Said space is split into three zones, each ruled by a different lieutenant of the omnipresent doomsday cult, each with their own agenda. While Far Cry 5 finally stretches the series structurally (after the rehash of FC4 and the obvious filler that was Primal), it still doesn’t know how to fill in all the space it covers. Sadly, fatigue with the new formula does eventually set in once you start hitting up those slowly revealed points of interest. This makes the map feel much more manageable, and the change reduced that usual Far Cry feeling that I was just checking objective boxes. Your reward is most often a single new quest on the in-game map rather than the explosion of map icons found in many other Ubisoft games. Say you catch some cultists carting citizens off to be brainwashed, or shake a grizzly off a lonely hiker. The freeform progression through the map doesn’t just occur at outposts, either. Once you clear out an outpost, it becomes a hub of non-player characters that can join your bloody quest-or simply chatter about other minor activities. The biggest of these mimic the classic “outposts” that have shown up in the series since Far Cry 2.

On your mission to stop a vaguely menacing, vaguely Christian cult that’s taken over Hope County (the evocatively named “Project at Eden’s Gate”), you’ll run across hotspots of activity just by exploring.

In Far Cry 5, all but a few side and primary objectives crop up organically. The result is definitely an example of addition by subtraction.

Ubisoft has finally put away that stale gameplay structure, which once belched thunderclouds of mind-numbing objectives onto the map every time you got to the top of a lookout. The game is set in Hope County, Montana, and for the first time in a long time, you won’t need to reveal the lovely looking locale by scaling towers. Once I packed up my last shred of hope that the game had anything interesting to say (which happened about 30 minutes in), I was able to uncover some genuinely smart changes to the series’ increasingly stagnant gameplay formula. That’s not to say that Far Cry 5 is all bad. However you expected to feel about the game’s portrayal of gun culture, militias, and weaponized evangelism going in, though, you’ll probably come away let down by the game’s lack of follow-through on that promise. After a marketing campaign that leans on evangelical and militia imagery, players could be forgiven for expecting some smart political statements (or at least biting satire) from the game. The publisher may well have set unrealistic expectations for the game’s story, which features a villainous cult that clearly draws from the current and complex state of the political far right in the US. Links: Steam | Official website Far Cry 5 is a disappointment largely of Ubisoft’s own making. Platform: Windows (reviewed), Xbox One, PS4 Game details Developer: Ubisoft Montreal and Toronto

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