Far Cry 5: A Beautiful Open World Playground Dragged Down by Forced Pacing and Story Bumps
I recently finished Far Cry 5 and it was my first time playing a Far Cry game in the series. The game delivered some refreshing choices in open world games, and surprisingly paired those choices with an unexpected amount of comedic charm. However, the game is heavily weighed down by repetitive gameplay loops and forced narrative interruptions. The game threw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and some of it stuck. The rest, fell straight to the floor.
My absolute biggest praise for Far Cry 5 is how Ubisoft finally killed the dreaded "climb a tower to reveal the map" formula they relied so heavily on from Assassin's Creed. Instead, you discover points of interest naturally: reading road signs, checking trail maps, picking up brochures, or talking to locals. It makes exploration feel completely organic, realistic, and unforced. You feel like a traveler exploring rural Montana rather than being tested on your platforming skills.
Hope County is gorgeous. The dense forests, rolling rivers, and rural valleys look stunning and feel like a real place. At times, the scenery feels photo realistic and could compete with Red Dead Redemption 2. Complementing this visual harmony is an incredible audio production. The licensed radio tracks is expansive and fits the world well. The original soundtrack, especially the ambient tracks and the cult hymns, are outstanding. The hymns feel both peaceful and oddly terrifying due how much they show off the cult's power and influence. I applaud the amount of effort that was spent on just the OST alone.
The writing for side characters is far better than it gets credit for. Hurk Drubman Sr. and Sharky Boshaw are absolute highlights, offering a perfect mix of crude humor and surprisingly deadpan, high-brow comedy. For example, a low hanging fruit for a joke is the shop named Dylan's Master Bait Shop. But Hurk Drubman's campaign voicemials found on landline phones are filled with high brow humor, such as saying if elected, he'll ensure no Canadians steal high paying jobs meant for Americans and naming professional hockey player as the job he is referring to.
What truly impressed me is how far Ubisoft went with unique dialogue.The companion interactions when you pair characters up, ike Hurk Jr and Sharky, feature tons of unique dialogue, banter-filled lines. There's 9 compaions, although three are animals. But still, the fact they went out of their way to record so much conversations between 6 different characters interacting with each other, and giving them all unique personalities and dynamics depending on who they are talking to, is truly amazing and not talked about enough. Same with the news updates on the radio. How they change dynamically, offering subtle foreshadowing in the broader narrative context as you progress through the story. You can sense and hear the despair and tension in them as the game progresses. It's just such impressive level of detail and effort for something that isn't needed for the main game or completion, because you can play the entire game without hearing most of these conversations or news updates.
Far Cry 5 suffers from an over reliance on constant action. Unless you completely clear a region, you cannot walk 50 feet or pause to take in the scenery without a cult pickup truck, an armed plane, or a pack of wild animals attacking you. The constant gunfights and explosions break the peaceful immersion the environmental designers worked so hard to create. The story asks you to accept a massive narrative leap: that an armed cult managed to completely cut off an entire U.S. county from the outside world and operate with total impunity, without immediate state or federal military intervention. That the cult managed to rise to that much power but also keep supply lines to the outside world for supplies open with nobody outside asking quesitons. The premise breaks down the second you think about it realistically.
Gameplay gets repetitive quickly. Much like Mafia III, progress boils down to making as much noise as possible to attract the attention of whoever controls the region. You do this by blowing up or stealing cult property, freeing hostages, and taking out outposts until you fill a meter to summon the region's boss.
Worst of all is the hunter mechanic. No matter what you are doing, whether you're mid air, fishing in a remote stream, or stealthing an outpost, once you hit a resistance threshold, the game sends unevadable hunters who shoot you with a dart andnforcibly kidnap you. When you wake up, you are dragged into a long, unskippable cutscene where the region’s antagonist monologues at length to convince you to stop. It destroys player agency and ruins the flow of the open world.
I’m genuinely torn on how Far Cry 5 handles its ending. I appreciate that the game didn't opt for a clean, Hollywood "justice and freedom prevail" happy ending. Real life is messy, and bad actors don't always get caught or face consequences. Sometimes the bad guys win in real life. But after spending dozens of hours liberating outposts, saving civilians, and taking back Hope County, the outcome leaves you feeling like every piece of effort you put into the game was completely meaningless and for nothing.
TLDR: Far Cry 5 is a game of massive highs and tedious lows. Far Cry 5 had a lot of ideas and executed some of them brilliantly while others should have never been attempted. The open world scenery, exploration mechanics, soundtrack, and subtle comedic writing show a developer who put a tremendous amount of effort into the little things and details. Unfortunately, those strengths are repeatedly undermined by a hard to swallow narrative, multiple endings that will leave most players feeling unsatisfied, and repetitive gameplay. Far Cry 5 is worth playing, especially if you enjoy ambient exploration and causing chaos, but be prepared for narrative frustration.