6:53 PM
Far Cry 5
...And I rest my case.
I'm kidding, of course, but even as I drove, shot, flew, and boated across Far Cry 5's Hope County, leveling everything in my way as I carved through Joseph Seed's Project at Eden's Gate cultists, there still somehow managed to be plenty of moments that take you completely out of whatever it was you were doing, just to admire the scenery. Because... damn.
Since my humble little segment on 2girls_1up *is* called "tl;dr", I think it's only fair to give an out to the faint of heart: I'm going to recommend this game, especially if you're just coming to the Far Cry series now. But the journey, in this case, is far and away beyond the destination, so if you're not here for the deep dive, scroll on down to the "tl;dr" section at the bottom, because while I'm writing this all in order, I'm already certain this is going to be a long one. To wit:
I'm kidding, of course, but even as I drove, shot, flew, and boated across Far Cry 5's Hope County, leveling everything in my way as I carved through Joseph Seed's Project at Eden's Gate cultists, there still somehow managed to be plenty of moments that take you completely out of whatever it was you were doing, just to admire the scenery. Because... damn.
Since my humble little segment on 2girls_1up *is* called "tl;dr", I think it's only fair to give an out to the faint of heart: I'm going to recommend this game, especially if you're just coming to the Far Cry series now. But the journey, in this case, is far and away beyond the destination, so if you're not here for the deep dive, scroll on down to the "tl;dr" section at the bottom, because while I'm writing this all in order, I'm already certain this is going to be a long one. To wit:
The Setup
Far Cry 5's setup and inciting events are unique to the series for a few reasons: Far Cry, historically, has been about being thrown into far away lands, being a stranger in a strange land, and fighting to survive until the environment manages to refine you into that region's apex predator. Of course, "far away lands" is entirely relative, and it'd be ethnocentric as hell to say that the remote, backwoods regions of the United States don't qualify as a worthy location. Still, it's technically the first game in the series to be set within the borders of a first-world country, and the game, while requiring more than a little winking and nodding to validate its premise, lets us act as if this idyllic wilderness in America's heartland is as distant an alien as the series has ever been.
Instead of a tourist, or a visitor to a far-away land, in Far Cry 5, we, for the first time, play an unnamed, customizable protagonist. Selecting either gender, and the physical appearance of your character, much like customizing their clothes later, has a minimal effect on the gameplay experience. Just to be sure, I played with a female avatar:
Instead of a tourist, or a visitor to a far-away land, in Far Cry 5, we, for the first time, play an unnamed, customizable protagonist. Selecting either gender, and the physical appearance of your character, much like customizing their clothes later, has a minimal effect on the gameplay experience. Just to be sure, I played with a female avatar:
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| I call her Alice. Because Far Cry 3 throwbacks, amirite? |
...and I can verify that aside from adjusting the spoken lines from NPC's to use a few gender-specific pronouns, you're not going to be penalized for designing your avatar how you like.
For the first time in the series, you're also playing a character who is in the affected region for official reasons. You're a rookie Sheriff's Deputy, heading into the very center of Hope County with a Federal Marshall, the Sheriff, and two other officers to arrest Joseph Seed, the fanatical leader of the pseudo-Christian Eden's Gate cult. Given that this is a sandbox shooter and not a 15-minute serving-a-warrant simulator, you can probably guess how well that shakes out: After a botched extraction, your fellow officers are all captured by Seed's disciples, as you make a frantic escape into the dark forest, evading or killing the cultists that spread through the woods to find you. It's a tense, well-designed opener, and since we're still operating off of the same engine as the last game in the series, even a modestly designed PC will have you impressed at the detailed foliage, beams of silver moonlight, and impeccable sound design that surround you in this immediately paranoia-inducing sequence.
As I played through the rest of the game, I found myself wishing there were more moments like that in the game, where you're underpowered, outnumbered, and intently listening for any sounds of danger. But that's not what Far Cry has been about since the 3rd installment, instead opting to steadily guide the player into becoming the most dangerous living thing in the game. Which brings us to Gameplay.
