Far Cry 5 Review

Far Cry 5 what a confused game it is. Apart of me wants to say FC5 is an improvement over 4 but with step forward the former does there's at least one or two steps backwards. Everything about the structure feels muddled. You have npcs and quests with an emphasis on coop like the Borderlands series but at the same time the game wants to tell a serious story with more scripted missions in a CoD campaign. It also wants you to destroy property and cause reckless abandon in the style of the Just Cause games do. There is also the stuff from previous Far Cries like outposts, skill trees and enemy outposts.

I did have fun playing FC5 but that was more so because it's an open world game where there are no loading screens and play for hours without interruption. It still can feel like frankenstein's monster when playing it in the moment.

The story is a great example of what I'm talking about it. Is it an excuse for you to over the top open world shennigans? You could get that impression since you can play the game for hours without interruption. One good thing about the new mission structure on paper is that it's less about actual missions to progress the story but how much damage you are doing to reduce influence of each of Joseph's captains. This meter can take hours to fill up however and when you reach a story milestone, the game will bizarrely have the player character get captured to escape for his life multiple times. You could be in a helicoptor and you will still get kidnapped when reaching a milestone. This can feel forced since the villains are cheating to get a leg up on the player while also interrupting the open world activities.

Then there is the story itself which is about a deputy and his group overthrowing a doomsday cult. The problem is it feels like the villains are cheating especially at the end where it turned out Joseph had a nuke the whole time and you indirectly caused Judgment Day? How did everything lead to this? I was just doing missions with wannabe Borderlands npcs for much of the game. Speaking of those npcs, they can drone on for so long before giving a mission that I just started to skip the dialogue after a point.

This then leads to the difficulty and it just adds more confusion. When you start up the game especially when you first enter any of the captain's regions, it's easy to get overwhelmed and decimated. The game drops the syringe system from past games for a generic regen health with med kits losing the self healing system that made the series different up until that point. The starting weapons feel weak especially the starting pistols and smg. Had to lower to easy since the health can take longer to kick in than many games using the system and enemies can tear through you easily. The more you play and getting more good weapons and especially when you unlock more guns for hire if you played single player like me the games gets much easier. Grace Armstrong and Boomer were my go toes basically Quiest and D-Dog from Metal Gear Solid 5. Remember what I said about this game feeling schizophrenic? It comes back again since during the most of the story missions where you are "captured" your guns for hire you've been using are taken away from you. The game gets much harder now and enemies can end you pretty fast especially heavy enemies with lots of health who use heavy weapons like LMGs You don't have your guns for hire to revive you during these missions. I want to lower to easy again during these parts so I can tank more hits, regen health can kick in faster and take more damage before dying when the medkit activation animation happens.

The perk system while interesting on paper since it encourages you to experiment just starts to become a hassle since this is a hitscan shooter and I just want to get the typical weapon archetypes like a sniper, shotgun and assault rifle eventually a semi automatic rifle since it covers both mid and close range and I don't need to grind out the perk system.

Outside of all that most of the game is spent trying to reach story milestones on each mission to get captured and then annoy the captains. The game did start to get monotonous due to how long it would take for a milestone to be reached. One thing that did certainly made the last few hours of the game super entertaining was buying an attack helicoptor and going to town on enemies with it from the sky.

Stealth is back and like every stealth system in this series from FC3 onwards, if you unlock fast crouch speed, it gets noticeably more easier to than it was when you didn't have since you move faster than enemy patrols do and before their AI awareness semi circles filll up. It's a shame not much has changed since these stealth mechanics were first introduced. There is no melee weapons now but they just make the takedown animation look slightly different.

Overall, I enjoyed FC5 and while this review can sound confused but that's how it feels when playing the game itself. It's as mad as the doomsday cult you are trying to stop