war themes of Far Cry 5 leads you to believe something is a miss. By comparison the other Seed family members are far less interesting because their suaveness and masculinity aren't imaginatively fused in quite the same way as Faith's earthly resonance.
The gameplay groundwork of Far Cry 5 is laid similarly to that of Far Cry 3. Far Cry 5 welcomes you into its world uprising resistance, placing flexibility at the helm and augmenting your experience with a divine cache of weaponry at your disposal. If you want to take a sneaky approach, then a bespoke bow with a sight reticule will be sure to hush any lurking grunts, while an assortment of heavy assault rifles, flamethrowers an rocket launchers can make Rambo exploits a reality. Be sure to make the most of your binoculars too, as they can spot enemies for you, making your oncoming insurgence smooth and relatively hassle-free, but be careful you locate all your foes, otherwise you could be in for a nasty surprise when you're taken by surprise and end desperately fighting for your life as the alarms are raised and a deadly armada heads your way to pulverise you.
Taking to the skies is a quasi-new possibility in Far Cry 5. Yes, in Far Cry 4 you could ride an unimpressive dinky helicopter, but that was like riding an 8-year-olds remote controlled chopper, in Far Cry 5 you can gain access to real looking and sounding helicopters, as well as sea and airplanes. Getting in the cockpit of one of these flying vehicle variants is most impressive, as you can look around and admire the views from up high, but you can also relish in some mid-air dogfighting, which is very exhilarating and handled with great aplomb here.
Reclaiming Hope County is a herculean task, and you will find that throwing yourself into the fray is the best way to nibble away at the statuesque Seed empire. There are a plethora of ways you can go about liberating Hope County and it's all tied to the acquisition of Resistance Points. You can earn RP in a multitude of ways from saving hostages, destroying cultist property and killing cultist VIPs (essentially micro bosses), to taking back settlements and completing story and side missions. The system makes for a decent progress indicator but why should it matter how much progress we're making when we've a monolithic open world to explore? It could be argued that Ubisoft want gamers to complete the story rather than uncover its vast beautiful world-but then it turns out much of the extracurricular content in Far Cry 5 is deflating in its quaintness.
Far Cry 5 isn't short of inviting scenery contained within its splendid summery rural American setting. Sprawling vast fields of dusty terrain, towering peaks accompanying a menagerie of rocky mountains and hilltops, and a tranquil complement of peaceful lakes and verdant forests caresses your eyes and consumes you in a state of celestial embrace, much akin to the Seed's otherworldly nature. Taking Hope County in from the skies is panoramic and gorgeously populated with sights, including billowing black smoke from unliberated settlements as well as silos you would impulsively yearn to obliterate with helicopter-mounted rockets-but the serenity above the destruction-is what makes Far Cry 5 incredibly arresting.
The variety of engaging pastimes maintains the sense of tranquillity while adding in perilous adventure, with many to eke out and obsess over, keeping you busy as you sink the hours into Far Cry 5. You can relax and take up a spot of fishing, which works wonderfully as you throw the hook and gaze at sploshes in the water to signal a possible catch, then you frantically reel in your slithering fish by pulling the rod in the opposite direction to its movement, then once caught you can go and sell your catches to the general store for cash or hunt and tame wild animals including rare master breeds called Judges, who disappear in a voodoo puff of smoke, making them awkward to kill and unpredictable to shoot or strike with your preferred weapon. You can also participate in money scavenging endeavours to make you richer, usually by finding keys to access bunkers and basements to find wads of cash, a good thing to do alone or with a friend in co-op.
The gameplay groundwork of Far Cry 5 is laid similarly to that of Far Cry 3. Far Cry 5 welcomes you into its world uprising resistance, placing flexibility at the helm and augmenting your experience with a divine cache of weaponry at your disposal. If you want to take a sneaky approach, then a bespoke bow with a sight reticule will be sure to hush any lurking grunts, while an assortment of heavy assault rifles, flamethrowers an rocket launchers can make Rambo exploits a reality. Be sure to make the most of your binoculars too, as they can spot enemies for you, making your oncoming insurgence smooth and relatively hassle-free, but be careful you locate all your foes, otherwise you could be in for a nasty surprise when you're taken by surprise and end desperately fighting for your life as the alarms are raised and a deadly armada heads your way to pulverise you.
Taking to the skies is a quasi-new possibility in Far Cry 5. Yes, in Far Cry 4 you could ride an unimpressive dinky helicopter, but that was like riding an 8-year-olds remote controlled chopper, in Far Cry 5 you can gain access to real looking and sounding helicopters, as well as sea and airplanes. Getting in the cockpit of one of these flying vehicle variants is most impressive, as you can look around and admire the views from up high, but you can also relish in some mid-air dogfighting, which is very exhilarating and handled with great aplomb here.
