When it first launched in 2004, Crytek’sFar Crywas a hallmark achievement in terms of organic, emergent gameplay and rendering distances. Never before was such a massive plot of in-game land fully explorable and entirely unhampered by a strict draw dist🍷ance limitation disguised as fogàlaSilent Hill. Though it’s more than a lit🍌tle♛ wonky today, the originalFar Crycertainly has a pl൲ace in the annals of𓃲 video game history. Sure, it’s not exactly Pac-Man or Mario, but turn-of-the-century PC gamers would be hard pressed to forget this tropical romp.
Fourteen✅ years and four main-sജeries releases later has brought us to the remote wilderness of Montana inFar Cry 5 and, though it m𝓀ay have undergone a bit of an overhaul since the early 2000s, the ꦏbasicFar Crystructure is definitely visible beneat🎉🎀h Ubisoft's polished exterior. Give or take a few extra microtransactionsꦆ, this o𓆏pen-world action franchise has made a fantastic transition to the modern era.
It’s kind of hard to find time to complain as you vault a semi-truck over a cliff and land, weapons blazing, on the back of your tactical assault bear named Cheeseburger, but complain gamers have. Don’t get me wrong, it can be a great game, but there are a few flaws in this crazy rural adventure. The game has ꧙been out for about a week now, so let’s recount the fifteen best and fiftꦛeen worst things aboutFar Cry 5.
30 Best: Hope County, Montana 💖🅰
Until now, theFar Cryseries was known for its outlandish tropical settings. We’ve traversed a few tropical islands, scaled Nepalese mountains, and made tracks through the African serengeti. The most recent installment in the franchise, however, pits players against a vicious cult in the rural sectors of the northwestern United💃 States. A change of pace, to be sure, but you can rampage through enemy compounds and cause millions of dollars worth of damage, same as always.
The fictional Hope County, Montana offers the kind of environment players have been hoping to see in🌳 this series—it’s something of a bold new direction, and it’s nice to see that, for the most part, players have received it positively. Sure, it may seem mundane initially, but franchise fanatics will no doubt understand by now thatFar Cry 5is anything but.
29 Worst: Controver🌃s🍌y or Publicity?
More than a few fans of theFar Cryseries were a little taken aback when it was announced that Ubisoft's major franchise would be set in a fictionalized version of rural North America. Given the recent political diaspora in the United States, it didn’t initially seem like a great idea to poke fun at the values of any one certain group of people, lest a greater controversy blossom from the relative🅰ly mundane premise. That said, some fans were actually surprised to see thatFar Cry 5has very. In an era of en🎶dless political commentary from all kinds of media, it’s almost strange to see that this gameও introduced a bold new setting, yet totally missed an opportunity to satirize the real world groups or ideas on which much of the plot is based.
28 Best: Boomer Thꦜe Dog 💦
How can you not loveBoomer the dog, the faithful c⛎anine companion which 🎀can be recruited to stand by your side and help you out in battle. Hiring partners is nothing new to theFar Crygames, as it’s a mechanic that’s been around 🐻since the second installment.
Far Cry 5 shakes things up by taking a page out of Fallout 4’s playbook to some extent.
Yet, whileFallout’sDogmeat could do little more than alert you to the presence of enemiܫes and dig up hidden consumables, Boomer can literally take out your enemies, nab their weapons, and bring them back to you. In a way, it’s like the best g🦋ame of fetch ever played, and this only begs the question of who is the best video game dog ever.
27 🐟 Worst: Disconnected Fro✤m Reality
I’m a huge fan ofCall of Duty’s zombies offshoot, as it’s the only reason I bought the last few releases. Yet, tons of members of that community have expressed their displeasure with the mode’s gradual departure from reality. In the beginning, we were first ta🦄sked with holding out against an endless onslaught of the undead with nothing but a small cache of weapons. Now the game’s plot has gotten to be so debased from reality that it’s nearly as complicated 🦂asMetal Gear Solid. ❀I fear that, to a certain extent, the sa🌸me thing is happening to theFar Cryseries. Ubisoft’s franchise is still pretty far from beco🌺ming the spiraling mess that isCoDZombies, but it is worrying.Far Cry 2was, in my opinion, the best in the series thanks to itඣ’s realistic antagonist and plot, and thefor later entries in the series.
