Far Cry 5 Review

Where do you start with a game like Far Cry? I guess with what I found wrong with the previous games. My complaint about Far Cry 2, 3 and 4 has always been this. There is never enough enemies. Unless you decide to take a stealthy approach you can just gun down camps in less than 10 seconds. Add a co-op partner and there really isn’t enough to go around.

Story / Missions [ No Spoilers ]

The story has never been a strong point for Far Cry. It’s suppose to be about the big open world. I’m sure you expect ‘freedom’ to be a large part of the game. This is the least ‘free’ game in the series and it will doubly annoy you when playing co-op. 

The game CONSTANTLY pulls you into cutscenes and they aren’t just normal cutscenes either. You are teleported from your location to do mandatory things. Look…I drove out to this location because I wanted to EXPLORE it. Then the game pulls you away rather randomly to move the story forward.

In one region “you are being hunted” pops up as you complete missions. You will be driving or moving around and eventually fade to black where you will then do a time trial linear level against illusionary targets. If that doesn’t sound lame enough this happens multiple times and you have to do the EXACT same time travel event. Did they run out of level designers?

Enemies

So most enemies will die if you breath near them. Which really messes you up the first time you come across the ‘special’ enemies. Oh they are every bit as human looking as the weaklings but some can take 4 shotguns to the brain close range and be absolutely fine. It’s inconsistent and the game makes you fall into a false sense of assurance for what will down a foe.

But this is so stupid. If they wanted to make the game difficult. ADD MORE ENEMIES! Don’t create super-humans where they really don’t belong. The solution is so simple. At the very least add more enemies when co-op play is enabled.

Controls

Driving is a pain as the game constantly tries to ‘predict’ where you want to drive. It tries to ‘pull’ you on to the road. This is mainly for single player purposes as it allows the player to use their side arm to fire whilst driving. You won’t not notice how abhorrent this is. Let ME play the game. I should be in control of driving. No I do not want to turn left here I want to continue straight on!

And I’m not referring to the auto drive toggle. The auto drive toggle makes the vehicle drive towards your marked location. The game literally has an overriding control that steers your vehicle when near roads.

Next up, C is go down on the helicopter but it isn’t go down on the grapple hook. So prepare to plummet to your death because C disconnects your grapple line. R is reload but it’s also to hire mercenaries who walk in front of you. E is for everything else. Too many games are trying this context sensitivity stuff and it’s particularly annoying when you have a butt ton of buttons on a keyboard.

Events

You drive 100 meters and encounter 3 hostage rescue scenarios, a convoy to destroy and loot truck. By the way those are the ONLY random events you’ll see. Not only are the random events over saturated but they’re extremely repetitive.

Co-op

Yes you can campaign co-op. A massive improvement! It’s very basic co-operative experience but honestly that’s all you need for most games. We wanted Skyrim Co-op, not Skyrim MMO that played nothing like Elder Scrolls.

The HUGE oversight with co-op play is that the player who joins the host cannot unlock weapons. The host unlocks progress which is required for unlocking weapons. I sincerely HATE that they have a system where you need money to buy gear, but then have another requirement to unlock a weapon. Seriously. Why is money not good enough alone?

You can’t free roam co-op though as if you go too far away from the co-op partner you’ll be warned. Initially when I started co-op my partner kept falling through the world but after a complete reinstall the game started to work…kinda.

There’s some desync and a bunch of derendering. You see something not so far away just vanish. A vehicle you were chasing just disappears. An AI you were shooting stops existing. It’s not game breaking but more should be expected from such a big title.

Map

It’s not as big as Ghost Recon Wildlands which is weird because this game is basically Ghost Recon Wildlands in how it is laid out but as a first person shooter. It’s not a diverse map either featuring a grand total of one biome. If you are interested in this game or a co-op experience. Then I’d recommend just going for Ghost Recon Wildlands!

Unlocks!

The least exciting choices for any Far Cry game. There are 50 perks overall but nothing which characterises you within a role. You can get a larger ammo pack for a certain type of weapon and that’s it. Perks like animals dealing less damage to you, being able to open locked doors, AI partners returning faster after they are eliminated. There’s nothing in the perks that feels good to unlock. You know it’s like… Woopdedoo I can now repair vehicles. It gets as exciting as unlocking an extra soldier for single player so you can feel like you’re part of a 4 man squad. Wait a minute…that sounds like Ghost Recon Wildlands again!

Level Up!

I find the leveling up strange in this game. You gain points towards unlocking perks by completing challenges. Kill 10 people with a shotgun, Kill 10 people with a sniper, kill 5 people over 150 meters range, having AI squadies kill, skinning a certain type of animal, catching a certain amount of different types of fish and so on. If you want to level up you have to consult the book for things you haven’t done, or just do the main story missions.

