Game details Developer: Ubisoft Montreal and Toronto

Publisher: Ubisoft

Platform: Windows (reviewed), Xbox One, PS4

Release Date: March 27, 2018

ESRB Rating: M for Mature

Price: $60

Links: Steam | Official website Ubisoft Montreal and Toronto: Ubisoft: Windows (reviewed), Xbox One, PS4March 27, 2018M for Mature: $60

Far Cry 5 is a disappointment largely of Ubisoft’s own making. The publisher may well have set unrealistic expectations for the game’s story, which features a villainous cult that clearly draws from the current and complex state of the political far right in the US. After a marketing campaign that leans on evangelical and militia imagery , players could be forgiven for expecting some smart political statements (or at least biting satire) from the game. However you expected to feel about the game’s portrayal of gun culture, militias, and weaponized evangelism going in, though, you’ll probably come away let down by the game’s lack of follow-through on that promise.

That’s not to say that Far Cry 5 is all bad. Once I packed up my last shred of hope that the game had anything interesting to say (which happened about 30 minutes in), I was able to uncover some genuinely smart changes to the series’ increasingly stagnant gameplay formula.

The game is set in Hope County, Montana, and for the first time in a long time, you won’t need to reveal the lovely looking locale by scaling towers. Ubisoft has finally put away that stale gameplay structure, which once belched thunderclouds of mind-numbing objectives onto the map every time you got to the top of a lookout. The result is definitely an example of addition by subtraction.

In Far Cry 5, all but a few side and primary objectives crop up organically. On your mission to stop a vaguely menacing, vaguely Christian cult that’s taken over Hope County (the evocatively named “Project at Eden’s Gate”), you’ll run across hotspots of activity just by exploring. The biggest of these mimic the classic “outposts” that have shown up in the series since Far Cry 2. Once you clear out an outpost, it becomes a hub of non-player characters that can join your bloody quest—or simply chatter about other minor activities.

The freeform progression through the map doesn’t just occur at outposts, either. Say you catch some cultists carting citizens off to be brainwashed, or shake a grizzly off a lonely hiker. Your reward is most often a single new quest on the in-game map rather than the explosion of map icons found in many other Ubisoft games. This makes the map feel much more manageable, and the change reduced that usual Far Cry feeling that I was just checking objective boxes.

A fatiguing formula

Sadly, fatigue with the new formula does eventually set in once you start hitting up those slowly revealed points of interest. While Far Cry 5 finally stretches the series structurally (after the rehash of FC4 and the obvious filler that was Primal), it still doesn’t know how to fill in all the space it covers.

Said space is split into three zones, each ruled by a different lieutenant of the omnipresent doomsday cult, each with their own agenda. Despite those differences, you mostly perform the same handful of activities throughout all three regions without much stress or variation save for occasional reskinning. The evil self-help guru’s land is packed with silos full of drug-infused fertilizer that you need to shoot until they explode, for instance. Meanwhile, the organization’s seemingly psychic “little sister” has filled her territory with tiny, drug-filled chapels that you need to… shoot until they explode. What variety!

The homogeneity doesn’t end there. Ubisoft has further streamlined the Far Cry formula by removing crafted upgrades and experience points. Now, every new ability comes from “Perk Points” accrued by completing cookie cutter challenges: killing 20 enemies with SMGs, killing 20 enemies with shotguns, or killing 20 enemies with pistols, and so on.























As such, Far Cry’s checklist-y malaise has shifted from exploration to progression. I never felt like I was working towards making my mute meatball protagonist stronger by playing skillfully to earn headshot and stealth XP bonuses. Instead, I was just letting progression happen to me. From time to time, I’d just happen to see a pop-up saying I had more of whatever generic juice let me unlock a wingsuit or grappling hook for no narrative reason whatsoever.

Surprising stashes

The one upside to this system is that Perk Points can be acquired from Far Cry 5’s “Prepper Stashes.” These micro-dungeons are by far the game’s standout addition and shake up gunplay that hasn’t changed since Far Cry 2 with some much-needed puzzle-platforming.

Longtime series fans might recognize some of the stashes’ gameplay ideas as being borrowed from Far Cry 3 and 4’s now-removed towers. But without that rigid architecture defining what they can and can’t be, Ubisoft was free to go to town with all manner of spatial puzzles. One very quick stash, for example, simply required me to snipe a keypad through a window across a lake. Another held a series of grappling hook swings over a boiling underground lake. One other had me scale the inside of a tower while maneuvering around hives of angry bees.

It’s almost disappointing that every stash terminates with a fat stack of cash and a handful of Perk Points. It’s a reminder that these wonderful diversions are in service of the rest of the game’s unremarkable whole—some very occasional hits among a whole lot of misses.

The list of gameplay misses includes the aerial combat: sluggish, simplistic dogfights in propeller planes. Disappointments also include stunt driving challenges in unwieldy cars you can barely see from in the game’s enclosed first-person view.

I still get a low-level hum of enjoyment from clearing outposts, but these feel so much more easily surmountable than they did in past games. Maybe it’s the fact that Far Cry 5 has automatically regenerating health, removing the disgusting urgency of pulling bullets out of my avatar’s arm to heal. Maybe it’s just that I’ve been at this for three games now (four, if you count Primal) with nearly identical weapons and tools at my disposal. Maybe it’s just my imagination. Whatever it is, that sense of satisfaction has definitely been diminished.