We come back to the cheerful explosive realities of one of the Ubisoft tapeworms, it's not Black Dragon or any other Primal, because we have a number in the title, so don't expect any surprises. After Far Cry 5, I expected more of the same as the four and three but set in slightly different realities and that's exactly what I got.
In Far Cry 5, you will not look for major revolutionary changes or even rebuilding the basic mechanics like in Assasins Creed Origins, but it does not mean that nothing has changed here, because a lot has changed, a lot in details, but let's start with the plot. This sandbox shooter goes to American Montana and explores the subject of dangerous sects.
The very idea of a dangerous sect trying to take over the entire county. It is not completely absurd, for example in the 1980s in Oregon a sectarian Settlement was created, if someone is interested in the topic, there is a documentary series "Wi wild country" on Netflix.
Of course, such an armed takeover and cutting off from the rest a country of an entire county, as Far Cry 5 portrays, is impossible, but we must remember that this is a game, in which the player kills nearly 2,000 cultists, so on the needs of the game reality, the sect must resemble a specific one the size of an army. There are more such "organisms" here - for example, the fact that the outposts were taken over is occupied by the appearing person the resistance movement suddenly appears in the plot out of nowhere, but that it is a constant part of the latest installments of the Far Cry series, it had to appear. Despite the exaggerated and mutated needs of "gameplay" of the presentation, the subject is interesting and this is where the question arises whether the game is exploring it or is it just exploiting it.
In other words - is it doing something interesting with it? Well, let's take a look at the plot - without spoiling anything as much as possible, of course. The main evil is the allegedly charismatic Joseph Seed, and his real and foster siblings - John, Jacob, and Faith - are doing his subordinates. The main bad guys in this game are… serious. Joseph, John, Jacob, and Faith ... They ran out of biblical-sounding names, that they invented this Faith? … They are dark, disturbing, and surprisingly composed. For a moment I suspected Ubisoft had decided to write a serious and gloomy story. Of course, the sect itself is based on a lot of nonsense - for example, Faith takes over the minds of humans and animals with a completely fantastic hallucinogenic drug called Bliss - but it is still presented "seriously." And then we meet our allies - a pastor holding a gun in a hollowed-out Bible, known from previous installments of Hurk, a peasant with a rocket launcher or Boomer's dog, who retrieves guns from opponents. And he is persistent at the same time.
Soon our hero - the nameless and mute sheriff's deputy - is sent by some cook to obtain the testicles of copulating bulls for ... the annual testicle festival and this is the moment when the game finally sheds its mask of any seriousness. The narrative is built on a powerful contrast - a gloomy, dark sect versus characters straight from Redneck Rampage. But it works - just homelike boys and cheeks are fighting with a truly evil sect. Nevertheless, it is impossible to take this story seriously, many dialogues and monologues were written without panache, and the mute protagonist makes it difficult to engage in the presented story. Although I have to admit that I enjoyed the story more than the one in Far Cry 4, and one of the endings probably will not be liked by many players, but I liked it because it was very non-standard. I understand the arguments of the critics of this finale, but I prefer something like that to the cliché, and here at least it was avoided. But, as could be expected from Ubisoft, a story with a potential for a message does not fulfill this potential at all. The thing is completely safe and tries not to annoy any worldviews, and its jokes are quite conservative.
