Far Cry 5

Some thoughts on Far Cry 5 after a decade long break from playing Ubisoft games. Spoiler warning!

Did I ever tell you what the definition of insanity is? Insanity is playing the exact same fucking Ubisoft game over and over again, expecting shit to change. That is crazy. The first time somebody told me that, I don’t know, I thought they were exactly right so, boom, I haven’t played one since Far Cry 3 … hence the old reference.

Recently I watched Snamwiches play Far Cry 5 and decided that maybe I was ready for another one. So, when the 2026 Steam Summer Sale came around, I bought Far Cry 5. I remember Ubisoft announcing it in 2017 and thinking that the setting was a cool idea, though a little weird. In a funny way, the US is one of the more interesting settings for Far Cry where it might be boring in other series.

Far Cry 5 does not avoid the often-repeated criticism that Ubisoft games all feel mechanically the same. The complaints likely come from people who are interested in more than one Ubisoft property and buy each on release. I don’t think there is anything fundamentally wrong with Ubisoft’s approach to game design and my more-than-a-decade break between Far Cry games has meant that the game felt like a sensible entry in the series, rather than a generic Ubisoft game #21. My issues with the game came largely from the story and its presentation.

Yes, It Is a Ubisoft Game

Mechanically Far Cry 5 feels like a more streamlined and modern Far Cry 3. Moving, shooting, sneaking, and driving all felt smoother and more impactful. Hope County is much larger than the Rook Islands, which allowed Ubisoft to add planes and helicopters. Both very fun additions. The full map is also revealed from the start and Far Cry 5 is much less linear, allowing you to choose from a greater number of things to do right out the gate.

The standouts for me were the Clutch Nixon events and the prepper stashes. Clutch Nixon events are vehicle challenges. They were always fun and a few did require a few restarts before I got the hang of them. Prepper stashes are small puzzles that would give you some money and ability points to spend. They were varied, I don’t remember doing the same thing twice, each had a little twist, and it was never too annoying or flow-breaking. The ability points were also a nice reward that made each feel worth it.

Overall the number of markers on the map gives off the impression that, despite being larger than Far Cry 3’s, the game is more densely packed with content. Sadly, I felt that the number of interesting things to do was roughly comparable. For example, there are a large number of hunting spots marked on the map, but the crafting system has been reduced in its impact to the point that I never felt the need to hunt. There are fishing spots now, which I know will make some people very happy, but fishing didn’t really catch me either (heh).

Markers that are missing initially are those for outposts — places where you can go and shoot some people without much further context. They are not marked ahead of time, but either have to be discovered by stumbling upon them while exploring the world or learned about by talking to marked NPCs in hubs. The short monologue each NPC delivers does give some flavor to each outpost, but I would have preferred to just be able to open my map, pick the next thing to do, and go.

Companions were a cool addition in concept: people who, after you complete a quest, could be summoned to travel through Hope County with you. Sadly, I would often find myself realizing that both my companions had gotten themselves killed at one point or another and I had been playing without them. They go on cooldown for the next 10 minutes after they die — a baffling choice for a single-player game.

Progressing through the game means completing tasks in one of Hope County’s three areas, each ruled over by one of the members of Joseph Seed’s family — Joseph being the main villain of the game. Each area has a progress bar that slowly fills up as you do things and you will be kidnapped at certain breakpoints for a little forced story mission. Once the bar is full, you confront the boss, kill them, and liberate that part of Hope County. Liberate means that the boss is crossed through when hovering over the map; people in Hope County and the cult both seem to not have gotten the memo.

That’s the main gameplay loop and despite my misgivings about some of the choices Ubisoft made, I think the overall package works. The moment-to-moment gameplay is very solid and an improvement over Far Cry 3. I found that mattered more for my enjoyment than the surrounding mechanics being perfectly aligned with my taste. But I will admit that I have always felt like “number go up” is sufficient motivation for me in a game and recognize that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

Meet the Seeds

What was disappointing, however, was the story. Quests add more context to why you were doing something, not what you were doing. It’s the difference between taking out a group of enemies because there was a marker on the map and because a group of cultists had stolen a character’s car. But worse yet, they are only loosely tied to the main narrative. Story missions ironically don’t progress the main story and have no direct impact on it. They are set dressing. The real story plays out each time you hit a breakpoint in the progress bar of an area and get kidnapped by one of the cult leaders. But let’s start at the beginning.

Far Cry 5 starts out in a helicopter — guess what happens to it before the intro mission is over. You and the other members of the Hope County Sheriff’s Department are on their way to arrest one Joseph Seed, a cult leader who has been accused of kidnapping, torture, and murder. The local law enforcement is hesitant about all of this, but is directed by a US marshal. You are The Junior Deputy of the Hope County Sheriff’s Department, no name, no voice either, but you do get to customize the appearance — including gender, meaning that this is the first Far Cry game that lets you play a woman.

