Far Cry 5 (

2018

) ½

The difference between the critical anticipation and the critical reception of Far Cry 5 has got to be one of the most shocking instances of whiplash the industry has ever seen. Somewhere along the way, the chattering classes that write for gaming websites got it into their heads that the latest entry in the venerable FPS series would be a heavily political drama with its finger on the pulse of current American events. Moreover, they expected it to cater entirely to their own, mostly far left, biases. Waypoint's preview sets the general tone rather nicely, as it ignores everything about the game and instead opts to focus on the author's feelings about life in contemporary America. The article pays little heed towards anything relevant to the game and instead goes off on massive asides about Trump and Brexit, telling us nothing other than the writer should probably take a vacation from Twitter. Feminist Frequency was far more measured in their expectations merely hoping that the game would address white supremacy and wondering how effective it would be at that. White supremacy is held up by violence, so therefore it cannot be upended by violence because all violence must be white supremacy (basic logic is not FemFaq's strong suit). One has to wonder what Feminist Frequency thinks of the Haitian revolution. Other critics were more unhinged in their anticipation, but none more so than Geek.com which wrote “You murder a bunch of awful white people in Far Cry 5. I cheer so hard I don’t even notice how boring the new Assassin’s Creed is” about the preview for the game at E3. Personally, I didn't know there was such a shortage of games where you kill evil white people, especially given the fact that nazis are one of the most common groups of video game antagonists.

The game was eagerly anticipated, but when it released most critics found themselves deeply disappointed with the results. Far Cry 5 was not the hyper-politicized game that they were hoping for and instead it was a rather toothless AAA title from Ubisoft, famed purveyor of toothless AAA titles (who could have guessed?). Eurogamer was enraged that there were blacks and women among the ranks of the enemy soldiers, a rather odd sentiment for a publication so committed to the ideals of diversity. Other publications were careful not to contradict themselves to such an extent, and stuck by the assessment of Polygon that the game's unwillingness to be a brazen piece of propaganda caused it to “collapse into a meandering, defiantly inoffensive mess.” GamesRadar, seemingly alone among the mainstream publications, was satisfied with the game's handling of politics, though judging from their assessment I'm not sure they actually played it. They note that “The rallies of Nazis in Charlottesville, the bombastic speechifying of alt-right talking heads like Richard Spencer, and yes, even the various indignities of Trump himself, are all the resonant targets of the game” but I have no idea how they came to that conclusion. The bad guys in this game are a bunch of drugged-out Christian extremists who are constantly ranting about the imminent Armageddon. They are not white supremacists or German nationalists, or even overblown blowhards. These guys have more in common with Charlie Manson and Jim Jones than any of the figures GamesRadar mentions.

To a certain extent, I understand why game journalists were so disappointed with this game. For months on end, they had been eagerly anticipating a game that they expected to be a glorified murder simulator where they could sadistically annihilate all the MAGA hat-wearing hillbillies who had swept the dreaded Cheeto into office. It was plain from the early reporting on their game that they saw in it a chance to vent the frustration that had been brewing in their hearts since the 2016 presidential election. At the very least they expected the game to skew heavily towards their political biases and depict a modern America as a nightmarish hellscape ruled over by a charismatic dictator. Then when the game came out, it is not only not overtly political but it is the most shamelessly pro-redneck game that I've played in years. Every other major friendly NPC is a stereotypical redneck who loves their family, their country, and their firearms with a passion so naive its downright charming. This is a game where after capturing an enemy enclave a short cinematic plays that depicts the locals hoisting the American flag, lighting off fireworks, and cracking brews in celebration. It's a game where one mission is to liberate a custom big rig, use it to smash through roadblocks and honk the horn as you do so; that the song convoy doesn't play in the background while you do so seems to be grievous oversight. Hell, Far Cry 5 is so naively patriotic that there's one mission where you have to defend the graves of American soldiers from cultists looking to defile them. Far from killing hicks, the game delights in celebrating them and their values.

