This game was my first introduction to the Far Cry series, but, as an Assassin’s Creed player, a lot of the things in it felt familiar. The action takes place in an isolated US county that’s been taken over by a doomsday cult. The county is divided into three parts, each controlled by one of the cult leader’s lieutenants preaching their own brand of insanity. The goal is to end their rule and force a confrontation with the cult leader. The mechanics will be familiar to any Assassin’s Creed player: you liberate the regions by helping the locals and messing with the cult property and activities, which earns you resistance points. Once you have caused enough trouble, you will be captured and brought before the lieutenant, who will abuse you before you are conveniently rescued (or let go). It is a good way to flesh out the antagonists and make you hate them, but being captured and released over and over again feels contrived, if not outright ridiculous. Reaching the highest resistance level will trigger the final confrontation, where you kill the lieutenant and destroy their bunker. Like in Assassin’s Creed, they will each deliver a parting speech that will make you question your actions, and I wouldn’t say it works well here at all. Unlike the Templars in Assassin’s Creed, the cult is just irredeemably evil — basically, it’s ISIS on American soil — and, whether or not they are right about the coming doomsday, they can obviously not be suffered to exist. I wanted to kill them in epic ways, not listen to their sermonizing. Unfortunately, that’s the way it is, and the confrontation with the cult leader, Joseph Seed, is even worse. Without going into detail, there is no ending where he doesn’t win, one way or another. It’s not that I can’t live with a sad ending, but the ones in this game just make you feel like it was all for nothing, and are the most disappointing thing about it.
Gameplay-wise, FC 5 is an open-world first-person shooter with stealth elements. There is a fair amount of weapons to choose from, but I never saw the need for anything beyond a sniper rifle and a machine gun. The guns can be upgraded, but the only available upgrades are scopes, suppressors and expanded magazines, which I think is rather meager for a game that seems to focus so much on guns. I was also disappointed by the lack of knives on the list of melee weapons. Nonetheless, the guns are fun to shoot, and the melee kills are good, too. You can drive various vehicles such as cars, boats, airplanes, etc., but the controls are wooden and do not even come close to the level of GTA, although shooting enemies on the ground from a chopper is fun. You can also fast-travel to any location you have discovered, which is a good thing on such a large map. It is possible to hire up to two companions (human or animal), whose abilities match your playstyle. You can choose a noisy or stealthy approach; when capturing an enemy stronghold, you will be rewarded for the latter, and those parts of the game were among my favorite. On the hard difficulty, you will die a lot, at least, in the initial stages when all the roads are swarming with cultists (it actually gets a little ridiculous), and during certain major fights along the main quest.
Graphics-wise, the game can be generously described as mediocre, but, on my rig (i5 7400, GTX 1060 6 Gb), it ran at a smooth 60 fps at 1080p (with almost everything on Ultra) and was quite playable even at 1440p.
The best things about the game are probably the setting and the side quests. Hope County looks beautiful and is a pleasure to explore, and the characters are colorful and fun to interact with. Even though Ubisoft claims the game was not directly influenced by current events, I doubt it, because its average NPC is a typical Trump supporter: a gun-loving, liberal-hating Conservative deeply distrustful of the government who has a 50% chance of owning a personal bunker (no wonder a doomsday cult arose in a place like that; it’s almost like Ubisoft were trying to say something). In other words, it’s rural America in all its glory, where you can go on adventures such as killing mating bulls to retrieve their swollen testicles, or helping your President by retrieving certain footage shot in a certain Russian hotel (hmm).
The game has been criticized by some for having microtransactions, and yes, they are present, but I was never tempted to use them. Anything you need can be purchased with in-game money after a reasonable amount of effort, I don’t care about weapon skins, and outfits for your character are largely pointless, because you the only times you can see yourself is when you are killed.