While capturing *outposts* and discovering new locations still provides a reliable dump of sidequests, defog, and characters to meet, the gameplay loop has shifted from simply going from tower to tower and dutifully clearing all of the related tasks, to more of a free-form kind of exploration, at least in theory. It's pretty easily to flip to the map and be pretty sure about the locations of all of the different points of interest, but taking some time to leave your quests unmarked and roaming around the countryside on foot yields a wealth of organic fun and unpredictable encounters. you'll stumble across new landmarks and interesting bits of story, caches of goodies, or new hunting and fishing grounds to exploit. What results is a modern Far Cry experience that feels much more like the open-world game that the series *technically* already was.
While there are numerous story beats that are specifically intended to nudge you towards this or that objective (at various degrees of intrusiveness), a remarkable aspect of Far Cry 5 is that you're never technically being railroaded in terms of what you decide to do. There's a clear order in which you're clearly meant to experience its three main gameplay segments - John first, then Faith, then Jacob - but aside from cutscenes and other information highlighting what the intended route is, you're not *actually* forced to attack the game in any particular order. You can easily rough up John's territory for a few missions, then go terrorize some Eden's Gate drug storage facilities in Faith's region, and then head on up to put some hurt on Jacob's soldiers just for fun without feeling like you've completely screwed the plot over. It'll take some replaying to figure out just how much changes between playthroughs if you decide to go off the rails, but for the purposes of this review, assume I played the three parts in the aforementioned order, just with the knowledge that you CAN deviate if you should choose to.
Weapons handling is best-in-series, as would be expected when playing with a more polished final product using an earlier engine. The new inclusion of realistic ballistics may be frustrating to inexperienced players, but adds a higher level of depth to the combat, raises the skill ceiling, and provides an additional challenge to player who prefer sniping their way through the game's outposts. This balances the game's weapon selection, and encourages players to adapt their tactics to different scenarios, and to try out a variety of play-styles. This makes every trip to the weapons shop feel like the "Tasting" scene from John Wick 2, where you plan your entire loadout around what kinds of encounters you're expecting. The variety of guns available, especially at the upper levels of the game, provide unique advantages and challenges even to veteran payers, and allow you to build around highly specialized forms of play, if desired.
The "Tagging" feature has returned for another round of play, as well. You can use your cameras (or gunsights) to focus on enemies and "tag' their locations from afar, to better plan your attacks, or assist you in remaining stealthy. This will allow you to constantly track their positions, even through walls. This can (and does) come across as an incredibly unfair advantage (and it is), but it's hard to deny that it helps the flow of the game and nudges the player to recon an area before charging in, while rewarding that approach with the information you'd need to go full-on action hero on an entire squad of enemies all at once. Yes, it is blatant power-fantasy wish fulfillment. But this is Far Cry. If you're not down for power-fantasy wish fulfillment, maybe a game with unlimited access to rocket launchers, attack helicopters, Big Rigs with mounted machine guns, and an ally character who is literally a two-ton grizzly bear isn't for you.
For the first time in the series, you're also playing a character who is in the affected region for official reasons. You're a rookie Sheriff's Deputy, heading into the very center of Hope County with a Federal Marshall, the Sheriff, and two other officers to arrest Joseph Seed, the fanatical leader of the pseudo-Christian Eden's Gate cult. Given that this is a sandbox shooter and not a 15-minute serving-a-warrant simulator, you can probably guess how well that shakes out: After a botched extraction, your fellow officers are all captured by Seed's disciples, as you make a frantic escape into the dark forest, evading or killing the cultists that spread through the woods to find you. It's a tense, well-designed opener, and since we're still operating off of the same engine as the last game in the series, even a modestly designed PC will have you impressed at the detailed foliage, beams of silver moonlight, and impeccable sound design that surround you in this immediately paranoia-inducing sequence.
As I played through the rest of the game, I found myself wishing there were more moments like that in the game, where you're underpowered, outnumbered, and intently listening for any sounds of danger. But that's not what Far Cry has been about since the 3rd installment, instead opting to steadily guide the player into becoming the most dangerous living thing in the game. Which brings us to Gameplay.