If you're like me, then all this is rather pleasant. Rednecks and hillbillies, like most people around the world, are decent enough folk once you understand their idiosyncrasies. Indeed, I'll confess a soft spot for exactly this sort of middle American hick, as I spent one of the happiest years of my life in rural Wisconsin. When I look back on that time and those people I knew there, I can't help but feel a twinge of nostalgia for the whole region. Among my peers, I seem to be alone in this feeling. The critics who were expecting a chance to kill digital Trump supporters have a radically different take on rural America. They are, generally speaking, either life-long urbanites or refugees from myriad salt-of-the-earth towns who have since settled in the big cities. When they think of the region they can only imagine scenes from Deliverance (1972) or conjure up memories of their unhappy childhoods. For them, being subjected to this positive depiction of middle America is odious. After all, they wanted to spend 20 or 30 hours slaughtering hicks and rednecks. Having to not only help them but be subjected to a positive interpretation of them and their culture was just too much. Hence the massive media blowback against a game that was at its core about as harmless as anything in the medium.

The mistake here was one of false expectations. The journalists that expected a mainstream AAA title to be a grotesque political screed that would alienate huge swaths of its audience to cater to a narrow demographic of mentally ill weirdos were delusional. One has to wonder if they understand either the development times needed to make games like Far Cry 5 or the amount of money they require. Indeed, expecting big-budget games like Far Cry 5 to take any risks at all (not just stupid ones like the journalists were hoping for but legitimate artistic risks as well) is a pretty damn foolish expectation in and of itself. I'm cynical enough that I'd think it foolish to expect anything interesting out of an Ubisoft sandbox series like Far Cry. They've been copy-pasting the plot, characters, and appeal of Far Cry 3 [2012] for the better part of a decade and I see no signs of them stopping anytime soon.

Since this is a soulless knock-off of Far Cry 3 [2012], you'll naturally be squaring off against a charismatic psycho who regularly delivers drawn-out monologues while staring directly at the player character. The charismatic psycho in question is one Joseph Seed, a cult leader who tells his (bafflingly large, seriously he must have recruited 9/10ths of the county to his cause) congregation that the end of the world is at hand. On the whole, I've got to admit that Ubisoft has succeeded in creating a more compelling villain with Joseph Seed than their previous success with Vas from Far Cry 3 [2012]. Vas, while cool as hell, never really seemed like the kind of lunatic you were apt to meet in real life. He was the kind of guy that turned up in Bond movies or comic books. It was nice to listen to him prattle on about this and that, but I was never unnerved by him because he never felt genuine. Joseph, on the other hand, is soft-spoken, calm, completely convinced that he's right about everything, and totally fucking mental. He's the sort of crazy person that exists in the real world; exactly the sort of crazy that you might encounter among the fanatical devotees to obscure religious sects and fringe political groups. He's absolutely terrifying and about as believable an antagonist as any in the whole series. What's more, given the game's ending which I won't spoil here, he has a point about the world and how it works.

Now, obviously, a man like Joseph is going to attract some heat from the feds, so the game opens with a few officers from the Hope County sheriff's office along with a US Marshall heading out to his compound to arrest him. Arresting the leader of a larger, well-armed cult is a good idea in general but I have to question the logic of sending in a small group of cops to apprehend him. It's kind of like sending in four guys with a warrant a couple of handguns to arrest Pablo Escobar in the mid-1980s. The absolute folly of this action should be apparent to anyone once you land in your helicopter at the main cult compound and see dozens of armed militiamen milling about. The only way that this small band of cops is walking out with Joseph Seed in tow is if he's already resigned himself to a symbolic sacrifice for mankind's sins. Despite his pretensions to Christ-like grace, I seriously doubt that this will happen. Naturally enough the whole operation goes tits up and you're left holding the bag as the cult makes moves to take over the entire county. This whole opening sequence is so bone-headed, that I have to admire Ubisoft for putting in an optional secret ending where you can just say “screw this” and walk away without even trying to arrest Joseph. This causes the game to end without even getting to the tutorial section. However, if you actually want to play the video game that you've bought, then you're going to have to try to arrest him and watch helplessly as everything falls apart around you.

At this point, the sensible thing would be to hightail it out of Hope County in the first car/helicopter you can get your hands on and call in the Montana National Guard or maybe the Marines to restore order. Seriously, Joseph has an army that must number in the thousands and there is little that a single deputy can be expected to do against such a force aside from retreat and come back with overwhelming reinforcements. Of course, this wouldn't make for much of a game (well at least not much of an FPS anyway, I suppose you could make a decent strategy game from that idea) so instead of calling for reinforcements, you'll be following the Far Cry tradition of waging a one-man (or lady as you can choose to play as a woman, not that it matters in the slightest) guerrilla war instead. This is all well and good, the tried-and-true formula of liberating outposts, destroying enemy assets, and completing side missions is as enjoyable as ever. I'm not a big fan of stealth games, so I appreciate one where I can start mowing down enemies with an LMG when I inevitably fuck up and get discovered. Despite the pleasures of the moment to moment gameplay, the central absurdity of the whole premise still hangs over the game. Montana may be a remote wasteland, but there are still interstates that run through it; throughout my playthrough, I kept wondering why doesn't the deputy just drive to the next county over and call for help? Why does nobody even suggest it as an idea until one of the game's endings?

