Far Cry 5 review

Reviewed on: PS4

Another review in the area, and this time it’s not another puzzle game. Far Cry 5 is one of the big releases of March.
Honestly, I know the series only superficially, since I have never played any game in the franchise seriously, so I don’t really know what was improved in this version over the others.

– First impressions / Audio and visuals:

Right off the bat, the game starts with something that makes me very sad, though it doesn’t get in the way of most people’s playing. This can be considered just a kind of “nervous tic” of mine.

As soon as you press “Start”, the game begins with cutscenes with Brazilian Portuguese dubbed audio and no subtitles, and it takes a while until you have control of the character and can access the options to turn on the subtitles.
Fine, in this case the game is dubbed and it is easy to understand the characters’ lines, but in games where English audio is the default, the lack of initial subtitles can be a bit irritating.

The game was made on the Dunia engine, and it looks pretty good running on the PS4. After that initial impression passes, we notice the graphics are very good, with cool explosion effects, and weapon ballistics too.
The characters are well modeled, but the variety is not as great as it seems. In combat, it seems the same enemies always come back.

The sounds are also very convincing, and I found nothing wrong. Gunfire of many kinds, explosions, planes, helicopters, boats, and much more.

I never ran into that classic scenery-loading problem when moving too fast in a vehicle. Thankfully. I also came across some bizarre bugs, but only one forced me to “die” for the game to go back to normal. The (few) other bugs I found did not get in the way of play at all. The game runs smoothly, with practically no framerate drops.

– Story:

In Far Cry 5, the story takes place in a fictional place called Hope County, where a religious cult is causing trouble throughout the town. The local police have already given up on interfering and turn a blind eye to what the cult people are doing, preferring to ignore it and try to live in peace.

You are a federal police rookie (who can be male or female), and you accompany another agent with a warrant to finally arrest the leader of the whole mess: Joseph Seed.
But as always happens in movies, games, series and so on, something goes wrong and you have to fend for yourself to survive in a hostile environment full of fanatics.
Shortly into the game, you meet people who didn’t like at all that the Seed siblings were terrorizing their homeland, so you end up forming a resistance against them.

I’m a fan of “Sessão da Tarde”-style cinema (Brazilian afternoon TV movies), that is, I don’t pay much attention to character building, their motivations, subconscious details and so on; I just want to watch, so let’s try to talk about the characters:

The Seed siblings are everything bad that can walk this earth. They are psychopaths, sadists and have a good gift of the gab for bringing a flock of followers to their side. In addition, they use extreme violence against those who don’t submit to their whims. Besides all the money they managed to gather/steal/extort.

Each of them has a different personality, and they are well represented by their voice actors. I didn’t find any character who is totally cheesy and poorly made.
Overall, the story in Far Cry 5 had everything to stir up the media, and although it tackles themes such as torture, extermination, corruption and so on, at no point did the game’s story shock me. The main characters acted the way they were expected to, according to each one’s personality.

– Mechanics:

Far Cry 5 is a first person shooter with an open-world map, and speaking of the map, I found the game’s world map very well made. It looks like a scale model of the county, showing mountains, lakes, forests, roads, etc…
As you do the missions, which take you further and further from the starting point, you find points of interest on the map, which may or may not unlock side or main missions. Each mission, rescue, or destruction of some cult property earns resistance points in the region where those actions took place.

It has been a long time since I last played an open-world game like this, and despite Ubisoft’s history of using the “open-world quest generator”, in Far Cry 5 I did not find those trivial collectibles that are quite common in this kind of game. There are some hunting and fishing regions, there are missions to destroy the cult’s Silos, but the numbers are not at all absurd, and those missions can be done quickly once you have access to fast vehicles to get around.

It is also possible to fast travel from one liberated location to another, but every time you do so there is an inevitable loading screen, so I only did it when the distance was too great to cover by vehicle.

The game has a money system, but I didn’t use it to buy any different weapon. I only restocked throwables like grenades and dynamite, and bought first-aid kits and body armor. By the way, here the health bar regenerates completely if you stand still for a few seconds without taking damage.
The controls are the standard for shooters: R2 to shoot, L2 to throw a grenade, the circle button makes the character crouch, and here it’s not possible to go prone like in some other FPS games.

The square button is the action button, and also reloads the weapon. Melee attack is done with the R3 button, and if you find an enemy unaware of your presence, you can take him down silently with the same command.
The L1 button opens the Weapon Wheel, to better view your equipment and select different weapons, but this doesn’t pause game time, so be careful when using it. By holding L1 and pressing R1, you go to the utilities menu, where you can craft homeopathic items with different effects such as increasing speed, increasing the strength of melee attacks, etc.

You can also hire some specialists on most missions, the Guns for Hire, and each has some kind of special ability. I confess I stayed with Boomer most of the time: the mutt can tag nearby enemies without my needing to use the binoculars, and I petted him at the end of every mission.
Some missions give an extra money bonus if you complete them without sounding the alarm, or without being detected.

About upgrades, the game has some challenges that must be completed, so that you earn points and can buy perks. The challenges range from killing a certain number of enemies with each weapon, hunting a certain number of animals of each type, to the number of enemies taken down by each of the Guns for Hire.
The controls of all the vehicles are very simple and work very well, helping not to frustrate players when using them.

– Conclusion:

I liked the game a lot; despite being open world, it isn’t full of those boring missions made to “pad things out”. The action is frenetic most of the time, and if you play following only the main missions, you won’t stop to catch your breath for even a minute.
The game’s world map is really cool, and makes you want to go on a ride with all kinds of vehicles to uncover all the dark parts of the map.

Story: 8.5

Mechanics: 9

Audio and visuals: 9

Final score: 9

The version for review was the PlayStation 4 one and was kindly provided by Ubisoft Brasil.