John is a bit like American TV preachers, but nothing comes of it. Faith tames his subjects with drugs, and Jacob is closer to the Big Boss conditioning his soldiers than one of the cult leaders, so they're typical game baddies. It even creates fun mini-stories - just this and that much. But this lack of message in such a large entertainment title does not surprise me and it does not bother me too much, because I do not necessarily expect a sandbox shooter to tell me about the condition of a human being in the modern world. Okay - let's move on to what is most important in Far Cry 5, which is the gameplay. The greatest sin of this title is its redundancy. This is a continuation of the triple and foursome fun project. The equation of enemy outposts with the ground is similar, regardless of whether it's the land on a tropical island, among the fictional mountains of Kyrat, or in Montana. So we will hunt wild animals again, destroy or silently cut down enemy outposts, blow up randomly encountered trucks and free those innocent from the hands of those who are just right dead in a moment. Again, we have a lot of quiet arcade shooting, well-prepared sneaking with binoculars marking enemies, all kinds of incapacitations, giving orders to allies, and a lot of exploring a huge map. Montana itself was reproduced perfectly. A huge space divided into three zones where we will find plains, valleys, and mountains, so we will fight in the fields, and on the water, and the peaks. It is impressive again how smoothly the Dunia engine, derived from CryEngine, handles it all. A novelty are allies drawn from Far Cry 2 who travel and fight with us - they can be both random guerrillas and 9 characters with certain characteristics - starting from a guy on an airplane or a grandmother in a helicopter, through a woman with a sniper rifle and a guy with a rocket launcher, and ending with a sneaking puma and a dog signifying nearby enemies, retrieving their guns and looting dead bodies ... It looks like a mongrel, but a bit of a graveyard hyena. Helicopters and planes are a nice addition. In deafly closed Montana, from which no one can get out because ... the sect has closed its borders. She closed them up to the very sky, it is impossible to fly over them.
Of course, helicopters behave in the same way as a helicopter flyer from Far Cry 4, which means that they rotate wherever we look and fly like a combination of an elevator and a train. Well, they're just like walking in the air. The physics of airplanes is also abstract because pluckers can take off from three meters of the runway and land on five. Full engine thrust and momentum in two seconds. This is part of the entire physics of vehicles, which has not changed a bit since the previous edition - it is still extremely artificial, cars bounce off each other like cars in an amusement park, but it is also not such a problem, because vehicles do not play here like that. a big role, such as in city sandboxes. However, I cannot say that nothing has changed here. In the ocean of similarities, there are a lot of small differences that make a big difference to the fun. Let's talk about them. The search and skinning animations are out. Now approach the corpse, hold down the button and move on. Groping bodies and cutting animals in the previous installment looked fun, but after several dozen hours of playing it got irritating. What's funny - the search order also appears here for killed animals. The furry ones are not skinned, they are subjected to ... Personal search, Mr. What do you have here with you? Illegal skin? We requisition! Climbing towers to “synchronize” also fell out of the game. We collect information about the location of outposts and other interesting locations by picking up some writings, reading notes, and talking to residents rescued from the clutches of the sect. A much more natural and non-invasive form of filling the map with markers. Although these inhabitants could have shorter monologues, because they rarely say anything interesting, and nothing will be marked on the map if we do not listen to them fully.
The minimap is gone, but I didn't miss it for a moment, because instead, we have a compass bar on the top that shows objects around the player. It's quite a sensible change, as too many titles in recent years have been playing staring more at the minimap than at the actual gameplay screen. The character development system has changed as well, and it's completely contractual. There are no experience points here anymore, and we don't have to hunt forty deer to make a bigger bag for throwing knives. Increasing the capacity of the hero and all skills went to one board, on which we unlock each item by paying for it with talent points. And these are gained by completing challenges or collecting newsletters about survival. These challenges are things like "kill 10 enemies with a pistol", "use a trained puma to kill 10 cultists" or "skin 3 bears". Each of them grants a certain number of Skill Points when performed and gives it only once. The system is cool in that it prompts the player to try out all the tools offered by the game. And there is also a bit of hunting there, but I did 90% of it by shooting randomly encountered animals, so it's much less absorbing than in the previous games. This system is meaningless from the point of view of the world… Here is my backpack… it got bigger! Because I burned that guy with a flamethrower! Magic! But from the gameplay side, it works fine. Just another example of ludonarational dissonance. It's fun to play, it makes no sense in terms of realism zero. Ah, and there are also newspapers about survival. We find them mainly in prepper caches, which are various shelters that the people of Montana built in the event of a cataclysm, prohibition, or another collapse of morals. Considering that these places are usually uninhabited, and there is a bloodthirsty sect around it, it must be admitted that it went well, the plan was made. But these hiding places are a pretty cool idea for collectibles because instead of the usual gathering, we have micro-puzzles. And we have to start the pump to pump out the water that flooded the shelter. And you have to find the key, following the footsteps of the owner of the cache, killed in the forest by some beast.