Reclaiming Hope County is a herculean task, and you will find that throwing yourself into the fray is the best way to nibble away at the statuesque Seed empire. There are a plethora of ways you can go about liberating Hope County and it's all tied to the acquisition of Resistance Points. You can earn RP in a multitude of ways from saving hostages, destroying cultist property and killing cultist VIPs (essentially micro bosses), to taking back settlements and completing story and side missions. The system makes for a decent progress indicator but why should it matter how much progress we're making when we've a monolithic open world to explore? It could be argued that Ubisoft want gamers to complete the story rather than uncover its vast beautiful world-but then it turns out much of the extracurricular content in Far Cry 5 is deflating in its quaintness.
Far Cry 5 isn't short of inviting scenery contained within its splendid summery rural American setting. Sprawling vast fields of dusty terrain, towering peaks accompanying a menagerie of rocky mountains and hilltops, and a tranquil complement of peaceful lakes and verdant forests caresses your eyes and consumes you in a state of celestial embrace, much akin to the Seed's otherworldly nature. Taking Hope County in from the skies is panoramic and gorgeously populated with sights, including billowing black smoke from unliberated settlements as well as silos you would impulsively yearn to obliterate with helicopter-mounted rockets-but the serenity above the destruction-is what makes Far Cry 5 incredibly arresting.
The variety of engaging pastimes maintains the sense of tranquillity while adding in perilous adventure, with many to eke out and obsess over, keeping you busy as you sink the hours into Far Cry 5. You can relax and take up a spot of fishing, which works wonderfully as you throw the hook and gaze at sploshes in the water to signal a possible catch, then you frantically reel in your slithering fish by pulling the rod in the opposite direction to its movement, then once caught you can go and sell your catches to the general store for cash or hunt and tame wild animals including rare master breeds called Judges, who disappear in a voodoo puff of smoke, making them awkward to kill and unpredictable to shoot or strike with your preferred weapon. You can also participate in money scavenging endeavours to make you richer, usually by finding keys to access bunkers and basements to find wads of cash, a good thing to do alone or with a friend in co-op.
Outside of the myriad of casual pursuits, Far Cry 5 disappointingly dives into a “business as usual” routine when it comes to conquering Hope County that's fleetingly enjoyable, but so unoriginal and unsurprising it pervades and interrupts the otherwise captivating setting. Turning back the cultists gets really dull because if you happen to be a seasoned Far Cry player, you'll be swept up in the familiarity of taking back settlements by way of stealth or gung-ho action heavy antics, decimating and levelling property and following orders of the folk you come into contact with. Everything surrounding the potatoes of the Far Cry 5 experience has been done countless times before, with the only saving graces coming from some very memorable and impressively manufactured main and side missions, but none of the imagination has been spared to the act of reclamation.
The upgrade system hasn't evolved either, you just need to collect upgrade points by accomplishing a swarm of objectives like sniping from a specified distance, killing X, Y and Z a certain amount of times until you receive you reward. Perks include additional weapon slots, the ability to swim unhindered, have access to a parachute when jettisoning yourself from a plane or helicopter-it's the usual upgrade system with no refinements or differences-but you'll have little care for it when embarking on missions because many of them aren't necessary anyway.
As for the main story and side missions, Far Cry 5 really does its best to regain its footing and does successfully manage to be a riotous joy if you can overlook the juvenile as well as the banal behaviour of some of your resistance pals. One of the accomplishments Far Cry 5 has to its bonnet is seen in the way in which it laces its classics compiled soundtrack to the action-centred moments during missions. Careening through cultist vehicles while Heart's Barracuda blares out of the radio is one of the encapsulating highlights of the entire game, showing Far Cry 5 relishing in the moments it's created from time-to-time- and when they happen Far Cry 5 can be flat-out superb.
The frolics don't stop there, Far Cry 5 has a penchant for the bizarre and the profane too. When you're fending off undead-like cultists with a flamethrower or participating in a game where's you're drugged up and tasked with punching and kicking ghouls into pits-the hilarity and weirdness ratchets up exquisitely, reassuring you that Far Cry 5 can be capable of providing good times when it lets itself loosen up enough to be a videogame and not another bloated Ubisoft open-world title.
Then again, particular missions reinforce the redundant drag Far Cry 5 has a tendency of being all too often. Every time you successfully assassinate one of the Seed family, you're forced to infiltrate and eradicate underground bunkers. During these flights of tedium, you make an entrance by killing everything in sight, then continue to enter the bunkers, running down sets of staircases and opening huge metal doors en route to taking out more stragglers. Why are the staircases and metal doors so memorable? Because every bunker has them, and they're exactly the same in all of these post-boss bunkers. Usually there would be attempts at emotional pulling of heartstrings as well, when a close comrade has perished, but these moments mean absolutely nothing because the allies you're supposedly grieving with only want you to destroy more stuff-it's laughable and completely predictable.
