Battling a doomsday cult
Unlike previous Far Cry games, players get to customise their character this time, writes Emillio Daniel
MOST gamers would have at least tried one of the five or six main Far Cry games. They would have also recognise the pattern: Dude gets dropped into the wilderness and must murder his way across an open-world to rid the big bad evil. The ending too may not make one happy.
That last part is important. Keep it in mind as you read on.
So earlier this year, we got yet another Far Cry game, Far Cry 5 (released on March 27), for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC and published by Ubisoft.
Early promotional material seemed promising with Ubisoft releasing trailers with themes and tonal directions previously unseen in the Far Cry series.
Instead of the wilderness of a foreign land, Ubisoft decided to take the game somewhere familiar to Americans and even non-Americans.
The game is set in Montana in the US against the backdrop of the fictional but stylistically recognisable fictional place called Hope County.
Admittedly, I skipped the previous two main Far Cry games (Far Cry 4, and Far Cry: Primal) out of boredom due to the series repeating itself.
But something about the idea of being set in a familiar place rang some bells in my head. The game’s release timing and the current state of the American political climate made it stick out on my radar of games to play.
I didn’t even wait for a Steam sale on this one to get it.
You’re not alone of course. You get a few friends to follow. Walking straight into the cult’s territory, things go sideways quickly and you and your friends get separated. Thus begins your mission, fight your way through the cult known as Eden’s Gate and save your friends.
The game surprisingly doesn’t handhold you as much as I recall it used to. Except for telling me generally what to do, it just lets me do what I want.
The game is split into four sections. The first section is just a beginner pseudo-tutorial area that you can liberate from cult control but it’s the other three that are important.
The three big areas are ruled by Joseph Seed’s inner circle. There’s a guy who trains the cult to fight by culling the weak out through very bloody means. There’s a guy whose entire purpose is to indoctrinate new recruits. And then there’s a creepy woman who basically cooks drugs for the cult. All in all, your average angry, not-so-functional family.
They each have one of your friends that you were separated from earlier in the game.
A new addition to the game allows you to recruit NPCs to fight alongside you and they don’t necessarily have to be human. Among non-human possible recruits is a large brown bear who apparently loves cheeseburgers and has diabetes as well as a mountain lion named Peaches that seems to have Heterochromia in its eyes.
This part was adequate at best. The music wasn’t memorable but it did fit. There were some cool moments such as diegetic music being used for plot purposes such as Only You by the band The Platters.
Otherwise, it felt like the music was grossly underutilised for a game that was so tonaly strong with its religious overtones and country backdrop.
It felt like there were plenty of opportunities to go further with the music and use diegetic music more often but alas, it didn’t happen more than a few times. for the entirety of the map.
The population density leaning towards just having cult-members created the issue that the world felt like it was just populated with canon fodder for you to murder instead of a healthy balance of regular people who aren’t crazy for a man who shouts about being able to talk to God every Sunday morning.
As a conclusion, despite making quite an extensive amount of changes to the series narratively and tonally, Far Cry 5 still falls back into its own established tropes and gameplay mechanics without doing anything terribly new beyond some light gimmicks.
The ability to customise your character seems a wasted gimmick meant for showing off to other players in multiplayer what your fancy hat looks like. Or that really gaudy pink skin for your assault rifle.
On top of that, the ending won’t make you happy. Without spoiling it, it basically narratively throws out all your hard efforts taking down the cult throughout the more than 30 hours you’ll spend with this game.
I am not sure why they did that but it could have at least been explained if your main character was at least given a voice to voice out their opinion.
I give this game a