It doesn't seem like a big deal, but it makes cleaning points on the map much more fun. Unfortunately, the game also has a lot of traditional gatherings in the form of some trading cards or other lighters from Vietnam, but fortunately, it is quite optional. It's also funny how the developers are aware of certain expectations of players - for example, that it will be possible to use a gliding suit from the beginning. Despite the freedom offered, the game suggests starting from John's flat region, where it is difficult to find rocks to jump there, so ... the developers added the ability to land from the air when using fast travel. Well, using fast travel, we can appear either at the destination point or high above it. This is a great example of the fact that the gameplay was polished here in terms of giving the player what the player can expect from such a game. Even if it is artificial. And although I was kidding about aggressive turkeys at the beginning of the material, the wild animals in Far Cry 5 seem weakened. Throughout the game, I was not bitten by any wolverine and not eaten by a bear. It seems that they do not so much deal less damage as they are a bit slower and do not reach the player like Usain Bolt infected with rabies. In this situation, you can easily sit on the lakeshore and take advantage of a new, quite pleasant fishing mini-game, relaxing at the same time. Quiet, clean water and fish.
Only not, because cultists are everywhere! They're fucking with planes, cars, and bushes. And they killed me. On fish. Far Cry 5 seems to have a phobia that the player, left alone for a moment, will start to get bored. That's why sectarian wet boys spawn more densely than zerglings, scour the skies in planes, roam the woods, and run like bruises on the Montana roads back and forth. And the more main and side missions in a given region we complete, increasing the irritation bar of John, Faith, or Jacob, the more sectarian rabies increases. And it can be tiring more than the charge of wolverines riding bears from Far Cry 4, and it often makes it difficult to sneak into outposts, because, for example, during quiet approaches, a pilot of some plane suddenly notices us and begins to infuse us from the onboard cams. On the other hand, when we clear a region, the game goes to the extreme, and suddenly almost no opponents spawn in it, so it gets a bit boring. Especially after going through the entire campaign. In addition, a rather peculiar idea is that the main storyline invades the player like Ezio's assassin from the dark alley. You play calmly, you complete quests that fill the story progress bar and suddenly it reaches one of the three points on the boss's annoyance thermometer. And the boss suddenly sends you a squad that overwhelms you with a drug cloud or some other damn thing that will automatically make you dizzy and take you to the next story cutscene and mission. This is not a tragedy, but if you had your plan and were aiming for something on the map, such a sudden cutting of the plot into the gameplay can be irritating. And it's a little funny that in the course of the game the hero is caught 9 times by sectarians, who turn out to be hellishly ineffective in finishing their worst tormentor - even when he is unconscious in their hands. I said you can't take this plot seriously, right?
And here's almost all of Far Cry 5. Some people might have expected Ubisoft to rebuild the core of the game as it was done with Assassin's Creed Origins, but with the Assassin's Chalk, there was such a problem that over the years the formula of third-person action boys has changed a lot - the timing of automatic aiming and based combat. on the reactive button, the press has passed. It needed to be refreshed. Meanwhile, first-person shooters haven't changed much, and Far Cry's formula hasn't aged. Therefore, the new version remains secondary, but it did not really need to be rebuilt, only sanded, and this was partially done. The five will certainly not impress like Far Cry 3, because it is not as fresh, but it is better in almost every way. You can find some strange design decisions here, a handful of rather harmless bugs mainly related to object physics, there are still annoying platform elements when we go to the mountains, and, unfortunately, microtransactions loom somewhere in the background.
