So there we are, creeping through the undergrowth on the side of a hill, shafts of sunlight piercing the dense canopy overhead, when we catch sight of our prize: the telltale white and brown furry hide of a North American pronghorn. We need to bring down and skin two of these fast-moving critters to complete our current mission, and we've been crawling around for the last 10 minutes patiently looking for the second one.
All of a sudden, a wolverine appears out of nowhere and jumps right at us. Fumbling for our melee weapon to avoid spooking the distant pronghorn, we swipe at this new adversary and send it skittering lifeless across some nearby rocks. At which point the game decides we've fulfilled some unseen quota for whacking hallucinogenic animals, and literally kidnaps us to go and do a story mission. We never see the pronghorn again.
Hook and line
Far Cry 5 isn't exactly heaving with open-world innovation, but one of its standout new additions is this weird habit of abducting the player at intervals to go deal with one of the bad guys on the game's critical path. You might be fishing in a lake, minding your own business, when out of nowhere a party of Eden's Gate enemies rolls up and knocks you out with a "bliss" dart, and then you wake up in a van at the start of a shoot-'em-up mission where you have to liberate the cult's other captives.
If any other open-world developers are reading, here's a tip: please don't do this. Let us choose when to engage with the story. Then again, we can understand why Ubisoft might have chosen to throw in this feature, because everything else in the game is so much fun that the overarching tale about liberating Hope County from a religious cult ends up feeling like a distraction rather than the thing driving you forward.
For anyone in search of a game with something to say, this should be an instant turn-off. Frankly we're not surprised Far Cry 5 has been given a shoeing by a few critics, some of whom felt its provocative choice of setting and its quasi-nationalist religious nutball antagonist demanded a bit more storytelling bravery, especially given the presumably deliberate parallels with the current political climate in the USA. Others simply felt that the tonal dissonance between the fairly serious narrative and the ridiculous antics you get up to outside of it meant it all felt a bit random and gratuitous.
Neither is a bad take, but we still can't stop playing Far Cry 5. Random and gratuitous, it turns out, is our jam.
Fear gating
Part of the disappointment with Far Cry 5's narrative stems from the fact it starts pretty brilliantly. You're a rookie US Marshal flying into Hope County, Montana, as part of a group trying to arrest a local religious leader, Joseph Seed, who has stoked up tensions among the local populace to the extent that it could all boil over at any minute. The local sheriff begs your boss to call off the raid, but you go through with it, landing outside Seed's church, where his heavily armed followers patrol a chain-link perimeter. You can feel the violence simmering under the surface, but you press on into the church.
We won't spoil the next bit, but half an hour later you're waking up in a bunker somewhere deep in the countryside, where a resistance leader, Dutch, has squirrelled you away from the wreckage of the botched raid on Seed's church. Dutch gives you a weapon and sends you out into Hope County to help build up the resistance against the Eden's Gate cult, which has used your attempted arrest as a catalyst to throw off any semblance of lawfulness and take control of the region, forcing residents to surrender property and themselves and go through hideous indoctrination routines to become part of the cult.
Heavy stuff. You need to complete missions to build up the resistance's strength and weaken the cult's stranglehold, liberating several large regions, each under the control of a Seed lieutenant. The standard open-world template starts to emerge in front of you, and while the story missions slump into a predictable pattern of big shootouts bookended by lengthy monologues from the various Seed family members, the rest of the game quickly steps up.
Hope springs eternal
Let's start with Hope County itself. While it lacks the verticality of the last two Far Cry titles, this rural tranche of backwater USA is a more-than-worthy playground. It looks uniformly stunning - perhaps less so in the towns, but more gorgeous with every step you take away from the asphalt. Ubisoft must have employed an army of digital horticulturists to fashion the sweeping hills, forests, streams and stretches of rutted farmland that cover most of the county. Everything is beautifully lit and important details like rushing water and the movement of foliage are spot on. When you pause to whip out a fishing rod and see whether you can find a new species to help unlock another perk, you can happily sit and listen to the gurgle of water as you watch carefully for a bite.
Fishing is just one of the many things you can do, of course. You can also liberate outposts, a Far Cry staple, and while the game doesn't feel as conducive to stealth as it used to be, the way it nudges you towards more chaotic solutions helps bring the best out of its systems. Creeping around silently dispatching enemies would have been fun, of course, but why not lure a nearby bear into the midst of your enemies instead? Or sneak up and rig a bomb to a semi? Or perform a rudimentary airstrike with a modified crop duster and then fly into the wreckage in a wingsuit and whip out a flamethrower? Decisions decisions.
One of our favourite things is the hidden prepper stashes scattered all across the county. You generally learn about their locations from civilians and then when you get there you discover a small puzzle to solve or set-piece to witness before you can bust into the bunker and retrieve all the loot. It's good loot too: mountains of cold hard cash, signature weapons, and of course perk points to throw into new abilities.
The bear necessities
You can also hunt game and sell the skins for cash. Initially this feels like a slight backwards step from the brilliantly ludicrous system the series previously employed whereby you had to hunt specific animals to turn their hides into perk-style upgrades. We'll never forget wading into the ocean in Far Cry 3 looking for sharks to punch so we could fashion some sort of expanded herb wallet.
Far Cry 5 throws that out, then, but we do enjoy the new way it doles out perks that correspond to new abilities. There's a new challenge menu that lists a bunch of things you can do to unlock perk points, ranging from covering long distances in a parachute to racking up kills with specific armaments. You could argue that that's a fairly cheap way of getting you to try out all the different tools in your arsenal, but often in games like this you quickly find a weapon you like and then play the whole game with it, whereas Far Cry 5 had us doing all sorts of different things willingly, and having fun to boot.
Then of course there's your animal helpers. Far Cry 5 quickly lets you enlist a faithful hound called Boomer as a buddy, allowing you to sic him on helpless Eden's Gate enemies and then pet him in triumph once the bullets stop flying. Later on you can unlock a cougar and even a bear. If we used a scoring scale at AllGamers, this would automatically add points to Far Cry 5's percentage. There are also some human buddies to unlock too, but we find it hard not to go into battles with a cougar and a bear. Because why would you not. The only slight demerit here is that your dog can't ride shotgun when you leap in a truck. Why?!
Chaos incarnate
By now you probably get the idea: this is a free-wheeling side mission extravaganza, where you spawn into the world, consult your menus and map, and go off and have some fun with the game's systems. Many of the actual side missions are extremely silly, too, from conspiracy theorists who get you to climb radio towers to shoot down imagined alien transmitters to chefs who ask you to bring them engorged bull testicles.
Far Cry 5 has another entertaining mode outside the main campaign too. Dubbed Far Cry 5 Arcade, it lets you put together little multiplayer maps using assets from a host of Ubisoft titles - the other Far Cry games, of course, but also stuff like Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and even Watch Dogs. There's also campaign co-op, although progress with friends isn't shared, so if you join someone else's campaign and complete activities, they will remain incomplete in your world. We're not wild about that, but it's not the end of the world.
Ultimately Far Cry 5 is one of those open worlds where the extra-curricular activities are vastly more interesting than the story that's supposed to tie the whole thing together, and while that means it won't be for everyone, anyone who enjoys random gratuitous open-world entertainment will be more than satisfied. We didn't really care about Joseph Seed and his pals, but every time a giant turkey attacked an NPC we were speaking to, we knew we were home. Hope County is a place where you're never more than a few minutes from the next gif to post on Reddit, and that will do nicely.