26 Best: Multiplayer Online Co-op 🍌
Remember the awful late 2000s trend of shoe-hornin🌠g in co-op features into a game? Or, worse yet, those mostly terrible co-op focused third person shooters likeInversionorKane and Lynchwhich cluttered the multiplayer market for a time. I’m happy to announce that those days 🍸are long gon𝓡e andFar Cry 5is the kind of game to whichco-op experiences of that era pale in comparison. PreviousFar Crygames allowed for some form of co-op, but, to my knowledge, this is the first title in the series which allows for full-on multiplayer action the whole way through the campaign. If you’re more of a lone wolf—or lone dog, in this case—then this feature probably doesn’t interest you a whole lot, but it can be an interesting🍃 way to shake things up during a second playthrough.
25 ♒ Worst: Yet Another Season Pass
There’s two sides to every coin, so, though I think this season pass may turn out to be worth my while, plenty of people are beyond jaded over the unnecessary DLC packed in with seemingly every title these days. Though the promised upcoming co🐈ntent seems really varied and interesting, includes a map maker and enhanced multiplayer options, and even includes an upcoming remastered version ofFar Cry 3, I can’t help but wonder what th𓆉e base game might have been like had Ubisoft allowed it’s developers to focus solely on that. I suppose the game will remain relevant for a litt♊le while longer than normal—an added benefit of such extraneous content—but I would rather play a whole and complete experience than a set of tacked-on side stories.
24 ꦫ Best: Put Bear Grylls To Shame
Some have vꦜoiced their concerns over the increased insanity of the more recentFar Crytitles. It’s certainly true that later entries in the series have become much less rooted in reality than earlier games, that doesn’t automatically have to be a bad thing. I’ve heard people argue that Ubisoft made📖 an effort toGTA-ify the series,𒁃 but it almost comes off as more reminiscent of theSaints Rowseries of which we h💜aven’t seen a mainline entry since 2013.
What others series will let you run around hunting elk and grizzly bears with an aluminum bat like a crazed, desperate hunter?
I ♛find it a bit odd that so many people enjoyed the utterly insaneFar Cry: Blood Dragon, yet they don’t enjoy the. It may not be for everyone, butFar Cry 5is definitely a wild, enjoyable ride.
23 Worst: The Ending is Really Silly 🐻🌼
So, like most of the otherFar Crygames, the fifth entry offers multiple diff🔯erent outcomes by which your adventures may be concluded. That said, I have a few problems with this. For starters, the difference between the “good” ending and the “bad” ending esse💟ntially comes down to aat the end of the game, and the endings were so strange and ambiguous that I cou🌊ldn’t really decipher the good from the bad, anyway. Plus, they don’t entirely feel like much of a payoff for your thirty-odd hour investment. One ending in particular is just so completely insane that it made the whole game feel pointless. I don’t want to spoil anything, but anyone who has beaten the game will know what I’m referring to. Why did I even bother if something likethatwas going to happen?
22 🥂 𒅌 Best: Make Your Own Maps
It seems like the jury may still be out onFar Cry 5’smapmaker feature. On one hand, it’s anwhich will surely extend the life-expectancy of the game. On🃏 the other, well, why doesFar Cryneed a mapmaker feature? That’s an argument for another time, though, as I’ve seen mℱany praise the intense customizability proposed by Ubisoft’s unexpected conclusion. It has majoꦅr implications for the game’s multiplayer elements, and I’ve already seem some people cobble together an early version of what may someday become fleshed-out battle royale experiences. I suppose we should all be thankful, at the end of the day, that Ubisoft merely allowed battle royale modes to be small, user generated add-ons instead of the focus of the game.
21 🌠 Worst: Hope to Hopeless
This is more of a complaint based on preference,𒁏 but I feel that many of us use games as a form of escapism—to detach ourselves from the struggles of🌱 the real world. That sounds a little grim, but bringing thepolitical and societal turmoilpresent in our everyday lives into the world of games doesn’t alwa🗹ys sit well with me. I don’t mean to say that gaming shouldn’t mature or take on broad, complex issues, but it feels a little atonal in a game concentrated heavily on setting cultists ablaze with a flamethrower whileDisco Infernoblares in the background. All I’m saying is that I don’t really want to think about politics when I'm playing games and, in previous incarnations of the series, I didn’t have to. Again, you may well be entranced by ♔the nuances of the plot—sparse though they may be—but I’m not.