Gameplay
The previous two Far Cry games wore the hell out of the "climb a tower to defog the local area and reveal its goodies" gimmick, to the point where it's even openly acknowledged in the game, by a character who had sent you out to do that exact thing. Despite the slightly cringe-ey joke ( I mean, come on, Ubisoft, you don't get to create a problem and then take credit for fixing it), this is a positive change.
 |
| When you're not, y'know, *still doing it*. |
While capturing *outposts* and discovering new locations still provides a reliable dump of sidequests, defog, and characters to meet, the gameplay loop has shifted from simply going from tower to tower and dutifully clearing all of the related tasks, to more of a free-form kind of exploration, at least in theory. It's pretty easily to flip to the map and be pretty sure about the locations of all of the different points of interest, but taking some time to leave your quests unmarked and roaming around the countryside on foot yields a wealth of organic fun and unpredictable encounters. you'll stumble across new landmarks and interesting bits of story, caches of goodies, or new hunting and fishing grounds to exploit. What results is a modern Far Cry experience that feels much more like the open-world game that the series *technically* already was.
While there are numerous story beats that are specifically intended to nudge you towards this or that objective (at various degrees of intrusiveness), a remarkable aspect of Far Cry 5 is that you're never technically being railroaded in terms of what you decide to do. There's a clear order in which you're clearly meant to experience its three main gameplay segments - John first, then Faith, then Jacob - but aside from cutscenes and other information highlighting what the intended route is, you're not *actually* forced to attack the game in any particular order. You can easily rough up John's territory for a few missions, then go terrorize some Eden's Gate drug storage facilities in Faith's region, and then head on up to put some hurt on Jacob's soldiers just for fun without feeling like you've completely screwed the plot over. It'll take some replaying to figure out just how much changes between playthroughs if you decide to go off the rails, but for the purposes of this review, assume I played the three parts in the aforementioned order, just with the knowledge that you CAN deviate if you should choose to.
Weapons handling is best-in-series, as would be expected when playing with a more polished final product using an earlier engine. The new inclusion of realistic ballistics may be frustrating to inexperienced players, but adds a higher level of depth to the combat, raises the skill ceiling, and provides an additional challenge to player who prefer sniping their way through the game's outposts. This balances the game's weapon selection, and encourages players to adapt their tactics to different scenarios, and to try out a variety of play-styles. This makes every trip to the weapons shop feel like the "Tasting" scene from John Wick 2, where you plan your entire loadout around what kinds of encounters you're expecting. The variety of guns available, especially at the upper levels of the game, provide unique advantages and challenges even to veteran payers, and allow you to build around highly specialized forms of play, if desired.
The "Tagging" feature has returned for another round of play, as well. You can use your cameras (or gunsights) to focus on enemies and "tag' their locations from afar, to better plan your attacks, or assist you in remaining stealthy. This will allow you to constantly track their positions, even through walls. This can (and does) come across as an incredibly unfair advantage (and it is), but it's hard to deny that it helps the flow of the game and nudges the player to recon an area before charging in, while rewarding that approach with the information you'd need to go full-on action hero on an entire squad of enemies all at once. Yes, it is blatant power-fantasy wish fulfillment. But this is Far Cry. If you're not down for power-fantasy wish fulfillment, maybe a game with unlimited access to rocket launchers, attack helicopters, Big Rigs with mounted machine guns, and an ally character who is literally a two-ton grizzly bear isn't for you.
