There is not a single gunfight in Far Cry 5 that does anything to convince the player to care. I'm no enemy of violence in games, but I do insist that violence be made to matter in games.
The only mildly compelling part of the game is its ending, and by then it's far too late to redeem the prior 20 hours spent wandering around a hall of mirrors. Instead, it has nothing to say and offers the player little of interest to do. From a distance, you would be forgiven for thinking that Far Cry 5, a game that advertised itself with charged imagery of patriotism and white supremacy run amok, would have something to say. The flimsiness of the game's illusions, instead of providing freedom for the player, simply rob the game's violence of substance. Running, sneaking, and shooting against the backdrop of rural Americana is, occasionally, fun. And Far Cry 5 does all of this, wildly contorting its setting and its play, in the interest of hollowing out a real-world place and a real-world set of sociopolitical circumstances until it resembles a playground. Some of these breaches of reality are normal in videogames, and can be acceptable under the right circumstances, but here they combine with the game's muddled, half-made-up politics and anthropology to construct the sense of a game entirely beholden to its own tricks but without the skill to properly hide them. But no one, even in the dead of night, will ever be sleeping. During the rhythms of play, the player will likely discover several barracks, wood cabins full of bunk beds and personal effects. You never see people at worship, or play. This cult has no coherent doctrine, and its structure doesn't resemble real-world cults in the slightest. The rest is a magic trick, all smoke and mirrors.īut just like the chase at the beginning of the game, the Project at Eden's Gate is an illusion that falls apart under thirty seconds of sustained attention. Buildings in the background don't have roofs the floor only extends to the final reachable hallway there's no grass, green or otherwise, on the other side of the fence. It's a known truism of game design that if the player doesn't need to see it, it probably doesn't exist.
The danger, it turned out, was just an illusion. I waited for my health to recharge, and I walked, calmly and serenely, away from a threat that didn't exist. While the intensity of the music and the scene's framing never changed, eventually my character stopped taking damage, and the semicircles on the screen indicating enemy attention faded.
Feet pounding through the woods of rural Montana, you run, bullets whizzing past your head as you barely manage to escape.Īs I did this, I noticed something peculiar. You're a nameless, silent police deputy fleeing from radical doomsday cultists who intend to gun you down. The first playable moments of Far Cry 5 are a chase-but you're the one being pursued.
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