When you look at Far Cry 5 in a broad perspective, the end result is a complete mishmash of triumphant successes and downtrodden failures. The massive open-world brims with life and ebullient content, it's sometimes easy to consider Far Cry 5 as a breathtaking and wondrous videogame about taking the fight to a maniacal cult. Unfortunately what's new in Far Cry 5 is too often veiled by an exhaustingly shattered design, one we've seen at least twice before with very little variation to the exercise of dismembering property and single-handedly liberating hotspots on the map. The Seed family and their operational occupation is all very sound, it's easy to get lost in their words and their hallucinatory sense of reality, which apart from the setting is the most refreshing aspect of Far Cry 5, those rollicking missions with accompanying soundtrack not withstanding. But the general feeling here is that Far Cry 5 is just another open-world game, another sprawling map with a checklist of collectibles and upgrades taped apathetically to it. As a forward-thinking game Far Cry 5 is an undisputed failure but as an Ubisoft game with all of their bells and whistles-Far Cry 5 is a serviceable and readily enjoyable experience.
The upgrade system hasn't evolved either, you just need to collect upgrade points by accomplishing a swarm of objectives like sniping from a specified distance, killing X, Y and Z a certain amount of times until you receive you reward. Perks include additional weapon slots, the ability to swim unhindered, have access to a parachute when jettisoning yourself from a plane or helicopter-it's the usual upgrade system with no refinements or differences-but you'll have little care for it when embarking on missions because many of them aren't necessary anyway.
As for the main story and side missions, Far Cry 5 really does its best to regain its footing and does successfully manage to be a riotous joy if you can overlook the juvenile as well as the banal behaviour of some of your resistance pals. One of the accomplishments Far Cry 5 has to its bonnet is seen in the way in which it laces its classics compiled soundtrack to the action-centred moments during missions. Careening through cultist vehicles while Heart's Barracuda blares out of the radio is one of the encapsulating highlights of the entire game, showing Far Cry 5 relishing in the moments it's created from time-to-time- and when they happen Far Cry 5 can be flat-out superb.
The frolics don't stop there, Far Cry 5 has a penchant for the bizarre and the profane too. When you're fending off undead-like cultists with a flamethrower or participating in a game where's you're drugged up and tasked with punching and kicking ghouls into pits-the hilarity and weirdness ratchets up exquisitely, reassuring you that Far Cry 5 can be capable of providing good times when it lets itself loosen up enough to be a videogame and not another bloated Ubisoft open-world title.
Then again, particular missions reinforce the redundant drag Far Cry 5 has a tendency of being all too often. Every time you successfully assassinate one of the Seed family, you're forced to infiltrate and eradicate underground bunkers. During these flights of tedium, you make an entrance by killing everything in sight, then continue to enter the bunkers, running down sets of staircases and opening huge metal doors en route to taking out more stragglers. Why are the staircases and metal doors so memorable? Because every bunker has them, and they're exactly the same in all of these post-boss bunkers. Usually there would be attempts at emotional pulling of heartstrings as well, when a close comrade has perished, but these moments mean absolutely nothing because the allies you're supposedly grieving with only want you to destroy more stuff-it's laughable and completely predictable.
When you look at Far Cry 5 in a broad perspective, the end result is a complete mishmash of triumphant successes and downtrodden failures. The massive open-world brims with life and ebullient content, it's sometimes easy to consider Far Cry 5 as a breathtaking and wondrous videogame about taking the fight to a maniacal cult. Unfortunately what's new in Far Cry 5 is too often veiled by an exhaustingly shattered design, one we've seen at least twice before with very little variation to the exercise of dismembering property and single-handedly liberating hotspots on the map. The Seed family and their operational occupation is all very sound, it's easy to get lost in their words and their hallucinatory sense of reality, which apart from the setting is the most refreshing aspect of Far Cry 5, those rollicking missions with accompanying soundtrack not withstanding. But the general feeling here is that Far Cry 5 is just another open-world game, another sprawling map with a checklist of collectibles and upgrades taped apathetically to it. As a forward-thinking game Far Cry 5 is an undisputed failure but as an Ubisoft game with all of their bells and whistles-Far Cry 5 is a serviceable and readily enjoyable experience.
STORY: 7/10
GAMEPLAY: 7/10
PRESENTATION: 8/10
LIFESPAN: 8/10
SCORE: 7/10
As excitingly entertaining as it is frustratingly familiar-Far Cry 5 will definitely please gamers who want a big open world and lots of ways to cause wholesale destruction, but fails to evolve a well-trodden formula. Crying out for something more.