The Story
Not the series' best. Pretty much on-par with what we've seen in the modern iterations, if not slightly weaker. Don't get me wrong, each of Joseph Seed's captains is a villain with their own particular brand of psychoses and warped justifications for their actions, around which a dedicated team could have based the entirety of a game around, had they been a little more fleshed out. That's not what we got, though. What we have is a band of four *very* disturbed religious fanatics, the screwed-up status quo on the island, and... pretty much no connective tissue to tie it all together. While the Story loop (yeah, we have a *story* loop this time) goes: Raise hell in a particular area - Get captured and put through a cutscene and scripted, controlled level - Repeat until captain's Dead, with literally no variation for the entire game outside of the final showdown, there were individual bits of brilliance therein; Particularly in Jacob's chapter, in which what I assumed was a forced action came across so organically that it made me stop for a moment and think "wow, yeah... okay, you got me", in a way that games rarely do. It's just a shame that such a brilliantly foreshadowed, subtle manipulation that seems so obvious in retrospect wasn't housed inside a more cohesive narrative.
The characters are played up for shock value for the most part, and while they're painted as these intelligent, charismatic sociopaths, their constant insistence that they were actively the victims of the ongoing struggle came across as insufficient to be properly manipulative, especially since any new tableau I'd come across was all corpses of the cult's victims and mind-control drug production facilities. This was never at a greater dissonance than in Faith's chapter, where she constantly tried to come off as this peaceful, harmless little girl, even as you were wading through the carnage her followers had committed at her command. It's hard to feel as guilty as the game seems to want me to feel when I'm being lectured by Joseph after running John down on a motorbike and spraying him full of holes before leaving him to die in a muddy pit (your results may vary), when he'd been busy murdering my friends and anyone that wasn't already a part of the cult. A proper charismatic villain, especially the type that generates the kind of fanatic obsession that cult leaders do, should be able to make me truly question the efficacy of my actions, like the venerated Spec Ops: The Line did. So while I have genuine respect for the writers who pulled off some of Far Cry 5's stronger story beats, by the end I was missing that cathartic feeling or completion, like I'd come a long way with a character, and come away with a new perspective through sharing their experiences. At least, the *story* didn't deliver that.
Where it *did*, however, well... here's the section you've been waiting for:
The characters are played up for shock value for the most part, and while they're painted as these intelligent, charismatic sociopaths, their constant insistence that they were actively the victims of the ongoing struggle came across as insufficient to be properly manipulative, especially since any new tableau I'd come across was all corpses of the cult's victims and mind-control drug production facilities. This was never at a greater dissonance than in Faith's chapter, where she constantly tried to come off as this peaceful, harmless little girl, even as you were wading through the carnage her followers had committed at her command. It's hard to feel as guilty as the game seems to want me to feel when I'm being lectured by Joseph after running John down on a motorbike and spraying him full of holes before leaving him to die in a muddy pit (your results may vary), when he'd been busy murdering my friends and anyone that wasn't already a part of the cult. A proper charismatic villain, especially the type that generates the kind of fanatic obsession that cult leaders do, should be able to make me truly question the efficacy of my actions, like the venerated Spec Ops: The Line did. So while I have genuine respect for the writers who pulled off some of Far Cry 5's stronger story beats, by the end I was missing that cathartic feeling or completion, like I'd come a long way with a character, and come away with a new perspective through sharing their experiences. At least, the *story* didn't deliver that.
Where it *did*, however, well... here's the section you've been waiting for:
The Elephant in the Room
Far Cry 5 was originally announced at E3 2017, while the wounds of the bitter political conflict of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election were still fresh and stinging. I want to make it clear, right here, at the beginning of the section where we're gonna discuss the political impact of a video game set in the modern United States, that I have a particular distaste for ascribing blanket descriptors to wide demographics without cause. I don't intend to tell you who I voted for, and why, but it's nearly impossible to completely remove one's own perspective when trying to generate an analysis of any kind of topic, much less a *political* one. That said, I'm going to attempt to dive into the political messages in this game, whose mass dismissal in larger outlets I find to be almost more interesting than the messages themselves.