The helicopter lands, Joseph is arrested, and on the way back to the helicopter the group gets attacked by his followers. The scene of unarmed cultists throwing themselves onto the helicopter is impactful and it ends with one of them throwing themselves into the blades, resulting in a helicopter crash. I know, who could have seen that coming? Everyone survives, including the handcuffed Joseph, who promptly kidnaps everyone except the Deputy.

The game then suffers heavily from a lack of direction. It’s the flip side of the game not choosing to gate any part of Hope County behind progressing the story. Ubisoft went too far and there isn’t a set of linear questlines to progress in. The Deputy’s actions help build up a resistance against the cult. But even saying “help build up a resistance” overstates things; nothing outside the main story causes a noticeable change within the world. Since nothing is mandatory, nothing gets to have a meaningful impact.

Then, when the progress bar hits a breakpoint, the Deputy gets kidnapped by the local Seed and the story progresses a little. Each Seed has a different fixation. John turned his childhood suffering into religious purification, the ex-addict Faith¹ controls people through a drug called Bliss, and Jacob dresses up his military trauma as social Darwinism. They serve almost exactly the same function. Each can abduct the Deputy whenever the progress bar demands it, each delivers a lecture about the collapsing world, and each inexplicably allows the Deputy to escape until the plot decides it is time for a boss fight.

After all three Seeds are dead and all the Deputy’s companions are rescued, they try to arrest Joseph again — likely for the crime of being mostly absent from a game he is the main villain in. Instead the Deputy finds that all their companions have been mind-controlled by Joseph through Bliss. It’s unclear how Joseph managed to set all this up, but it wasn’t clear how Faith did it either in her section of the game, so points for consistency. The US marshal is absent because Faith made him kill himself earlier. That might have been impactful had he appeared in more than two scenes before his death.

The fight sees the Deputy pitted against Joseph and their mind-controlled companions at the same time, but once a companion is knocked down, they can be helped up and will join the fight against Joseph. Both in its concept and execution this fight is a genuine highlight of the game.

Ultimately he is overwhelmed and arrested. Then the nukes go off. Yeah … I don’t know either. A car crash later, Joseph survives unharmed and, miraculously free from the handcuffs, drags the Deputy into a bunker. The end.

Huh?

I guess that crazy Joseph had a point after all, didn’t he? The cult was right, Society was collapsing. The world should have prepared and now the Deputy must be feeling very foolish for standing against them. I think that’s what Ubisoft wanted you to feel.

Of course, only the recently concussed would actually feel that way. The cult had nothing to do with the nukes. Joseph got just incredibly lucky with the start of a nuclear war. A war he had no hand in creating and did not end up preventing. The cult was not meant to be an answer to any of it, none of the drugging, kidnapping, torturing, or killing served any purpose towards or away from nuclear war. Joseph is a prepper that also happens to run a cult, maybe in the hopes of living a comfortable life surrounded by his followers.

But the game isn’t happy with that. It lets him survive two crashes, gets him out of custody twice, gives him a conveniently timed nuke, and removes his handcuffs for the ending to play out the way it wants. It lets him monologue about god and the cult, but in the end he appears less like a messenger of god than he did at the start. You already saw what the cult had actually been doing, how it served no greater purpose than Joseph himself. All you get in the ending is the disappointment of the game handing him everything he needs.

Each failure of the story is made worse by the fact that the Deputy is a silent protagonist, mostly in the traditional sense. They have no personality beyond the actions the player has them take and have little shared history with the rest of the cast. Perhaps the idea was that the player can fill out the identity of the Deputy in their head. Less Gordon Freeman and more the Doom Guy. In fact the Doom Guy is an oddly apt comparison. Both Doom’s Samuel Hayden and the Seeds keep talking about the greater good and such to someone that might as well be a wall. Neither the Doom Guy nor the Deputy were going to stop blowing stuff up.

The difference is that the interactions of the Doom Guy and Hayden are a joke. The Doom Guy is there to slay demons because demons are bad, not to carefully consider the pros and cons of harnessing the energy of hell. Far Cry 5 seems to want the Deputy to consider what the Seeds are saying, struggle with it, and to have a moment of realization that Joseph was right when the nukes go off behind him. The Deputy could have been the player’s way into the world and show the player why someone might be convinced by what the Seeds are saying. Instead you just listen to the insane ramblings of a bunch of cult leaders and then use the hands of the Deputy to rip and tear, because why wouldn’t you?

Jason wasn’t the most amazing protagonist, Vaas is who carried Far Cry 3. But Jason feeling like a real person with real stakes that he was able to vocalize and make the player feel helped a lot. Vaas wasn’t just a threat because there was a bar in the menu screen that told you so, but because he killed Jason’s brother and took people Jason cared about hostage.

I wouldn’t say that Far Cry 3’s story was a masterpiece, but it felt like an important part of the overall experience. It added a sense of “why” to the open world, tick-the-boxes gameplay that Ubisoft likes to create. Far Cry 5 never manages to make me care, but it feels like the game believes that I should, a little like Ubisoft ticked all the boxes when making the game and expected that to be enough.