Their presence is irritating, but fortunately, Ubisoft cannot or does not want to implement them in an intrusive form. You can buy some silver for real money here to buy the best weapons and nicer clothes for your character, but you can also buy it quite easily with money earned in the game, and these prestigious guns are not much better than those received at the beginning of the game. A quick method of getting cash here is hunting animals, and if you unlock a special skill, you will collect two skins from each animal. Killing beasts with a bow also doubles the skins obtained. In other words ... Aziz, who is he who peels four skins from one bear? A skilled hunter is maybe ... a tax collector? As in the previous installment, the game can be played with two people in the online co-op mode, but unlike Far Cry 4, where you could only participate in side missions, you can also complete story missions here, so you can be two go through most of the game, except for the prologue. However, during such a game, progress regarding liberated outposts and completed missions are saved only for the host player - the other player retains only the equipment and character development obtained in the course of co-op play. The limitation is understandable because, with such an open formula of the game, each player will have a different state of clearing the map and something must be imposed, but it is worth being aware that playing the whole game together so that both players can complete it would require playing it together twice.
Several viewers asked me on streams to compare it to Ghost Recon: Wildlands and my opinion are that while Wildlands is a game that should be played in co-op and only from poverty you can also play it yourself, Far Cry 5 is rather, a game to be played alone, in which you can also have a good time in pairs from time to time. The last thing to talk about is Far Cry Arcade, which is a combination of a level editor and a platform for publishing and sharing maps created by players.
What's funny, Ubisoft advertises it as if it was something new, and such editors are in the series from the very beginning. However, the fact is that this time the thing has been expanded, because in addition to the assets from several Far Cry games, we also have Assassin's Creed Black Flag and Unity objects, as well as Watch Dogs and you can build your levels from all of this. Maps can be played solitary and cooperative - consisting in deflecting an outpost, eliminating enemies, killing a specific target, or reaching a specific location. Of course, the published maps are of very different quality - from really interesting, through nice, but ugly, to nightmares in which someone was only playing with the editor and it is not known why he made his burying in the mud public. You can play with it, but be prepared for the variable quality and often a quite linear structure that turns out to be unpleasantly limiting after several dozen hours of open campaigns.
In addition, Far Cry Arcade is based on a competitive multiplayer of up to 12 players. This was missing in Far Cry 4, which had its idea for online gameplay, but you could not use levels from the editor in it. In the top five, you can, and on the one hand, it means diversity, and on the other hand, a crazy dispersion of the quality of these maps. Once I came across a small, tight location where the action resembled Call of Duty, another time some winter level made a sniper fair out of fun, and on another map, after catching a helicopter, I felt like the last pig when I mowed enemies running on the beach without giving them a chance for survival. Get on your knees worms for I am helicopter death, destroyer of beach worlds! All this multiplayer is insanely uneven - one time you will hit a nice map, and another time something that has a completely messed up balance and is practically unplayable. And this is probably one of the few games in which animals can appear on a competitive map. Madness, chaos, zero balance. Overall, you can play with it, but be aware that the experiences will be extremely varied. And here's the whole Far Cry 5 stuff. I got hooked - to the point that I did all the missions, which took me about 35 hours. Well, I did not collect lighters from Vietnam, because running from marker to marker and picking up items is a negation of good fun for me, but if someone likes such collecting, you can add a few more hours there.
You can extend the game by modifying the difficulty level, but I do not recommend just choosing high, because then the only thing that changes is the damage dealt by enemies and the gameplay becomes not so much more difficult, but more irritating. It is better to cut some facilities related to the interface - just for example seeing marked enemies through walls. It gets harder immediately and the game changes its face. The question of whether it is worth buying Far Cry 5 is really simple - if you liked the previous versions and you do not mind the redundancy, FC5 is the best version of what the three and four presented. However, if Far Cry has not convinced you so far - five will not change anything here. I had a great time with all the scenes. Well, maybe except for Far Cry 2, which is put on a pedestal today, because it had some great, immersive trinkets not present in the five, but not matching its fast pace. But apart from that, the two was an extremely tedious, contentless game, and to this day I have the impression that I assessed them too positively in my old review from years ago. In my opinion, Far Cry 5, despite being redundant, is today a better game than Far Cry 2 was in 2008.
ALL IMAGES ARE FROM https://www.trueachievements.com/game/Far-Cry-5/screenshots