This review has taken an ungodly amount of time to write, not because it's a particularly complex game, but because it's so politically interesting to me, for the reasons I'm about to describe. I had to speak with quite a few of my friends inside and outside the gaming community, from all over the political spectrum before I could give what I consider to be my best shot at a review. With that in mind, I'd like to submit the argument that Far Cry 5, which has been repeatedly accused of being apolitical, is actually concealing a profound political message just beneath the surface. But it's going to take a little more organization. to wit:
Surprisingly... no. Of the protagonists you encounter in the campaign, Only one, maybe two seemed to be enjoying themselves, and the most notable example I can think of has been consistently portrayed throughout this series as an ignorant idiot. You won't find a cast of characters with confederate flags tattooed on their foreheads, instead what you find is a group of hardy individuals who'd been worried about a coming crisis for some time, and regardless of whether or not they'd looked forward to some kind of protracted domestic guerilla war, they had been long since sobered by the reality they now faced. In the mission where you first meet your pilot ally and return his stolen plane, he speaks at length over the radio about how he'd much rather cut and run, with his wife being pregnant, radically reorienting his priorities towards protecting his family over any piece of property.
That's just one of a solid half-dozen gut-wrenching stories peppered in among the less engaging content. This isn't a story about a ragtag resistance having the time of their lives, it's a story about people thrust into a situation well beyond their control, doing what they must to survive. Of the dozens of unique, named characters you meet over the course of your game, almost none of them seem to want to be there. When they mutter gun owner rhetoric like "The safe and effective use of firearms is key to the security of a free state" (I think that's pretty close to the actual line) under their breath, it's not Second Amendment propaganda, they're saying "look around you, protagonist who represents literally the entirety of law enforcement's influence in the area, and tell me how *else* you'd suggest we fix this, outside of a citizen's resistance?" They're people who could either take up arms or die, which, historically, is the exact kind of scenario for which the Second Amendment was written. And we may be playing through that kind of scenario because *we* find it fun, but in-context, we're alone in that sentiment. It's almost as though all these people were... humans.
I get that I'm writing this, probably, for *maybe* ten people. If anything it's to fill up a portfolio of work that establishes a kind of narrative voice for me, but I took all this time to explain my position because I feel like it's trying to tell us a few things that I think we've forgotten: first, that not everything that isn't a out-and-out political hit-piece is apolitical, that the people who are on the other side of the aisle are JUST as human as we are, and that if you bought Far Cry 5, excited that you were finally going to get something that makes you feel a little better by simulating the mass slaughter of people that lives two states away from you, just because they disagreed with you, and were *disappointed* that you didn't get that chance, then you might want to stop and consider that it may say a lot more about *you* than it does about the quality of the game.
tl;dr: Read the review. No easy road this time.
This review has taken an ungodly amount of time to write, not because it's a particularly complex game, but because it's so politically interesting to me, for the reasons I'm about to describe. I had to speak with quite a few of my friends inside and outside the gaming community, from all over the political spectrum before I could give what I consider to be my best shot at a review. With that in mind, I'd like to submit the argument that Far Cry 5, which has been repeatedly accused of being apolitical, is actually concealing a profound political message just beneath the surface. But it's going to take a little more organization. to wit:
Low-Hanging Fruit:
I'm not going to tease it out: Far Cry 5 made the insane splash on E3 that it did BECAUSE of the political climate. Some People, a *lot* of people, saw a diverse cast of scrappy underdog protagonists voicing their frustrations with fundamentalists taking over their homes and towns, and maniacal, religious leaders with a deep conservative bent, set in Montana, right here in the Middle of the U.S.A., and thought: "Yes. This is gonna be the biggest 'fuck you' to Trump and his supporters I could have asked for!" They thought the game would be filled with Trump jokes and that it'd have a protracted, scathing observation to make about the Second Amendment and its supporters, and it just... didn't. The references were there, of course: a joke here, a parody character running for governor who wants to kick the *Canadian* illegals out of the country there, and a few "Make 'X' Great Again' quips thrown in for flavor, but by no means was this game a drawn-out satire of American conservatives. In fact, the vast majority of the *protagonist* cast was either portrayed as Moderate to Right-leaning, and throughout the entire cast of protagonists, the only people who had an objection to the use of firearms were the people who favored the bow as a weapon, instead. One of the sobering thing about writing this review so late after the release of Far Cry 5 is that I got to see the full spectrum of gaming media's reaction to the game, and it seemed, almost unanimously, that the prevailing opinion was that Far Cry 5 was "apolitical".
