All of my reviews are of my opinions and experiences of the game. Any other opinions in my reviews will be cited. I only hope that my reviews will be used as a tool for someone trying to get the most out of their money.
Hey Nerds! I just recently beat Far Cry 5 and wanted to share my thoughts and opinions of the game. This is the first time dipping my toes into the Far Cry series and what better time to jump in than 5. In today’s review I will be reviewing the Xbox version of Far Cry 5 and discussing points that I feel are important to me; Setting, story, graphics, game play, and bugs.
- Setting
Far Cry 5 takes place in Hope County, Montana. Hope County feels like the perfect setting for a gun-crazy cult to take root it. It is secluded deep into the forests of Montana with dense woods, mountain, and rivers sprawled across the environment. You need to learn how to traverse the terrain and to use it to your advantage because the cult definitely will be.
- Story
I will try to keep this as spoiler free as possible, but honestly there isn’t a whole lot to spoil. The story begins before the player character comes in. The Seed family has taken over Hope County with their militant Christian cult, Eden’s Gate. The cult believes the end is near and that the Father (Joseph Seed) is the messenger of God. The Father broke Hope County into 3 parts and distributed them among his siblings. Jacob is the strong arm of the cult. He is the military commander and is charge of “culling the herd.” Faith is the miracle worker. She is in charge of testing peoples faith and the production of the hallucinogenic drug called Bliss. John is the charismatic disciple of the Father. He is in charge of assigning sins to the people. The story throughout the game is pretty bare bones. You help build up the resistance throughout the game, take on each leader until you make your way to the father. The resistance characters are nothing to note. I honestly already forgot their names. The only interesting characters are the Seed family. Throughout the story you get little tidbits as to why the Seeds are so crazy. Ubisoft has always had a way of making their villains terrifyingly evil and realistic, and this time is no exception.
- Graphics
The graphics of the Xbox version are hit and miss. The landscape of Hope County is beautiful. There were many time where I was taken aback about how amazing rural Montana is. Granted, I am not from Montana but I grew up in south Georgia and lived a significant time in Washington. I felt like I can smell the pine from my old hunting days back home or when I would go fishing in the forest of the Pacific Northwest. Taking a quick plane ride will tell you a different story. Everything looks flat and a fog effect hides the landscape. The trees show their 2D vertical design up until the 100m mark. It was jarring enough for it to bother me. Ubisoft went for a realistic appearance for the characters and ended up being mediocre. Emotion didn’t exist much on the face so you have to go by the voice acting to understand the mood, and even then it was still a toss up. The biggest characters all had their own signature look but the enemies basically looked the same. Homeless hillbillies is the best way to describe them. The weapons are accurate to real life with pretty good sound effects.
- Gameplay
The premise of the game is to take back Hope County and to mount an offense against the Eden’s Gate cult. You achieve this by gaining resistance points through completing quests, taking back cult strongholds, and capturing resources. As you receive points toward the final fight against the area leaders, the game throws in a wrench to make it more difficult. From increased patrols to drugs being released into the air, the cult throws everything in the disposal at you to slow down your progress. Attacking the cult strongholds were by far my favorite. Expect a 5-10 minute firefight coming your way. The cultist will sound alarms to call for reinforcements but the speaker system can be destroyed to stop the reinforcements from arriving. Or if you’re feeling froggy, let them come and embrace the hailstorm of cultist fury showering upon you. You can earn your money through quests and hunting. Skinning the animals you’ve hunted will give you a pelt to sell to local vendors. Or you can go on a moose genocide as revenge on the moose that flipped your truck off a mountain and killed you mid-mission. No judgement here. Far Cry 5 functions just like every other modern FPS. Cars control as you would expect and choppers are easy to learn how to fly. The planes are a different story. It took me most of my playthrough to become somewhat decent at flying a plane. The controls feel too responsive which made me correct every turn I tried to make. It’s incredibly annoying to do the flying missions because of this.
- Microtransactions
There are microtransactions in the game but I am happy to say they make NO affect on the gameplay oncesoever. You can purchase silvers bars for the store front and use them to unlock special skins for your weapons. Better yet, you don’t have to buy them at all. You can use the in game currency to buy the skins you want.
- Bugs
Fortunately, I didn’t run into too many bugs but the ones I ran into were incredibly annoying. The first bug was the tried and true falling through the map bug. A quick restart fixed it pretty quickly. The second bug I ran into happened while I was swimming. I was trying to reach climb onto the river bank and ended up getting stuck underneath a rock. Another restart fixed that up also. The third bug happened during my fight with John. Slight spoiler ahead. John’s fight is a dogfight between you and him. During my gameplay, my plane would just disappear when I got his plane’s health down to about half. I would have to deploy my parachute and either slowly fall to the ground or die from John’s machine gun. It happened multiple times and I almost quit playing the game right there. Restarting the system and the mission did not work. I ended up flying my plane into his out of frustration and when I loaded back into the game, it had progressed me to the second half of that fight. I am unsure of how to fix it so take advice from angry me and kamikaze his ass.
I am disappointed in myself for not playing the other Far Cry games. I had a blast playing this game and already plan on going back in the series to see what I missed. Despite the frustrations I had throughout my play through, I do reccomend this game for people who want a mindless killing frenzy. If $60 is too much for you, grab it on sale as soon as you can or go to your Redbox and play it for a few days. Keep an eye out for more of my in depth reviews. If there is a game you want me to review send me a message and I’ll look into it. Keep gaming, Nerds.