Despite being mostly a knock-off of Far Cry 3 [2012], the series has plainly devolved in several key areas. In particular, the player character has become a gormless mute with much more in common with Half Life's Gordan Freeman than Far Cry 3's Jason Brody. Jason had an arch, however unconvincing if you chose the “good” ending where he leaves the island, where he went from hapless frat-bro to a zonked-out Rambo impersonator. It was a unique story, at least for the medium, about how noble intentions can be washed away by a thirst for bloody vengeance, and how a man pursuing heroism can fall into a pit of savage depravity. Jason loses himself in a sea of bloodshed and psychedelic drugs until he's no longer the man who began his quest. Vas may have gotten all the attention in the promotional material, but without a strong foil in Brody, the whole game would have been pointless. Here the player character has retreated entirely to the background, not even having a voice to speak in cut-scenes. As a result, not just the heroes but the villains as well start to feel hollow. Seed and his lieutenants just speak at the player character, but since the player character might as well be a slab of concrete they can only give speeches and pontificate. There is no character interaction whatsoever, and these scenes quickly become tedious. The exquisite facial animation and impassioned performances of the voice actors cannot save them from feeling empty.

Moreover, in order to talk to you so much, the cult has to constantly capture and release you like you're a fish that's one inch under the legal limit. If my character had some sort of purpose in the cult's plans or some sort of relationship to Joseph I could believe this, but as far as I can tell it's only done to give the bad guys more time to monologue. Seriously, by the time I got to the cult's last region I had a kill count numbering in the thousands. Stop trying to capture me alive you idiots. If you knock me unconscious and then don't slit my throat you're even bigger idiots than I thought. Moreover, when the cult decides to capture you, there is no way to prevent it from happening. Once in Jacob Seed's region, I was in a favorable position with plenty of ammo when his hunters came for me, so I just mowed down his goons as they turned up. The poor bastards never even got a shot off. Eventually, after I'd wasted four or five patrols the game just gave up and had me pass out so the story could proceed. It's a bit annoying and breaks the immersion. A better solution would be to have the cult back off momentarily and attack me later when I was in a worse position. Hell, they could have also gotten around it by just sending in a bigger squad of hunters, I doubt I'd be able to kill 20 or 30 cultists without them laying a hand on me, no matter how advantageous my position was.

The game's obsession with kidnapping you periodically is symptomatic of a larger flaw in the storytelling: The game never feels comfortable relinquishing control to the player which is a downright baffling problem for an open-world game to have. If you go and talk to an NPC the game will expect you to stand completely still waiting for them to finish speaking, rather than say scouting out the area around them and gathering supplies. If you move more than five feet from the NPC they'll let out an exasperated “Hey, I'm talking here!” and if you go back and speak to them again they will start off with a sarcastic “As I was saying.” Why do I have to mind my manners around the NPCs? Better question, why is it that during cut-scenes if I look away from the person talking, the camera will almost immediately refocus on them. I'm impressed with your facial animations Ubisoft, but there's no need to force me to look at them. These are minor grips but the game's death grip on what you can and cannot do gets very annoying in certain missions. In one memorable case, the game told me that I failed a mission because I drove out of the mission zone after I had completed all the objectives but before my NPC companion had finished talking. In another case, I had completed the mission objectives and tried to fast travel back to the quest giver only to be told that fast traveling would exit me out of the mission. So instead I had to walk the six hundred meter through the woods back to the same point I was trying to fast travel to.

The game's map is divided into three districts, each with a cult lieutenant ruling over it. You have John Seed, a sadistic bastard who produces glossy propaganda films for the cult, Faith Seed who makes a hallucinogenic drug called bliss that the cult is using to control its members, and Jacob Seed who brainwashes people with old Platters songs. Each region has a bunch of missions to complete, outposts to liberate, hostages to save, and cult properties to destroy. Completing objectives will eventually draw the attention of the cult, and invariably the local lieutenant will try to kidnap you. Rinse and repeat for all three districts then head back to the cult HQ for the big showdown with Joseph. The advantage of this system is that if there is a particular mission or task that the player hates, then they can skip it entirely and focus on more enjoyable pass times. There are, of course, a few story missions that you will be obliged to complete in each region, but these are kept to a minimum. Annoyingly, the three regions all feel like they are separate realms. There is not a single mission in the entire game that will start you on the edge of one region and have you cross over into another. The game acts like these are three islands separated by miles of open ocean, when in fact there is just a small river dividing them up.