Considering how ready the left wing of the gaming community seemed to be for this game to make the right wing look ridiculous, I'm actually surprised at how little vitriol was thrown Ubisoft's way when it turned out to move in a different direction. It was chalked up to a variety of things: Ubisoft apparently not wanting to be political, the mass influx of openly right-wing people in the Trump political era, or myriad other factors, but the overwhelming reaction to this, regardless of the explanation, was disappointment. A great deal of people believed they were owed a certain amount of cathartic ultra-violence, and were denied it, and made their disappointment known.
Of course, Far Cry 5 is *not* apolitical. But you *do* have to catch some things that aren't glaringly obvious to see what its message is.
One of my favorite things about video gaming as a medium is that it is uniquely immersive. Everything that happens to the main character happens, more or less, to the player. You get to experience the struggles and triumphs of your character even as they do. You get to *live* in their world, and that world is custom-tailored specifically to allow you to see every aspect of it. As I mentioned before, this insulated little world you're dropped into is full of conservatives, many of whom were "Prepper" types, or your stereotypical rednecks that you were expecting to see in this setting. But if we're operating off of the assumption that this game was supposed to validate our stereotypes of the people we disagree with, wouldn't we then be seeing those same survivalist/militia types having the time of their lives? Surely, they prepared for this and enjoyed using firearms and hunting because they were *looking forward* to this, right?I Have Seen the Enemy, and He is Me!
Surprisingly... no. Of the protagonists you encounter in the campaign, Only one, maybe two seemed to be enjoying themselves, and the most notable example I can think of has been consistently portrayed throughout this series as an ignorant idiot. You won't find a cast of characters with confederate flags tattooed on their foreheads, instead what you find is a group of hardy individuals who'd been worried about a coming crisis for some time, and regardless of whether or not they'd looked forward to some kind of protracted domestic guerilla war, they had been long since sobered by the reality they now faced. In the mission where you first meet your pilot ally and return his stolen plane, he speaks at length over the radio about how he'd much rather cut and run, with his wife being pregnant, radically reorienting his priorities towards protecting his family over any piece of property.
That's just one of a solid half-dozen gut-wrenching stories peppered in among the less engaging content. This isn't a story about a ragtag resistance having the time of their lives, it's a story about people thrust into a situation well beyond their control, doing what they must to survive. Of the dozens of unique, named characters you meet over the course of your game, almost none of them seem to want to be there. When they mutter gun owner rhetoric like "The safe and effective use of firearms is key to the security of a free state" (I think that's pretty close to the actual line) under their breath, it's not Second Amendment propaganda, they're saying "look around you, protagonist who represents literally the entirety of law enforcement's influence in the area, and tell me how *else* you'd suggest we fix this, outside of a citizen's resistance?" They're people who could either take up arms or die, which, historically, is the exact kind of scenario for which the Second Amendment was written. And we may be playing through that kind of scenario because *we* find it fun, but in-context, we're alone in that sentiment. It's almost as though all these people were... humans.
Gaze Ye Not Into the Abyss
At this point you've probably gathered that this game is neither right-wing nor left-wing. The antagonists are about as stereotypically right-wing as one can get without being racists, and yet the protagonists are also right-wing, fighting for their own, reasonable motives. So then... what's the message?I get that I'm writing this, probably, for *maybe* ten people. If anything it's to fill up a portfolio of work that establishes a kind of narrative voice for me, but I took all this time to explain my position because I feel like it's trying to tell us a few things that I think we've forgotten: first, that not everything that isn't a out-and-out political hit-piece is apolitical, that the people who are on the other side of the aisle are JUST as human as we are, and that if you bought Far Cry 5, excited that you were finally going to get something that makes you feel a little better by simulating the mass slaughter of people that lives two states away from you, just because they disagreed with you, and were *disappointed* that you didn't get that chance, then you might want to stop and consider that it may say a lot more about *you* than it does about the quality of the game.
tl;dr: Read the review. No easy road this time.