I don’t think it’s a bad system for leveling up but when you tie it into rather boring perks there’s nothing to make you want to go out of your way to level up. You’re going to have to switch up what you do though to level up. 

Weapons

I can’t say this game has a good selection of weapons for a new Far Cry. It has a good selection of pistols but once you go to, for example, SMG’s you have a grand total of 5 to choose from. Actually 2 of those are “Ubisoft Club Exclusives” so you only have 3. For Stargate fans there is no P90. Oh and let’s not forget that if you havn’t unlocked the weapon then you can’t even pick the thing up if you find it in the world!

There are 7 rifles with an additional 4 prestige. Scratch that because one of the rifles and one of the prestige, the AK-M, is the same but with a different aesthetic appearance. A grand total of 4 sniper rifles which I think is the worst selection. The first sniper rifle is an assault rifle, then a 308 carbine, then suddenly we get the big anti material weapon followed by another big anti-material weapon. Come on. Where’s the iconic M24?

Let’s bring up the fact that you could pay full price for this game and still not have access to a lot of the weapons when there are so few weapons in the game. This is EA level stuff in what’s supposed to be a single player game. So in summary. The selection of weapons on offer is both low in choice with many weapons locked behind whatever the hell Ubisofts Club membership is. If this doesn’t stop then Far Cry 6 is going to be much worse.

Clothes

Yes! You can customise your character and here’s where the selection is actually pretty good. Plenty of silly and serious stuff you can get. I don’t feel Far Cry is a big multiplayer game so the only time anyone will see your gear is in co-op play. I think the clothing is a bit expensive using the in game currency but that might be to encourage players to buy silver bars with real money. A troubling trend…

Vehicles

Like weapons, you can buy vehicles at spawn stations. Buying a vehicle means you can keep spawning that vehicle at specific locations. There’s a few color options and there are more vehicles than weapons. Vehicles have always felt slow and basic in Far Cry 5 and with the new ‘auto control’ of vehicles it once again feels like Far Cry 5 is a cheap Chinese knock off of the previous games in the series.

What Far Cry, An Open World Game, Needs To Be!

It’s about Freedom. How you approach the game should be important. All Far Cry 5 does is let you approach locations on the map from an angle of your choosing.

Picture this. There is an outpost and this outpost has maybe 100 guys spread over it. There’s a general inside you want the player to kill. In that region there are ammo depots, fuel depots, barracks, training facilities, vehicle depots and we could think up any number of interesting facilities to dot around. In between all of those facilities are enemy patrols who will call for reinforcements from nearby bases if they can get the radio call off in time before the player kills them.

So you, the player, can decide what to hit first. Maybe you want to try and gear up and hit the weapons facilities first. Maybe this allows you to arm some rebels who can join you as a party. Maybe by tanking out their tank facility you will weaken the tanks at the main outpost and prevent new tanks for reinforcing the area. Maybe you would just stealth in the base and take out the general like a legend, but that might not be your approach.

Then when you take some of these facilities they will be attacked and recaptured giving you a reason to arm up some rebels to defend the area. If you like the sound of this then there’ an old game called Jagged Alliance : Back in Action to refer to. It’s not an FPS but it’s a fairly good basis for this kind of setup.

Far Cry really doesn’t provide any of this. Every outpost and base you attack looks and feels the same with the same enemies. While you can snipe or take them out stealthily we found that the monotony of doing them left us just running in and quickly gunning down the handful of generic enemies in less than a minute or two.

DLC

That ugly word but to draw upon what was just said. The DLC, and even the expansion, don’t take advantage of that full open world. It’s just more of the same with a different theme or significantly less. In the case of the Zombie DLC what you get is some missions. What I expected is map of Far Cry 5 but with some kind of zombie infestation.

You roam the land, there’s lots of zombies, there’s some missions about getting weapons and ammo or finding a safe place to make a base. Gathering supplies and all that usual zombie jazz. Why on earth are we focusing on ‘go from A to B’ type missions.

Summary

Worth the $7 I paid for it. But easily the worst Far Cry of the series but maybe the full co-operative experience redeems that a little. Nonetheless it is still Far Cry to the core and it offers the same kind of experience but in my personal opinion there are much better games I could have spent $7 on.

Everything about Far Cry screams “I want to be an open world game” but it’s been designed in a way that’s so linear. It’s designed in a way that rips you out of the free roaming. All the missions and even random events are repetitive, unchallenging, slow paced (So many unnecessary cutscenes!) and worst of all, unrewarding.

After about 2 hours of playing I felt like I had done everything except for the ‘specially crafted’ missions. I had nothing to aspire to. Nothing I wanted to unlock even among the things that required me to complete chunks of the game. I find it hard to imagine other people will also give the game any more attention.