The regions all look alike, save for a few superficial differences here and there (Faith's region, for instance, is dotted with fields of flowers) which strikes me as a missed opportunity. There are, after all, a wide variety of biomes in rural Montana from sunny meadows to frozen mountaintops to dense forests. Yet, even on the most desolate mountain peeks in this game, I never saw a trace of snow. If you dropped my character at a random point in the map I would have no idea where I was, or even what region I was in. The forest that covers the entire map is well-realized and pretty enough but it gets repetitive and stale after a while. Each region could have been given its own unique look and feel, which would have made the overall playing experience less tedious.

The enemy outposts are far better. Each has a unique appearance with some interesting features that can be exploited in combat. There are two real ways of approaching each outpost, with stealthy guile or just kicking down the front door and mowing down the chumps inside with a machine gun. However, since you can get a silenced machine gun there is not as much difference between the two approaches as you might think at first. Stealthily crouch-walking towards the base and picking off each guard as they start to spot you coming is a viable, and even overpowered method. Once you engage with the enemies there are a bunch of different approaches you can take, from picking them off one by one with a sniper rifle, to weaving in and out of buildings picking off choice targets with a shotgun. I especially liked laying out explosives near the front gate and triggering them once enemy reinforcements drove up in trucks and ATVs. Unfortunately, the enemy AI is really fucking dumb and if you're so inclined it's very easy to hole up in a corner somewhere and wait for the cultists to come looking for you one or two at a time, never getting suspicious when they see the literal pile of corpses growing in front of you. I avoided this for the most part because the combat is far more enjoyable if you are zipping around losing pursuers and doubling back to ambush them from behind. Still, it would be far better if the enemies weren't so stupid and would learn how to flush me out with grenades or Molotov cocktails or at least learned to team up and rush your position all at once. Indeed, in general, the enemy AI is worthless when it comes to coordinating their efforts.

Your player character won't be going it alone, in addition to the random militia and civilian NPCs you can also recruit nine specialist characters to help you out in combat. These characters run the gamete from team-killing fucktards, to totally worthless, to generally ok, to stupidly overpowered. Some like Hurk Jr and Sharky are just as likely to kill you as the enemy thanks to their impractical choice of weapons (a rocket launcher and a shotgun with incendiary rounds respectively). Others invariably die before they can do anything useful like Adelaide who pilots a Korean war era helicopter that gets shot down the moment it encounters an enemy aircraft. Others like Peaches the tame Cougar are so damn overpowered that you have to wonder why you're coming along for the ride at all. Indeed, the chief challenge of the specialists is finding one that is useful but not so OP that the game starts to play itself like you're a necromancer in Diablo 2 [2000]. Grace Armstrong and Jade Black are good choices since they tend to keep their distance from the enemy and take potshots with either a sniper rifle or a bow and arrow. Yet, as far as I'm concerned the only real choice for companion is Boomer the prize gun dog. Boomer is basically worthless in combat (he would kill maybe one cultist per encounter) but he provides helpful buffs to the player character by identifying all nearby enemies and fetching discarded weapons when your ammunition runs low. As an added bonus, he's a dog, so unlike the human specialists, he wouldn't constantly barrage me a bunch of lame jokes in an attempt to sound quirky. Add in the ability to pet him behind his ears and you have what is damn near the perfect companion for any scenario. The only downside was I couldn't get him to ride in the same car as me and stick his head out the window as we drive, as he preferred to run alongside the car. I guess he needs his exercise.

Player upgrades suffer from a similar issue in that some are way overpowered and others are completely worthless. Upgrades are unlocked by completing challenges, which is nice because it incentives the player to mix up combat a bit using guns that they might normally avoid and techniques that they would otherwise consider pointless. The problem is that the perks that can be unlocked with these are unbalanced to an absurd degree. You could waste a few perk points on being able to pick locks, as I did, only to discover that the ability works on almost no locked doors you're likely to encounter. You could spend more perk points to be able to disarm alarms faster, but I don't know why you would want to when a silenced gun can knock the alarm out of commission permanently without alerting any nearby guards. On the other side of the spectrum, if you sink your points into health upgrades and the enemies might as well be armed with nothing more than rude language for all the damage they can do to you. The game suffers a bit from its kitchen sink design focus. As a result, there are a mess of competing systems that struggle to synergize well. This is best illustrated by your secondary weapons, at any time your character has access to seven different kinds of thrown weapons (grenades, dynamite. pipe bombs, molotovs, throwing knives, proximity mines, and remote mines). It might be a good idea to limit me to just two, as I'd invariably forget about them in combat due to the sheer choice of options available to me. Moreover, some have no practical difference; do I really need both grenades and dynamite when they are both just thrown weapons that go boom? The game also includes a crafting system that is completely pointless, as I ran through the entire game hardly needing to craft anything at all. At times I even forgot the crafting system existed. In case you get bored with the actual game, the developers also included a fishing mini-game which is a mildly fun distraction but has nothing to do with anything aside from a very small number of missions that require a freshly caught fish to complete.

Likewise, the game's story and overall tone suffers from a similar lack of focus. One minute I'm teaming up with a redneck to get his customized Humvee back from a bunch of dastardly cultists, the next I'm listening to Joseph's earnest instance that mankind is on the brink of destruction and only he can save it. The cult is treated completely seriously whenever one of their leaders is on screen, but like a stock antagonist whenever you're on a side mission. Depending on where I am in the story the cult goes from The Damned 33rd in Spec-Ops: The Line [2012] to Cobra from GI Joe. You can't have it both ways! The problem at the heart of this tension is the fact that I don't see how an organization like Project Eden's Gate could have emerged in Hope County. The county is a nice enough place full of friendly neighborly people, mostly with families, who seem to be doing alright economically. Cults don't just spring into existence, but rather they form out of a response to an existing cultural or economic need. Hope County is not a spiritual vacuum like the San Francisco that birthed the People's Temple. Nor is it filled with runaways with nowhere else to call home like those that would under the sway of Charles Manson. The cult and the world that they live in simply don't make sense together.

The game is positively riddled with micro-transactions. Every vendor (and there are usually two or three at every outpost) has a link to the game's real-life currency store eager to sell you a premium currency that can be used for in-game items and special costumes. In case you miss them in-game, or if you're too damn lazy to even start the game, you can even access the micro-transaction shop from the main menu too. A great deal of effort has been made to ensure that these stores are everywhere, constantly tempting the player with promises of easy advancement in exchange for a few real-life dollars. Yet, as far as I can tell there is no reason to give Ubisoft a single red cent for anything. Everything in the shops can be bought with in-game currency just as easily and it's not like there is any shortage of that going around. Just kill a couple of animals and sell their skins and you'll have more than enough money to buy everything you need. For godsakes, this is a modern Far Cry game, all you need is a silenced sniper rifle, a silenced light machine gun, and an attack helicopter and the game has practically beaten itself. Even on hard difficulty, I doubt that anything aside from a few poorly balanced set pieces will give even the most hapless player much trouble. As for the cosmetic purchases, I have to wonder what sort of buffoon would willingly pay real-world money for them as this is a first-person game where you seldom see your character's body. Moreover, all the cinematics are in first-person as well so you don't even get the simple pleasure of seeing your absurd custom character appear alongside the more somber NPCs. About the only cosmetic upgrade you'll be able to see with any regularity is what gloves your character is wearing and if a promise of that I enough to get you to hand your credit card over to Ubisoft then I'm comfortable saying this is just a case of a fool and his money being quickly parted.

When it comes to micro-transactions Ubisoft is neither as cruel nor as incompetent as its rivals at Electronic Arts or Bethesda. They will never release a game that is as openly exploitative as Star Wars: Battlefront 2 [2017] or as hopeless broken as Fallout 76 [2018]. Yet, this makes it all the more dangerous a company. Ubisoft will never be the most hated corporation in the field, rather they will be trailing a bit behind, being as exploitative as they can be without drawing the ire of consumers. This makes them, if anything, more dangerous than their rivals. The micro-transactions in Far Cry 5 are meant to be a test run, and from here I expect all future games in the Far Cry series, or other entries into the various Ubisoft sandbox titles for that matter, to be steadily ratcheting up the number and need for these micro-transactions. Ubisoft will never be the most egregious offender, but they will constantly be pushing the boundaries of what they can get away with. Always tinkering with their formula, fine-tuning it to maximize the amount of currency they can bleed out of gullible players.